Giuseppe (Peppe to his intimates) De Santis made a splash with Bitter Rice but he is still not as well known as the heavy hitters who participated with him in the neo realism movement, such as Visconti, Rossellini, and De Sica. Despite the fact that his more deeply rooted Marxist social consciousness was arguably more in line with the original ideology of neo realism than the more erratic politics of those other practitioners, De Santis had career difficulties due to his very outspoken vision and a stubborn refusal to compromise. (He landed up as the documentary points out making one film with the USSR and another with Yugoslavia when he couldn't find support for these projects in Italy.) De Santis himself in archival interviews included here argues that he wrote more scripts for films that were never made than for his completed films, and several of them sound interesting, he also amusingly supported himself by writing Western stories under the pseudonym Joseph Saint. Ironically, several colleagues interviewed make the point that in terms of his foregrounding of erotic actresses and his use of sensationalism and melodrama he was closer to Hollywood style movies than some of the other neo realist auteurs.
The film offers a look at Fondi, the hometown that the director would return to several times as a setting.
It also mentions a reappraisal of De Santis that happened at the 1974 Pesaro program on neo realism.Hopefully as people who get the Criterion disc of Bitter Rice, on which this documentary is featured, look at this they will be intrigued to look for other outstanding specimens of De Santis' oeuvre such as Caccia Tragica, Non C'E Pace Tra Le Ulive, Un Marito Per Anna Zaccheo, and Uomini E Lupi, the last curiously not referenced at all in this reassessment.
Review of Giuseppe De Santis
