Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was the Duke of Modrone and hailed from one of the most illustrious families of the Milanese aristocracy. Though a self-proclaimed communist he lived in sumptuous splendor; and he disdained to conceal his homosexuality at a time when it wasn't exactly socially acceptable. Having worked as an assistant to the legendary Jean Renoir, Visconti would co-script with him and Carl Koch a version of La Tosca (1940) mainly directed by Koch and had plans to make his own debut with a Verga adaptation. When this was forbidden by the authorities, he then decided to cast Anna Magnani, whom he had admired in Vittorio De Sica's Teresa Venerdi as the treacherous wife in a somber tale of lust, adultery and murder.
It was loosely based on an American novel by James M. Cain - the lubricious The Postman Always Rings Twice. Magnani became pregnant and the film was made with Clara Calamai in 1942 as Ossessione, in deep defiance of the Fascist censorship's disapproval of crime and immorality on the silver screen. It was shot chiefly on location in the Ferrara region of the Po Valley in northernmost Italy and in Ancona; in its sense of Italian reality as well as its violent passion, it was indeed a revelation to budding Italian filmmakers, though heavily edited for public release. After five years of working on mostly abortive film projects and in the theater, Visconti conceived a vast film trilogy La Terra Trema, on the fisherfolk, mineworkers and rural laborers of Sicily. But the Episodio del mare (Episode of the Sea) filmed entirely in the coastal village of Aci Trenza would depict the problems of a would be independent fisherman and his family with such an insistently formal pictorial style and deliberately slow rhythm, as well as difficult partly improvised Sicilian dialect, that it was a box-office disaster, despite all the cutting and redubbing.
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| The Mother and child reunion from La Terra Trema |
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| Visconti's neo-realism days were finito come 1951's Bellissima, pictured above Anna Magnani and Walter Chiari |
Consequently, the other parts remained unfinished. Visconti virtually waved a goodbye to neo-realism with Bellissima in 1954 in which Anna Magnani played a mother desperate that her child become a film star. After the Magnani episode in Siamo donne (1953) he moved on to the colorful historical recreation and almost operatic theatricality of Senso (The Wanton Countess), a story of destructive desire and betrayal set in the Venice of 1866 at the time of the risorgimento.