Tragic Hunt

Just after the war, bandits attack a truck carrying the newly married Michele and Giovanna along with the accountant of an agricultural cooperative, who is taking four million lire to the office. The money is gone and the cooperative’s whole season is put at risk. The villagers go after the bandits with what they have, and the chase runs across the plain, through mud and fields. Giuseppe De Santis’s first feature belongs to the earliest years of neorealism and sets collective labour inside the shape of an adventure. As it becomes clear who the bandits are, the matter stops being a simple robbery and it emerges that the war has not ended. The eighty nine minute Italian production was completed in 1947.