{"id":3772,"date":"2014-03-26T21:12:56","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T21:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3772"},"modified":"2014-03-26T21:12:56","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T21:12:56","slug":"bitter-rice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/bitter-rice\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitter Rice"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_3787\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3787\" style=\"width: 297px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/bitter-rice.jpg\" ><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-3787\" alt=\"Bitter Rice, aka Riso amaro\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/bitter-rice.jpg\" width=\"297\" height=\"431\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/bitter-rice.jpg 297w, http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/bitter-rice-60x88.jpg 60w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 297px) 100vw, 297px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3787\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bitter Rice, aka Riso amaro<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The image of Silvana Mangano, clad in tight shorts and black stockings, picking rice and looking to the camera. It&#8217;s one of the iconic images of Italian cinema, and <strong>Bitter Rice<\/strong>, the film it comes from, is one of the much-too-ignored classics of the postwar period. It&#8217;s a fusion of neo-realism and noir, with Mangano as an agricultural worker who befriends Doris Dowling, a thief on the run with a valuable stolen necklace and the cops on her trail. Dowling begins to bond with the women rice pickers, but then her cold-hearted boyfriend Vittorio Gassman appears and things go to pot.<\/p>\n<p>With a script by talented future Italian directors Carlo Lizzani, Gianni Puccini and Mario Monicelli, this is a very good film, mixing a documentary examination of Italian agricultural life in the 1940s, part pacey thriller (including a climactic gun fight in a meat locker), part meditation on the intrusion of mass media, creeping Americanisation and dilution of traditional Italian culture. This has dated a lot better than many Italian films of the time. Note: Doris and her sister Constance Dowling had fascinating lives and caused quite a scandal in Italy; Constance was involved with the poet Cesare Pavese who committed suicide after their relationship broke down (one of his last poems, allegedly about her, was called &#8216;Death will come and she&#8217;ll have your eyes&#8217;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Giuseppe De Santis&#8217;s 1949 classic Bitter Rice holds up amazingly well today, better than most of the neo-realist classics of its time, partially because of its cinematic prowess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[37,1164,1147,614,1163,239],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3772"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3772"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3800,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3772\/revisions\/3800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}