Lipstick

A woman is robbed and murdered. A fourteen-year-old girl sees a smooth gigolo coming out of the hotel where it happened, and because she has a schoolgirl attachment to him she does not report what she saw and tries instead to make friends with him. That silence, buried inside a childish infatuation, is where the whole tension of the film sits. Damiano Damiani came to his first feature after documentary work, writing the script with Cesare Zavattini. It takes place in one of the crowded new districts that were growing on the edge of Rome in those years: tall blocks, unpaved streets, shacks housing the people pushed out of the centre. It opened on 26 March 1960, with Pietro Germi in the cast.