Antonioni returned to the desolate landscapes of the Po Valley ("the landscape I remember from my childhood") to film this study of a man (Steve Cochran) who, deserted by his mistress (Alida Valli), sets out with his little daughter in search of peace of mind and a new life. But the image of his lover and the failure of their union never leaves him. Unlike the upper and middle class milieux of L'Avventura and La Notte, Il Grido is of interest for its portrait of a working class environment with an unrehearsed, near documentary feel. In his book Antonioni, or The Surface of the World, Seymour Chatman notes several elements of Antonioni's style which first appear in Il Grido, among them "that the very unreadability of motive and feeling in a character's facial and bodily expression could itself become the sign of a certain important emotional climate...(and that) the plot develops no longer explicitly through major events but implicitly in silent interstices between minor events."