Early indicators of Antonioni's style, in Il Grido

I'm not sure if you can really see from Antonioni's 1957 neorealistic, somewhat melodramatic "Il Grido" just how great a director he would become, but it's certainly a film worth watching and it has many of the elements that would come to define Antonioni's later style: first, his willingness to shift the plot focus from one character to another - as Il Grido begins by focusing on a woman who breaks up with her 7-year live-in boyfriend (and father of her daughter), and then rather surprisingly the movie turns out to be about him, not her (think of how the main character in L'aventura is more or less dropped from the plot; his penchant for road movies and travel - as the working-class protagonist of this film leaves his small home town, travels up (?) and down the coast of Italy, trying to find some kind of new, stable, satisfying relationship - eventually returning home in despair (think of the travel in l'aventura, the Passenger); the alienation of the protagonist (see above, plus Blow-up). And then, some unique touches: the extraordinary look at small industrial communities (refineries, mostly) in Italy postwar - the incredible poverty and isolation - seemingly closer to the middle ages than to the modern world, except for the occasional, rare appearance of a bus, a motorcycle, and a motorboat - and interesting that the protagonist works in a refinery (oil?) and takes up a job in a gas station; an incredibly odd scene in which the young daughter walks through a field and finds herself among a crowd of zombie-like men - are they mentally ill? shell shocked veterans? it's never explained - it just scares her, and us - the kind of scene that Fellini (and many imitators) would make their signature, but here it is, on a field off a highway, seemingly out of nowhere.