Il Grido movie storyline. After a seven-year relationship with refinery mechanic Aldo, Irma learns that her husband died in Australia. Aldo thinks that this tragedy might be a chance for them to “legitimize” their affair–until Irma tells him she’s in love with another man. He tries to make her stay with him, and when his efforts fail he even uses violence, which obliterates any chance that she will stay.
Aldo decides to leave town, taking their daughter with him. He wanders endlessly, visiting other towns around the Po valley, emotionally and socially empty. During his journey he meets women who offer him home and love on occasion, but nothing can keep him steady, as the past and his love for Irma shall haunt him forever.
Il grido (initially titled The Cry – Il Grido in the UK and The Outcry in the US) is a 1957 Italian drama film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, and Betsy Blair. It received the Golden Leopard at the 1957 Locarno Film Festival. In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that “have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978.”
Themes
In retrospect, critics such as Leslie Camhi (The Village Voice), Philip French (The Guardian) and Keith Phipps (The A.V. Club) saw Il grido as a transitional work between Antonioni’s neorealist roots and his later films. In her 1984 analysis of Italian cinema, Mira Liehm writes that while Il grido contains neo-realist elements, “particularly the interdependence between the landscapes and the characters and the emphasis on objects”, protagonist Aldo “foreshadows Sandro in L’avventura and Giovanni in La notte in his refusal to acknowledge the fading of love”.
Reviewers disagree about whether Aldo’s death at the end is intentional or not. While French critic Gérard Gozlan (Positif) saw it as a suicide, Seymour Chatman argues that Aldo is overcome with vertigo as he stands atop the tower, causing him to fall to his death. Chatman found support in the original screenplay, which mentions that Aldo attempts to resist a sudden onset of vertigo as he looks down on the ground. Peter Brunette regards the ending as being ambiguous: Aldo’s death can be viewed either as caused by a fall or a deliberate jump.
Liehm, Brunette and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith also point out that as an exception in Antonioni’s films, the protagonist of Il grido is a member of the working class instead of the bourgeoisie, an observation confirmed by the director in an interview in which he stated that only Il grido and his early documentary short Gente del Po (1947) were about working class concerns.
Awards
Il Grido (1957)
The Cry
Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni
Starring: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Betsy Blair, Gabriella Pallotta, Dorian Gray, Lyn Shaw, Mirna Girardi, Pina Boldrini, Guerrino Campanilli, Pietro Corvelatti, Lilia Landi
Screenplay by: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Ennio De Concini
Cinematography by: Gianni di Venanzo
Film Editing by: Eraldo Da Roma
Costume Design by: Pia Marchesi
Set Decoration by: Franco Fontana
Art Direction by: Franco Fontana
Music by: Giovanni Fusco
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Compass Film
Release Date: July 14, 1957 (Locarno, Italy), October 22, 1962 (United States)
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