Il Grido · reception & legacy
1957 · Michelangelo Antonioni
How Il Grido has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A flop at home — Italian leftist critics accused Antonioni of betraying neorealism by giving a factory worker a 'bourgeois' inner crisis — even as it took the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 1957; it's since been reclaimed as the essential bridge to L'Avventura and the alienation trilogy.
What's debated
Fans still argue whether it's minor, transitional Antonioni or secretly his warmest, most emotionally direct film — alienation before the rich people got it.
Where it stands
The deep-cut Antonioni: the one completists reach after the trilogy, then insist you can't understand the trilogy without.
★ Did you know? Antonioni cast two Hollywood exiles as his Po Valley drifters: B-movie tough guy Steve Cochran, and Betsy Blair, fresh off Marty and pushed toward Europe by the blacklist.