Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It's a good movie, though maybe not a great one. What makes it stand out is the fact that it managed to be made at all. I mean -- Italy? 1948? I don't know how some of the period directors turned out decently done films like this one, "Open City," "Paisan," and the rest of the neorealist examples. Maybe it helps to have no money. Well, let me take that back because I ought to know better.There are a lot of scenes of men and women hard at work in the rice fields of northern Italy, but the film captures little of the backbreaking quality of that work. Everybody seems to be enjoying herself, although there are arguments between the contract workers and the scabs. They overcome their differences and finally work together. A bit of Marx never hurt anyone.The thing is, rice planting, tending, and harvesting is horribly burdensome toil. You stand in mud up to your calves, bent over, working with your hands under the murk. And the film doesn't give us any of the exhaustion that follows. You get a better hint in "The Grapes of Wrath" when Pa Joad finishes his hamburger, stands up, stretches stiffly, and says something like, "You wouldn't think a couple hours of pickin' fruit would make a body ache so." The two principal women are the sullen but good Doris Dowling, who looks very much like her sister, Constance, Danny Kaye's inamorata in "Up In Arms." Dowling was of Irish ancestry. She had a long career, mostly in television, not being an exceptionally striking beauty.The other woman, driven by lust and greed but not unsympathetic, is Sylvana Mangano. She's a good enough actress and of considerable heft for an eighteen year old. I approve of the fact that she doesn't shave her arm pits. She has a majestic bosom that, if set free from its tight confines, would devastate the countryside, smothering cities, wiping out whole populations, and in the end denuding earth of all life. Those Michelangelos yet unborn would remain unborn.There's a sub plot involving the randy but fundamentally decent guy, Raf Vallone. I could never understand what women saw in him -- a large and hairy guy with a big bony face. Then there is the treacherous, lying thief, Vittorio Gassman, who switches women the way some men switch socks. He plans to undermine the entire enterprise at the expense of the workers. That slight groan you hear comes from Highgate Cemetery as Karl Marx struggles to roll over.I realize it's beside the point but I have to mention that I sat through the first half of this movie two generations ago, in one of those big movie palaces on Market Street in San Francisco, hoping to see a little flesh. And just about the time the ladies were rolling up their skirts the theater lurched forward, then backward, like a ride in an amusement park. The earthquake sent me dashing out into the street. For half a century I've been wondering how it all turned out.

Although its mold of 1949 appears somewhat melodramatic today, the black and white 'Riso Amaro' (= Italian for 'Bitter Rice') surely ranks among the classics in film history.This very Italian product by Guiseppe de Santis shows a pretty ordinary crime story, excellently interwoven with an impressive decor of harsh season labor in the rice-fields of Northern Italy. The thousands of women, up to their ankles in the water, breaking their backs in the burning sun to earn a few bucks, make a truly great setting.'Riso Amaro' has been labeled as 'neo-realism'. Another issue worth mentioning is its female lead Silvana Mangano, ex miss Rome. To the standards of 1949 miss Mangano's performance in this film was shocking. This earned 'Riso Amaro' a lot of publicity, in particular in strongly Roman Catholic Italy.

Despite the fact that this film isn't available with English subtitles, (french is the closest!) it isn't so difficult to follow, and it is a satisfying experience. It comes across as a realistic portrayal of life in the rice fields of Italy, and is undoubtedly well-made with a haunting, natural quality about the whole production. Some of the scenes tend to be a bit overdrawn, and samey, but this doesn't detract from the overall intensity which is helped in no small part by the acting. It's quite clear that professional actors were used alongside non-actors, and this adds a certain poignant interest to the proceedings. The best performance is given by that seriously underrated actress from the USA - Doris Dowling, and it makes it all the more difficult to understand why she didn't have a far more high profile career in her own country. For fans of continental cinema in general, this is well worthy of interest.

For the first 75% of this film, I wasn't particularly interested in the film. Most of the reason was that I found the female leads to be so stupid, as they debased themselves repeatedly to gain the favor of a horrid petty crook. I guess this realistic, as some women do this, but I felt no connection to the characters, so my attention waned.Fortunately, I did continue watching, because as the film developed further, so did the characters. And, this was all capped off by a dandy ending that I WON'T elaborate on because this would ruin the film.This film is a Neo-Realistic Italian film, in that most of the actors were apparently not professionals and the subject matter was rather mundane (this is not meant to be an insult--just a comment about the style of film). While I didn't like it nearly as much as De Sica's films of that era, it was well worth watching and better than many other Neo-Realistic films.FYI--parents should know that although this is an older film, there is some nudity. It's not super explicit, but does occur in the film.