Cinema: Import

Bitter Rice (Lux Film] is an Italian-made melodrama with many points of resemblance to a U.S. thriller. It is lifted out of the ordinary by 1) its star, a sexy, sultry young woman named Silvana Mangano, and 2) its subject, the rice harvest of northern Italy.

A pair of jewel thieves on the run from the police join the migrant workers crowded into an abandoned barracks on Italian estate. One of them (Hollywood's Doris Dowling) slogs into the rice paddies and finds redemption in hard work and the love of an army sergeant (Raf Vallone). The other (Vittorio Gassmann) spends his time chasing Silvana and plotting to steal the rice harvest. Along the way is a good deal of earthy violence: Silvana gets birched on a roadside ; Doris is nearly mobbed as a scab by her fellow workers; Gassmann is impaled on a meat hook during a fight in a butcher shop. Director Giuseppe de Santis gets a sweaty authenticity into his scenes in the barracks and fields, and devotes a lot of deserved footage to Silvana's Grecian profile and womanly body.