The film acts as a crime melodrama, a romance, an evocation of working-class Italian life, and a plea for social justice.

It was the movie that added sex appeal to the gritty neorealist film period and made a star out of actress Silvana Mangano. “Riso Amaro” (“Bitter Rice”), featured women wearing daring shorts with ...

Francesca and Walter are two-bit criminals in Northern Italy, and, in an effort to avoid the police, Francesca joins a group of women rice workers. She meets the voluptuous peasant rice worker, ...

During planting season in Northern Italy’s Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (the seductive Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman) who is planning a daring heist ...