Hailed by Scorsese for the singular manner in which its director “works through total artifice as way to the truth,” Senso chronicles the relationship between an earthy, materialistic Austrian officer (Granger) and his aristocratic Italian mistress. Set amidst the Risorgimento battle for independence and the unification of Italy in Austrian-occupied Venice of 1866 and sumptuously produced (with costumes by Escoffier and cinematography by G. R. Aldo, who died in a car crash during production), the film is an intriguing amalgam of the neorealism of Visconti’s earlier work and the lush romanticism of his later films. Because of the obvious parallels the film draws to contemporary Italian history, Senso suffered at the hands of producers and censors. While the HFA print is an English-dubbed version, there is compensation in the richness of the dialogue, written by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles.