A Man Without a Woman

Il Grido is the rough draft of a masterpiece. In it Michelangelo Antonioni mines and examines the material that he later elaborated in L'Avventura, his sublime lament for the living dead.

The story is set in the Po Valley. As it begins, a factory hand (Steve Cochran) is jilted by his mistress (Alida Valli), who goes to another man. Stunned and unmanned, the hero runs without really knowing where he is going, runs with the Po as it runs downhill to the sea. On the way he meets three women: one from the town (Betsy Blair), one from the country (Dorian Gray), one from the brothel (Lyn Shaw). They all love him, but he cannot love them in return. He loves only the woman who left him. Desperate, he turns back to her, turns back against the flow of the river, turns back against the current of his life. When he finds his mistress he finds her changed. She has a new baby, a new life; he has nothing. Wearily he climbs the tower of the factory where once he worked, climbs to the height of his achievement as a man--and drops to his death.

Technically, the film is not impressive. The views of the Po Valley, wide and still and parqueted with poplars, silver the screen like scenes from the hand of Ruisdael; but the script is often awkward and the acting consistently crude. Yet the picture is a moving experience. Il Grido means The Cry, and the cry comes from the heart. With it, Antonioni opens the aorta of his talent and releases the cold grey mainstream of his feeling, the chilling theme of all his art: that modern man has somehow lost the meaning of his life, that God alone knows when he will find it again, and that God may not exist.

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