Reprinted from: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/movies/35462_road17q.shtml
Dusted off, neorealistic
'50s film is lush with color
[Filmed in Istria]
Friday, August 17, 2001
By WILLIAM
ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
MOVIE CRITIC
Gillo Pontecorvo is a long-inactive Italian filmmaker whose reputation as a world-class director rests entirely on one film: "The Battle of Algiers," a pseudo-documentary about the French loss of Algeria that was one of the international film sensations of the '60s.
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He made only two films prior to that breakthrough, and only two films (both flops) after it. The first follow-up, 1969's "Burn!" starring Marlon Brando, was another third-world revolution parable, and the second, "Ogro" -- Pontecorvo's last film -- was released in 1979.
Pontecorvo's first and least typical feature, 1957's "The Wide Blue Road," (La grande strada azzurra) was poorly received critically and virtually disowned by its director, who had conceived it as a gritty piece of neorealism and ended up with splashy color and big stars like Yves Montand and Alida Valli.
It quickly fell into obscurity and was apparently never distributed in this country, but thanks to a rare screening at a 1999 Pontecorvo retrospective at Lincoln Center attended by Jonathan Demme, the film is having a belated run in the U.S.
Spearheaded by Demme, the film's tangle of ownership was sorted out, it was lovingly restored from the original camera negative (by a partnership of Milestone Film and Turner Classic Movies), and its release is being "presented" by Demme and fellow Pontecorvo fan Dustin Hoffman.
It's worth seeing too. The style is dated, and its neorealism seems forced and ineffective, but it's still delectable, and mostly for the things Pontecorvo hated about it: its delirious '50s color, and its stars, particularly Montand at the peak of virility.
Set on the Adriatic coast of Italy, it's the story of Squarcio (Montand), a fisherman who has lifted his family out of poverty by fishing with dynamite -- even though the practice is against the law, it devastates the ecology and ruins the economic prospects of the more law-abiding net fishermen.
The script traces the character's conflict with his wife (Valli), his former best friend (Francisco Rabal), various officers of the coast guard and the larger community of fishermen, who have just formed a co-op which -- in true neorealist tradition -- seems the solution to all labor problems.
Roberto Rossellini was Pontecorvo's idol, "Paisan" was his favorite film, and it's clear from the opening frames that he's out to dramatize the fishermen's grim lives in the semi-improvised, documentarylike style of that and other neorealist classics of the 1940s like "The Bicycle Thief" and "Bitter Rice."
By 1957, however, neorealism had run its course in Italian Cinema, "The Wide Blue Road" seemed a colorful copy of earlier, better films, and Italian critics and the European moviegoing gave it a collective yawn, even though it won Pontecorvo the best director prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Seen today, it's a terrific vehicle for French/Italian star Montand, who was already well-established in Europe ("The Wages of Fear").
Even more appealing is the imaginative and slightly surreal color cinematography of Mario Montuori, who had served as Rossellini's cameraman on several films. Working with a Technicolor-like process called Ferraniacolor, the richness of his aquas and blues give the film a refreshing air of nautical fantasy.