Lost Youth

In Rome after the war there is a gang of young thieves. At its head is a man named Stefano, the son of a well known professor. The police suspect that the criminals are in fact university students. Inspector Mariani, a young veteran of the war, enrols and investigates from the inside. There he falls for a fellow student named Luisa. But Luisa is the sister of the man who leads the gang. The film places the poverty of the postwar years behind the crime. Young people from good families getting drawn into crime is the real subject. Carla Del Poggio and Massimo Girotti appear in Pietro Germi’s eighty minute Italian film, completed in 1948.