"Two Cents Worth of Hope is the third, and perhaps the most richly realized in the series of Castellani's films (Under the Sun of Rome, It Is Spring) that lodges the ebullience of his temperament and his style in stories of young lovers. In the context of a village near Naples, everything is larger, quicker, louder, and quite a bit more exciting than life. The expansiveness of the characters' gestures, their voices raised in anger and in song, the emotions that are instantly and vividly exteriorized, are perhaps caricatural, but they are also very cinematic. The film's pacing maintains an irresistible level of intensity, carrying the spectator from one vignette to the next as the couple, in their efforts to get married, survive encounters with a decrepit bus, a chicken-stealing mother, a father who makes fireworks, and the proprietess of little movie theatres who requires the hero's blood for her sick child. The relationship between the characters and their environment is rendered in vivid and fleeting images, the most memorable of which is the lovers' meeting amidst cactus and clotheslines. Two Cents Worth of Hope deservedly won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Festival." Charles Affron