Hollywood's finest director of actresses met the great Italian film diva in Wild Is the Wind. Magnani's quicksilver passions adapted interestingly to the world of American melodrama, while her costar, Anthony Quinn, had a passing acquaintance with Italian neorealism in Fellini's La Strada. In this film, set (and shot on location) in the extreme heat and cold of the Nevada plains, Gino (Quinn), a wealthy Nevada sheeprancher, brings over his late wife's sister (Magnani) from Italy as his bride in the vain hope of recreating his first marriage. (It is a strange kind of type-casting that has Magnani involved in the resurrection of a dead spouse in both of tonight's films.) Her robust humor and rowdy sensuality make her loneliness and isolation all the more poignant as she embarks on an affair with ranch-hand Anthony Franciosa; she has something in common with the doomed animals, as Cukor's direction makes clear. For her second American film, Magnani received her second Oscar nomination, in a performance described by Gordon Gow, in Hollywood in the Fifties, as "rich in those small details she endows with the complete illusion of spontaneity, whether exploding with mirth at the sight of a paper cup emerging from a coffee machine or expressing a swift and sympathetic concern for a lassoed stallion as it tumbles to the ground."