When it comes to quote unquote "classic" Neo-Realist cinema, Vidas Secas may go harder in a manner of speaking when it comes to depicting the harsh and unrelentingly grim conditions of the working poor as exemplified by this semi ill educated family, though it has much more of its success on the direction than the Italians or Satyajit Ray had in their works.
I think why their films stand up as greater than this film is that those directors had a... I don't know it sensitivity yo their subjects is the word (maybe it is that) but a certain complex yet simple and uncanny ability to find in the characters and actors in their stories deep wells of humanity, and there was some warmth to balance out the misery in those stories (think of the father and son in Bicycle Thieves or the little Apur in Pather Panchali). This film is all desolation and, as the kids asks as subtly as a brick to the face, a banal hell.
This isn't to say Vidas Secas doesn't have value today as a work of dark and poetic humanism, and its director Pereira dos Santos elevates the material through his use of long or extended takes on moments and his close ups are often extraordinary. There's this palpable sense of desperation that comes from how he shows the environment and how he let's it frankly speak for itself; what can grow out in these fields where things are dying and cattle are for no other use than being branded and to be herded until death, after all. And there is sympathy for this father despite/because of his ill education and critical thinking when it comes to his boss or being imprisoned - he's no less averse to being exploited than the cattle or animals on the farm.
I read someone say that this film seemed to come quite late or after the wave of working class focused Neo Realistic dramas, and perhaps there's something to that. But depicting a family and their dire straits isn't necessarily a method that has to stop just because things are (seemingly) better in other countries. There will always be those, especially on farms and villages of countries like Brazil, hard times and labor exploitation, and there's always an integrity to Peirera dos Santos's images.
If it isn't a film I'd revisit as much as like Umberto D (sorry but not sorry - Flike > Baleia, also poor Baleia, you know it won't work out for him because he's the happy one in this story) or Paisan, it's nevertheless an important film not because We Are Showing These People That Makes It Matter, but because the direction shows family and society through a lens that makes us bear witness and ask us to simply see others we (meaning us working class middle class dopes) normally turn our eyes in apathy. There's nothing to be apathetic about in this film - it's cold and brutal and a drag, but it's never boring.
