Critics rarely get excited at the mention of Portuguese cinema and it has tended to remain one of the ugly duckling of European film. Yet it has a very significant role in the early propagation of naturalstic cinema (what later becomes known as "neo-realist"). When Henrique Alergia and Alfredo Nunes de Matos founded Invicta Film in 1917 they were well aware of the relative backwardness of Portuguese cinema and imported a rather strange crew of itinerant experts from wherever they could find them, including French director Georges Pallu and the highly itinerant Italian director Rino Lupo (he had already worked in France, Poland,Denmark and Russia before coming to Portugal). For the texts they drew on the Portuguese realistic novel, in this case an 1898 story by the guru of Portuguese realism Abel Acácio de Almeida Botelho (1855-1917), but in the case of Os Lobos (made by Lupo for Iberia in the same year) based on a work by the contemporary dramatists João Correia de Oliveira and Francisco Lage who fairly dominated Portuguese theatre at the time.
The result are impressive films that place their fictional stories within the context of everyday working life. Os Lobos is in many ways the more interesting film although I don not believe that the surviving version is complete. This is a painfully familiar tale of a country girl, entranced by cit life who falls for s high-born playboy rather than an honest peasant and is inevitably "ruined" and abandoned by him. But it does not the plot so much as the fine location photography and the superb sense of place that makes the film worthwhile.
After the advent of sound and the second World War and the threat to European film posed by US market-dominance, the next generation of Portuguese film-makers (especially António Lopes Ribeiro and José Leitão de Barros) would continue very much regardless in the same naturalistic mode and, with the emergence of their protégé Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal would produce films such as the documentary short Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) and the full-length feature Aniki-Bóbó (1942) which would have a profound influence on the development of the contemporary neo-realist film in Italy.
