Ossessione (1943)
Director Luchino Visconti’s first film Ossessione (1943) is considered an extremely important movie in the history of Italian and world cinema. An adaptation of James M. Cain’s noir-ish crime novel about a young wife of an inn-keeper who cheats on her older husband with a handsome drifter The Postman Always Rings Twice (which was also filmed twice by Hollywood, first in 1946 and then in 1981), the movie carried many elements of the neo-realist cinema that was to emerge out of Italy after the Second World War.
Though it was very much plot-driven and even melodramatic in places, Ossessione still presaged such neo-realist classics as The Bicycle Thief (1948) as it was shot mostly outdoors in natural light with a number of moving long take shots and focusing as it did on the lives of the poor. In Italian with English subtitles
