Ossessione (1943)

Ossessione is Luchino Visconti’s 1943 unauthorised adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The novel has immense historical importance. Along with Don Tracy’s Criss Cross, published the same year, it has strong claims to be the foundation text of noir fiction and thus indirectly one of the foundation stones of film noir. Oddly enough there has never been a satisfactory film adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The novel is very much a Depression novel and very much an American novel. Moving the setting to Italy works up to a point. Although the movie was made during the war Visconti wisely makes no mention of the war. We assume the setting is the 1930s. And like Cain’s novel it has a background of poverty, frustration and desperation.

Drifter Gino Costa (Massimo Girotti) arrives at the roadside trattoria owned by middle-aged Giuseppe Bragana (Juan de Landa). For me Gino and Bragana’s wife Giovanna Bragana (Clara Calamai) it’s lust at first sight. After a dispute about non-payment for his meal the penniless Gino is persuaded to accept an informal position as an odd jobs man.

It takes no time at all for Gino and Giovanna to end up in bed.

Giovanna despises her husband. She married him because she was desperate. She had been reduced to whoring herself out to men in return for food. She has no intention of going back to that. But she hates being married to Giuseppe. She wishes he would just die. Then she and Gino could be happy together, with Giuseppe’s money.

You know where this is going to lead.

The problem with the 1946 MGM Hollywood adaptation is that it’s too clean, too glossy, too respectable and has none of the necessary lust and sleaze. John Garfield is miscast as the male lead. He’s not rough enough and he’s not sufficiently disreputable. I’m a big fan of Lana Turner but she looks like a movie star when she’s supposed to look like a cheap waitress. The attraction between the two is too wholesome and lacks any erotic heat.

The 1981 Hollywood version was perfectly cast. Jack Nicholson was ideal as the male lead. Jessica Lange came across as cheap and brazen and slutty, just as her character was supposed to be. Nicholson and Lange generate vast amounts of sweaty erotic heat, just as they should. Unfortunately this version totally self-destructs midway through.

Ossessione has the right leads. Massimo Girotti has the right sort of animal virility. Giovanna takes one look at him and you know that she wants to tear his trousers off. And Girotti gives off the right vibes - a man who truly is drifting with no self-awareness at all. Clara Calamai projects the right kind of earthy sexuality. She might have daydreams of romance but right now she wants hot dirty sex with Gino.

The problem with Visconti’s version is that it loses direction midway through and the action slows to a crawl with irrelevant subplots.

Massimo Girotti’s performance is all over the place. It just doesn’t ring true. One minute he’s a rough, tough hyper-masculine guy and the next he’s some kind of passive sensitive soul. It’s as if the original idea was to base Gino fairly closely on the character in the novel and then it was decided to make him a totally different character.

Some of the movie’s problems are inherent in the story. The early parts of the story dealing with the beginnings of the two characters’ obsession are great stuff. Lots of dramatic tension, the inexorably rising sexual temperature, the tense three-way relationship between Gino, Giovanna and Giuseppe with all its attendant betrayals and deceptions. Then the murder occurs. In the 1981 version the movie then self-destructs. In Visconti’s version it just starts to drift aimlessly.

There’s a lengthy sub-plot involving another drifter, a guy known as Lo Spagnolo. It’s fairly clearly implied that a romantic attachment develops between Gino and Lo Spagnolo. This sub-plot goes nowhere and feels clumsily tacked-on but this is a Visconti movie so I guess he wanted to include it.

There were half-a-dozen writers involved which perhaps explains why the script lacks tightness and coherence. The movie is about 40 minutes too long. It just meanders.

This was Visconti in full-on neo-realist mode and so I suspect that it was deliberately intended to be visually uninteresting. Which it is. I have to lay my cards on the table here. l I despise neo-realism.

The fact that this movie has such a high reputation says less about its inherent quality and more about the deficiencies of the Hollywood adaptations. There’s also the fact that Visconti was one of the darlings of the arthouse movie crowd so there’s an assumption that this must be a great movie, which it clearly isn’t. It’s very much like the 1981 version in some ways - some great early moments between the two leads but then it loses its way.

Worth a look if you want to be able to say you’ve seen all three adaptations of the novel but don’t set your expectations too high. It’s a bit of a misfire.

Ossessione (1943)

Luchino Visconti’s first feature film, Ossessione, was an unauthorised version of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Cain’s gritty 1934 novel was ideally suited to the Italian neo-realist style of film-making. I’ve always felt that the 1946 Hollywood movie version suffered from being too clean, not seedy enough, and definitely not desperate enough. And Lana Turner, although she projects the necessary sensuality, looks too much like a Hollywood starlet.

Clara Calamai in Visconti’s film is a lot more earthy than Turner, and seems more authentically working class. She gives a great performance as Giovanna, conveying her mix of calculation and desperation. Massimo Girotti as Gino, the drifter, is more of an innocent. He seems totally unable to make decisions, and gets swept along by events. The uncontrollable lust that draws these two characters together is conveyed extremely well and extremely economically.

The film is much more aware of class, and of the degradations of poverty, than the Hollywood version. There are a few changes from the book, but the essentials of Cain’s plot remain. The photography has a stark beauty to it. The movie also touches on wider issues involving sexuality, with Gino’s relationship with a prostitute, and his friendship with another drifter, Lo Spagnola, which has definite homosexual overtones (Visconti himself was of course gay).

While the movie is uncompromising in its treatment of the actions of Giovanna and Gino it steers way from simplistic moralising. It’s made clear that women like Giovanna were left with few options if they wanted to escape from grinding poverty, and it’s made clear that they were often forced by circumstances into loveless marriages that were little different from prostitution.

Ossessione represents an intriguingly different approach compared to the two American versions of this story, and it’s an excellent film in its own right. It remains the definitive movie version of Cain's novel.

While it lacks the opulence and obvious decadence of late Visconti, it’s still visually impressive. Visconti was discovering his political consciousness, but the left-wing political slant isn’t overly laboured.

The Region 4 DVD is not a fantastic print at all, but it’s worth picking up if you can find a cheap enough copy.