A classic film too little known today: De Santis's Bitter Rice

Giuseppe De Santis's 1949 movie, Bitter Rice, is a classic in every sense and would be much better known today, I think, if the director had made more films of this sort - but he never quite reached the levels of Di Sica, Rosellini, Anotnioni, Fellini or others who have come to define 20th-century Italian cinema. That said, Bitter Rice stands up to anything else from its era, as a social document and as a powerful drama. The film is about the women who work at the annual rice harvest and planting, 40 days of hard work in the wet fields in northern Italy. At the outset, we see the women boarding the trains that will take them north, and the film, w/ a brief voice-over narration initially has the look and feel of a documentary - and it's obvious that De Santis is eager to show the difficult conditions and the labor exploitation that was part of this work, then and perhaps today as well. He quickly establishes a narrative line, however, as one of the women is involved in a gem theft and boards the rice train to escape arrest; her partner in crime soon follows her to the fields, largely to collect the jewels they've stole, and the three strands of the narrative entwine - a jewelry heist, a love story, and an expose of the brutal conditions under which these migrant laborers work. Almost every frame of the movie is beautiful and powerful and could stand alone as part of a photo exhibit on this little-known harvest, and some of the scenes are fantastic cinematic movements as well, in particular the women singing as they plant the rice (the bosses forbid their talking to one another as they work, so they use song to communicate - such as their denunciation of the "illegals," the cadre of women working the fields w/out union certification). Even the more conventional story line, about the theft of the jewels and another planned heist has surprising twists and ends in a fantastic shootout among bloody carcasses in a butchery. De Santis's commitment and his politics - no doubt part of the leftists movement in postwar Italy - are evident throughout and keep us grounded in the reality: There's nothing romantic about these working conditions, but by working together the rice-harvesters achieve a degree of power. And don't miss the ending, as the women board the trains for return to their homes across Italy.