“They're all a bunch of delinquents.... The town should be wiped off the map, the mountain area burned....”
Vittorio de Seta's first feature, set in a remote Sardinian village and cast with local non-professional actors, explores the moral and social structures unique to rural cultures of poverty, which provoke statements like the above (quoted by de Seta in Film Culture) from the more prosperous areas of the country. The story is of a shepherd, Michele, who must flee an unjust accusation of theft and murder. Forced into the role of brigand to survive, he winds up stealing from peasants as poor as himself.
“...de Seta's slow, visually sensitive style recalls such films as Louisiana Story and The Island. Flaherty's romantic innocence ahd Shindo's empty repetitiveness are replaced by the sharp, hard edge of social protest.... The action proceeds with no word of social generalisation, with the camera fixed on the characters' proud, bleak, suspicious faces; the moral is at one with the personal drama. This is a western from which all the romantic excitement about toughness has been stripped away, and whose characters, instead of being free and wild, have been humiliated deep within themselves by centuries of feudalism....” --Raymond Durgnat, Films and Filming