ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

MartinHafer Some folks watching "Il Grido" might be surprised to see some Americans in this Italian film. In the 1950s and 60s, quite a few Italian directors (such as Antonioni and Fellini) cast Americans and had them dubbed into Italian. Most were second and third tier actors at the time (such as Steve Cochran, Richard Basehart and Anthony Quinn) but later even some big name stars performed in the Italian films (such as Burt Lancaster). I think the reason they did this was to attempt to increase the marketability of the movies outside of Italy--and these stars would help.The film begins with Irma (Alida Valli) learning that her husband is dead. He apparently has been gone for many years and the interim she's been living with Aldo (Steve Cochran). They even have a child together. Here's the odd part, however, now that she knows she's a widow, she tells Aldo to leave! He is not at all happy and eventually he disappears along with his daughter. For the rest of the film, Aldo and his daughter move from town to town. However, Aldo has difficulty connecting with other women and he rejects opportunity after opportunity for relationships. Instead, he remains socially isolated and depressed.Overall, you'll probably find this film a bit slow and depressing. While this is usually a big turn-off, it actually works here. Director Antonioni wants to create a depressing portrait of a lost man and does it quite well. The simple piano score sure helps with this. Not a film for everyone but exceptionally well made.By the way, at one point in the film, you see folks saying they caught a couple porcupines and were going to eat them. These actually were hedgehogs--you never would hold porcupines the way they did nor do I think you'd eat them! This is simply a mistranslation.

bobsgrock Films like Il Grido are nearly impossible to qualify or calculate on any real scale simply because they do not adhere to conventional rules of filmmaking. Michelangelo Antonioni's existential journey is very episodic in nature as we watch a self-contained man travel away from his lover in search of more fulfilling relationships after she turns down his marriage proposal. What follows may or may not make an emotional impact on the viewer as it is very languid pacing and tediously told. Antonioni fills the screen with endless long shots and long takes of the most desolate, empty and vast areas possible, especially for a country known to be so vibrant and fruitful as Italy. This seems to represent the protagonist's soul, his yearning for some sort of satisfaction that he cannot seem to grab a hold of. Despite the downtrodden mood of the film, it is a captivating journey, exploring the depths and lengths to which humans seek pleasure in any form. Of course, this assumes that pleasure is the right word.

chaos-rampant Antonioni is one of the sages of cinema, perhaps the wisest of them. His cinema is a stunning edifice; a structure rigid and harmonious as shaped by a visual vocabulary which articulates with few words a place and a time; pattern and blueprint, whereby each film as individual level informs and is informed by the whole; these levels filled with doors to insight and intuition. To all these doors he holds the keys, and in the spaces behind the doors, which are closed to most filmmakers, he moves freely and sees everything. Meditation as stillness of mind, which enables awareness.Naturally some of these levels are more aptly functional, staircases that lead higher. Il Grido is one of those (and La Notte later).Nonetheless we see here the early sketches of what is to come. We see a man cast adrift after a painful breakup as passing through various lives, affecting them with shortlived passions and vexations. Each of these lives he briefly shares could be a possible new home, a safe harbor where peace and happiness are finally possible. But he moves on, still clinging to a mad hope and frustrated desire that his old affair could resume at any point.So this is the fascinating stuff. A man alone, itinerant, ostensibly free to be what he may, but captive of his desires so that he's nothing at all, except perhaps a painful memory. The downward spiral into squalor and misery is not simply the upkeep of a bad karma, but a reminder of what fuels the restlessnesss. What negativity keeps him going, regret or unfulfillment, will only be encountered ahead of him, it cannot be escaped by running from it.In passing through these phases the film perhaps stalls for too long. We understand what is going on, the proverbial journey of an empty, unfulfilled life, but Antonioni wants to shape these lives as lived, meaning we get the mundane details of their routine. The comings and goings and side characters, as vignettes. This is the neorealist baggage ostensibly cinema in the service of revealing/documenting society, which Antonioni is about to shed for his next film, and be free as a creative spirit.For the end Antonioni reserves defeaning symbolism, by contrast to the hazy allusions he would favour onwards. The man climbs on the refinery tower, the place and time where he was for once happy in his life and which now seems impossible to attain again, and we don't even have to guess what happens next.

Cosmoeticadotcom So much attention has been paid to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's later New Wave films that his earlier Neo-Realistic films of the 1950s have been overlooked, as if the work of merely a talented tyro. But, even though he was not as consciously 'experimental' in those films as he was in the films of the L'Alienation trilogy (L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse), and later classics like Blowup and The Passenger, his earlier films were visually well composed and well written films that both played upon the viewers' emotions and gave them believable characters and situations that could be related to. That Antonioni's filmic career started out working in the documentary format should not come as a surprise to those familiar with those earlier films.One of the best of those films is 1957's black and white Il Grido (The Outcry), which Antonioni also wrote, along with Elio Bartolini and Ennio de Concini. It's a nearly two hour long film that has much in common with Federico Fellini's 1954 classic La Strada, save that the film is a bit more believable and less patently heart-tugging. It also prefigures many of the themes that would recur in Antonioni's later work, such as alienation, apathy, and anomy, as well as possesses a political edge those later films lack.The lead character is a small town (actually crappy shacks and huts) Italian refinery worker and mechanical engineer named Aldo, played by American B film actor Steve Cochran, who is utterly believable as an Italian native. His reputation in this country was mostly in gangster films, but her he plays a member of the Italian Postwar proletariat, as the country is just on the verge of pulling out of its long economic slump. He has been having an affair with a sexy older blond woman named Irma, played by Alida Valli- most famed for her role in the 1949 film noir classic The Third Man, starring (and likely directed by) Orson Welles. Irma, though, is married, but her husband has been gone for almost seven years, working in Australia, thus letting Aldo squire her at will. The pair even have a young blond daughter together, named Rosina (Mirna Girardi)…. The film has been compared, in some circles, to the plays of Samuel Beckett, and this is one of the rare times that such comparisons are apt. No, even Antonioni's landscapes are not as bleak, nor his characters as satiric, as Beckett's, but much of the film is a physical journey to nowhere, for Aldo ends up back where he started, except having failed even more frequently. Il Grido is not as praised as much as Antonioni's later films, but it is better than the film that proceeded it, L'Avventura- which saw him break with his past totally, even if a failed break, and skirts near and above greatness. Only its rather abrupt, if appropriate, ending, can be argued against its greatness, just as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon can be said to miss greatness only for its weak ending.Still, this film contains many moments that show how good a screenwriter Antonioni was, such as a shot of a man briefly entering Elvia's house, asking her out on a date- a movie or dancing, and her rejecting him casually- offering to go out on another Sunday evening. He cynically scoffs that her promise will be 'like every other Sunday.' In that brief scene, with a minor character- Elvia, and a small unnamed role, we know all we need to of Elvia- that she is still obsessed with Aldo, as we see her out dancing with him in the next scene, and that her hurt when she knows he is using her to forget Irma, is genuine. There is no need for a flashback on Elvia's past with either man, for that brief scene and comment sums it up with wonderful poesy and concision. Would more filmmakers learn the lessons that Antonioni did half a century ago, with Il Grido, and more of them would produce films of quality, and a few would augur great art. Ah, perchance to