Under the Olive Tree

Francesco comes home to his village after three years at the front and three more as a prisoner. Shepherding is the only work he knows, but in his absence another shepherd has taken his family’s flock, and his fiancee has gone to the same man. Bonfiglio is on the way up; he steals, he threatens, and he uses force when he needs to in order to keep the other shepherds quiet. When Francesco tries to take back what is his, it is Francesco who ends up in prison. The film puts post war poverty and the power of the landowner into the language of neorealism, and both the fight and the justice happen up on the mountain, among the animals. Giuseppe De Santis shot it in Fondi, the town he came from, and in the olive groves around it; Raf Vallone and Lucia Bose play the leads, and the Italian production was completed in 1950.