silver nitrate notes

Visconti's Ossessione and the American Novel He Stole

02 jun 2026

Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) made his first film by taking an American crime novel he had no right to use and shooting it along the flat banks of the Po. Ossessione (1943) is an unauthorised, uncredited adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), and for that reason it could not be shown legally in the United States until 1976, by which time MGM had made the property twice over and Visconti was near the end of his career. The theft is half the story. The other half is what an Italian aristocrat with communist sympathies did to a piece of California pulp once he had carried it home.

The plot is Cain's, stripped to the bone. A drifter, Gino, wanders into a roadside trattoria, falls for the bored wife, Giovanna, and the two of them murder her fat, oblivious husband to be free of him. Guilt does the rest. Massimo Girotti plays Gino with a heavy physical sullenness; Clara Calamai plays Giovanna as a woman who has already calculated the price of everything and is furious about it.

What separates the picture from the noir that Cain's novel would later feed in Hollywood is the texture around the crime. Visconti had spent the late 1930s in France assisting Jean Renoir, and he had clearly studied Toni (1935) and the way Renoir let real places and real working bodies into the frame. His cinematographers, Aldo Tonti (1910-1988) and Domenico Scala, photograph the Po Valley as itself: the dust, the heat haze off the road, the river, the cheap dance hall, the sweat on men who load trucks for a living. The murder is melodrama. The world it happens in is documentary. Holding those two registers in one film is the trick, and it is the trick that a generation of Italian directors would take up after the war.

It has become customary to call Ossessione the first neorealist film, and Giuseppe De Santis, who helped write it and would go on to direct, was on the crew, so the line of descent is real enough. But I think the label flattens what is strange about the film. The neorealism that arrived two years later with Rome, Open City and then Bicycle Thieves stripped eroticism and melodrama out in pursuit of a kind of moral plainness. Ossessione keeps them. It is sweaty, sexual, operatic in its appetites. Visconti never lost that quality. He was a man of the theatre and the opera house, and even his most socially serious films run hot where Rossellini and De Sica ran cool.

The film's survival is its own small miracle. The Fascist censors loathed it, cut it, and tried to suppress it; prints were destroyed. Visconti is said to have hidden a duplicate negative, which is the only reason we can watch it at all. Knowing that, the long shots of the Po feel different. They are footage that someone deliberately preserved against a state that wanted it gone, a record of ordinary Italian poverty made in the last years of the regime that pretended such poverty did not exist.

Watch it next to the films that followed and the influence is obvious; watch it on its own and the strangeness returns. It is a murder story with the soul of an opera and the skin of a documentary, made by a count who stole his plot from a writer of American thrillers and gave it back to Italy as something nobody there had quite seen before.

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sources
[1] Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.
[2] Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Luchino Visconti. 3rd ed. London: BFI Publishing, 2003.
[3] Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001.
[4] Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton University Press, 1986.