Sunday | June 7, 2015 7:00 pm

Violent Summer
(Estate violenta)

Screening on Film

Directed by Valerio Zurlini.
With Eleonora Rossi Drago, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Lilla Brignone.
Italy, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 98 min.
Italian with English subtitles.
Print source: Cinecittà Luce

After making short documentaries and one comic feature, Valerio Zurlini turned to the kind of sober, restrained, but deeply moving melodrama for which he is best remembered today. Like Rossellini’s General della Rovere, made the same year, Violent Summer looks back to the Fascist era more than a decade before filmmakers such as Pasolini, de Sica and Bertolucci did so. The summer of the title is 1943; against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Italy, the film tells the story of the romance between the callow son of a Fascist politician and the somewhat older widow of a naval officer. This was Zurlini's first film for Titanus, which would produce or distribute a number of his subsequent features.