Il grido

Years before his international breakthrough L’AVVENTURA, Michelangelo Antonioni made his first masterpiece with IL GRIDO, a raw expression of anguish that remains one of Italian cinema’s great overlooked gems. Bridging the director’s early, neorealism-inspired work and his hallmark stories of existential rootlessness, Il grido centers on Aldo (Steve Cochran), a sugar-refinery worker in the Po valley, whose hopes of marrying his longtime lover (Alida Valli) are dashed when she declares she’s fallen in love with another man. Shocked and demoralized, Aldo leaves town with his daughter, drifting through the Po’s small villages as his prospects dwindle and his connections with other women—including an an old girlfriend (Betsy Blair), a gas-station owner (Dorian Gray), and a sex worker (Lyn Shaw)—fizzle out into alienation and despair. Boldly using environment to convey character, IL GRIDO reveals a director in the process of discovering his artistic signature and applying it to this most personal of statements about the human condition.