James M. Cain’s classic American crime novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, is so stark and primal that a film adaptation can be set anywhere on Earth and it’ll hold up fine. There are minor deviations, but this absorbing Italian film—director Luchino Visconti’s feature debut—sticks close to Cain’s story of a mysterious drifter and a lusty married woman who fall for each other so they kill her husband together and then see everything go bad as they both figure out that the other person isn’t worth murder. In between all of that, the film soaks in the details of its rural Italian setting. It’s a world of vagabonds, prostitutes, peasants, dusty roads, and empty pockets. It’s so raw and real and low-budget (the product of a war devastated Italian film industry) that most film historians credit this as the official start of the Italian neorealism movement.
EVERYONE suppressed this one in 1943. The Mussolini regime reportedly so objected to the film’s bleak vision of the country, as well as its then-scandalous intimations of adulterous sex, that they demanded all prints be destroyed (Visconti quietly kept a private copy of the negative). That Luchino Visconti was a known Communist subversive likely didn’t help matters there, either. Meanwhile, the film never saw release throughout the rest of the world because the makers never acquired the legal rights to adapt Cain’s novel (Cain isn’t even noted in the credits). It took a few decades and a lot of water under the bridge for the film to finally be shown. Today, it’s easily available on DVD.