1,001 Films: "Ossessione" (1943)

Ossessione begins (and will end) on the road - a long, dusty, wearying road viewed from the cab of a truck, a road it keeps returning to, a road that would eventually fork and lead the Italian cinema to Fellini and escapism on one side, and Rossellini and neo-realism on the other. Luchino Visconti's unofficial adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice reveals all that was groundbreaking (and scandalous) about James M. Cain's novel, chiefly by centralising three characters who, in their own right, are almost completely unsympathetic: the porky blowhard restauranteur, his clingy bitch of a wife, and the alpha-male cocksmith who drifts in between them, pumping the second even as he claims to be fixing a water pump for the first.

This trio will be redeemed, and damned, by their interactions with one another, but also by the work one has to perform to make a life for oneself - and it's funny that it should have took an Italian aristocrat, of all directors, to realise this. In the later 1946 adaptation with John Garfield and Lana Turner, Hollywood would prove rather too hung up on the sex and death - the more sensational, saleable aspects of Cain's potboiler - to give much consideration to its characters' relations outside the sack. Visconti, in contrast, gives the book the full, 140-minute epic treatment, shifting between locations (roadside, town, exile), and in doing so allowing figures sculpted from pure literary pulp to grow before our very eyes.

These characters are defined by money: the restauranteur's get-rich-quick strategies set against the umbrella salesman Lo Spagnola's laissez-faire, what-goes-around-comes-around philosophy. (The ending will prove him right.) The bored wife, meanwhile, seethes at the thought she's become a mere possession or slave - only to find that her liberation doesn't make her any happier. The sex, consequently, becomes an escape from drudgery or poverty; you could well imagine a modern adaptation set on or around a housing estate. Yet however many times the characters hit the road, try to branch out, make a fresh start, there really is no escape, which explains why they come to turn on one another instead. (In the film's presentation of social immobility, there reside the seeds of de Sica's Bicycle Thieves.)

Its second half, signalled by a narrative ellipsis that leaves all sorts of questions trailing in its wake, necessitates some detective work, as both the police and a priest (the most obvious sop to Catholic mores) attempt to figure out what went on one fateful night, but it also gives rise to a rare sense of history repeating itself, as the lover replaces the husband behind the restaurant's bar, and finds responsibility not just less fun than his previous, itinerant lifestyle, but quite possibly a punishment for the sins he's adjudged to have committed. Without glamorising them, Visconti makes these miseries rich and resonant - which is why, for all the liberties his film takes with its source, and no matter that it comes no closer to resolving the issue of whom we're meant to be rooting for, this continues to stand as the most complete and enthralling treatment of this material.

Ossessione is available on DVD through the BFI.