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BITTER RICE
1949
Director
Giuseppe De Santis
Starring
Doris Dowling
Silvana Mangano
Vittorio Gassman
Raf Vallone
Runtime
108 minutes
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This singular Italian genre-mashup from 1949 fuses the class-based politics—and the on-location authenticity—of neorealism with smoldering romance and pulp crime melodrama.
During planting season in Northern Italy’s Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman) who is planning a daring heist of the crop, as well as his femme-fatale-ish girlfriend, played by the Hollywood star Doris Dowling.
BITTER RICE reveals, with journalistic avidity, details of the landowners’ predatory chicanery, conflicts between union and non-union workers, farmhands’ secret communications by way of song, and the all-women rice-field workers’ day-to-day lives and grim backstories. Director Giuseppe De Santis films the turbulent action with a blend of intimacy and spectacle, in exhilaratingly spontaneous dance scenes and shocking outbursts of violence alike.
Restored in 4K in 2025 by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Cristaldifilm at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the original negative, a dupe negative and a positive print preserved by Cristaldifilm at CSC – Cineteca Nazionale and from the dupe positive of the 1994 restoration promoted by CSC – Cineteca Nazionale.
During planting season in Northern Italy’s Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman) who is planning a daring heist of the crop, as well as his femme-fatale-ish girlfriend, played by the Hollywood star Doris Dowling.
BITTER RICE reveals, with journalistic avidity, details of the landowners’ predatory chicanery, conflicts between union and non-union workers, farmhands’ secret communications by way of song, and the all-women rice-field workers’ day-to-day lives and grim backstories. Director Giuseppe De Santis films the turbulent action with a blend of intimacy and spectacle, in exhilaratingly spontaneous dance scenes and shocking outbursts of violence alike.
Restored in 4K in 2025 by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Cristaldifilm at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the original negative, a dupe negative and a positive print preserved by Cristaldifilm at CSC – Cineteca Nazionale and from the dupe positive of the 1994 restoration promoted by CSC – Cineteca Nazionale.