gavin6942 Gino, a drifter, begins an affair with inn-owner Giovanna as they plan to get rid of her older husband.Because this was based on the novel "The Postman Always Rings Twice", by James M. Cain, it was not widely seen outside of Italy. Apparently nobody bothered to get the rights to the novel before filming it. And because this is Luchino Visconti's first feature film, that means very few people were able to learn about Visconti until years later."Ossessione" is considered by many to be the first Italian neorealist film, though there is some debate about whether such a categorization is accurate. I have no opinion on that one way or the other. Though it may be true, it has not gone down as one of the biggest neorealist films, for whatever that may be worth.

dbdumonteil First thing to bear in mind is that it is the second version of Cain 's "Postman always rings twice" .The first version was French and made in 1939 by Pierre Chenal with satisfying -but not outstanding -results.Two American Versions were to follow Visconti's ,Tay Garnett's film starring John Garfield and Lana Turner being the best of the two ,in spite of Jack Nicholson's and Jessica Lange's talent.Luchino Visconti's "ossessione" beats them all.It features the best tramp,Massimo Girotti ,although John Garfield is a close second.Unlike the three other movies,it's not really a thriller,it's rather a psychological drama where James Cain's story often sounds as if it had been rewritten by Patricia Highsmith -which the presence of the gay Spanish man reinforces-.The lack of of picturesque in the depiction of Italian life predates Neorealism which officially began just after the war.Unlike Chenal's and Garnett's works ,you will not find here any suspense:the "accident" does not interest the director at all;nor the investigation.The movie deals with Gino's obsession :first his desire for Giovanna ,then with his remorse when he hears and sees his victim everywhere in the house.It also depicts Giovanna 's obsession: to live her passionate love while staying a respectable lady ,to stop being "invited by men";and to a lesser degree Lo Spagnolo's : in a very short scene ,he lights a cigarette and his match lights Gino's body."Ossessione" is a masterpiece of Italy's fascist years,at a time this country did not produce many great works.They say it shocked a lot of people.

Kris Kolodziejski Ossessione is in very bad state but is now undergoing a full restoration at Digital Film Lab in Copenhagen. The material used is a "Master positive" 2nd generation originally from the print Visconti managed to hide from the fascists. It has been scanned on the Spirit 4K (as 2K RGB data) then processed using DaVinci Revival restoration software. After this the rest is manual labor and we do not anticipate finishing before early spring. Sometime next year it should be available on DVD and hopefully also released on HD DVD. This film is beautiful and we hope the restoration effort will be enjoyed by many generations to come.

ALauff Luchino Visconti's debut film, this Italian noir is generally credited with launching the Neorealist movement—well, it says so right on the back of the box—and is a sometimes penetrating, sometimes lugubrious portrait of lonesome individuals in moral flux. In Fascist Italy, an assortment of characters—including an ingenuous drifter who espouses Communist virtues—embody the remote desperations of a country searching for its identity from without, drifting phantasms longing for a soul. Although Visconti's compassion for the disenfranchised and his ability to express their lamentable conditions was already well-developed, the spider web of deceit here is too tenuous—Gino is so unhinged to begin with that his undoing seems less a matter of fate or manipulation than a self-fulfilling prophesy—the cosmic irony too didactic, the illicit relationship too strained with bathos. All the same, it's incisive and essential, although its actual impact on film history is certainly debatable.