Senso Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

A wonderful, majestic piece of work

Fabulous to find not just that 'Senso' has been released on a new disc, but that it's the full version, in Italian: there aren't many films around that have, down the years, been so badly hacked around as this one. And it comes up as bright and sparkling as ever, with its tale of doomed passion set against the Italian revolution, as Visconti turned his back with a flourish on the neo-realist movement which his Communism had originally led his to espouse with such fervour.

He starts with a barn-storming scene from 'Il trovatore' and continues in full-on operatic mode, creating sublime, resplendent backdrops and wondrous compositions against which to set his tale of love and betrayal, of the naivete of an older woman against the fickle shallowness of the prettiest of young men (here played by Farley Granger). Alida Valli is magnificent, and even if the film never quite gets the balance right between its ultimately sordid central story, and the momentous events in the background, this remains a key work of fifties cinema.

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[Highly rated reviewer]

Do Your Duty...

Set against the backdrop of the Austrian War of Unification and loosely based on the decadent and far less subtle Camillo Boito novella of the same name, Visconti's fine, visually beautiful film finds the somewhat vain and cuckolding Contessa Serpieri exacting revenge on the Austrian lover that has opportunistically spurned her. She does indeed do her duty.