A last gasp for Italian neo-realism - Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati

Watched the 1962 film by the not-well-known Italian direct Ermanno Olmi, I Fidanzati (The Fiances) - Criterion collection, which pretty much tells you the film is worth watching at least once (Olmi best known for his earlier film Il Posto, which I've never seen in any event). Fidanzati is clearly a period piece - shot in b/w and seems old-fashioned even by 1962 standards - it's part of the great Italian neo-realist tradition, but a last attempt to hang onto that integrity, I think, as Italian cinema at the time was already moving toward spaghetti westerns and spectacles. This one is about an engaged couple (obviously) living in mainland Italy - I think Naples, but I'm not sure, there was also a Milan reference somewhere maybe? - he works as a machinist of some sort building jet engines - and he's tapped by his employer to move to a plant in Sicily, seemingly a big job advancement - but it means leaving his fiancee behind indefinitely. When he gets to Sicily he finds life there pretty difficult, lonely, and expensive - it's a boom-town all of a sudden and the prices are jacked up accordingly. The plot is wafer-thin, and made weaker by Olmi's completely clumsy handling of the conclusion, as the guy and girl write to each other to reconcile, and we get the letters narrated in voice-over, very clumsy and non-cinematic - but we don't watch this film for its plot. The strength is the vivid almost documentary realism in which Olmi shows the life in industrial Sicily in the early 60s, Italy still reeling from the war (there are bombed out and ruined buildings everywhere) - a completely non-tourist view of Italy, grim and in its way beautiful (at times) and interesting to look at (always). Some of the great scenes in Sicily are the jam-packed street fair with thousands of participants, many masked and costumed (he must have used a real street fair to get this footage), the night-time visit to the espresso bar, the search for an apartment, the bus ride to the factory - and in mainland the swimming episode (he cheats on his fiancee, as she later learns) and most of all the opening sequence in the dance hall - the strange, awkward silence of the assembled couples before the music starts, the evident tension between the two fiances of the title (we don't know why they're so tense until later), and the beauty and grace of the dancing, in this very spartan dance hall, once the music starts. Hey, the film is only 77 minutes - definitely worth that amount of your time.