Germi was one of the first Italian filmmakers to treat Sicily as a subject, and he did so as an outsider and an artist. He saw it "possessed of a tragic primitive loneliness." It was his West, In the Name of the Law a true Italian western closer to John Ford than to Sergio Leone. Here, the Apaches are Mafiosi with all the attendant respect they must command as an enemy. Into a Sicilian village where a peasant has been robbed and killed comes a young judge (Massimo Girotti) who, in his attempts to enforce law and order, clashes not only with a powerful Mafia baron (Charles Vanel) but with a code of honor that is so embedded in the culture as to make any other authority irrelevant. Germi's dynamic, Eisenstein-inspired compositions and Leonida Barboni's striking cinematography "showed the whiteness of the barren mountains as a protective barrier against the outside world...the houses with closed shutters, and the villagers with inscrutable faces. In 1948, all this was new, and to capture it on the screen was an act of courage." (Mira Liehm)