Sunday | June 14, 2015 5:00 pm

Cronaca nera

Screening on Film

Directed by Giorgio Bianchi.
With María Denis, Gino Cervi, Andrea Checchi.
Italy, 1947, 35mm, black & white, 90 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

While critics have long discussed the influence of Italian neorealism on postwar Hollywood and early noir, Cronaca nera shows neorealist cinema itself, in the wake of Ossessione (1943), exemplifying the fatalism associated with noir. Its title drawn from the name of the crime pages in Italian newspapers, the film follows a gangster on the run who takes refuge with an honest family. He falls in love while trying to go straight, but his past cannot be set aside so easily. If the director, Giorgio Bianchi, is little known today, among the film’s screenwriters are Sergio Amidei and Cesare Zavattini, who between them worked on most of the postwar masterpieces by Rossellini and de Sica.