Five Branded Women

In Yugoslavia under Nazi occupation, five women are punished in public by the partisans for having been with German soldiers: their hair is cut off and they are driven out of the village. The shorn head is a sign, a mark anyone can read. Left outside, the five take up arms to survive and end up fighting within the very movement that punished them. Martin Ritt’s film takes on directly this practice of punishment carried out on women’s bodies under occupation. The source is Ugo Pirro’s novel Jovanka e le altre, produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Silvana Mangano, Jeanne Moreau, Vera Miles, Barbara Bel Geddes and Carla Gravina are the five, with Van Heflin in the cast; it was Moreau’s first American production. It was shot in Italy and in Klagenfurt, Austria.