Rome 11:00

A small advertisement appears in a newspaper: a typist is wanted. Two hundred women turn up at the address that morning. They queue on the staircase; some out of work, some married, some hungry, some looking for a first job. They talk while they wait, and the film opens out the lives of five of them from there. Then the staircase gives way under the weight. It happened. On 15 January 1951, on Via Savoia in Rome, a staircase collapsed in exactly this way; one woman died and seventy-six were injured. The script is built on interviews with the survivors, and the young reporter who conducted them was Elio Petri, later a director himself. Giuseppe De Santis directs, with Cesare Zavattini among the writers. A hundred and five minutes. One of the clearest cases of Italian neorealism making a film directly out of a news story.