Pantheon Visconti, and a central work of Italian cinema. (It is often claimed to be the first neorealist film.) Steeped in “the air of death and sperm,” according to one of its scriptwriters, Giuseppe De Santis, shot partly in secret and banned by Mussolini’s censors as “a concoction of repulsive passions, humiliation and decay,” Visconti’s first film is a sensational version of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice; because he didn’t clear the literary rights, the film eventually became what Phillip Lopate calls “unattainable, a Holy Grail of the cinema.” Unlike Antonioni, who transposed the same Cain story to the chic precincts of Milan (in Story of a Love Affair), Visconti sets his version near Ferrara in the bleakly beautiful Po valley (setting of many great Italian films, including Antonioni’s Il Grido and Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem). Gino, a strapping vagabond, is seduced by the ex-prostitute Giovanna, who lives with her grotesque old husband in an isolated roadside inn. The erotic attraction between Gino and Giovanna quickly flares into the “obsession” of the title, and the stage is set for murder. Visconti transforms this by now familiar story into a neorealist opera about the price paid for passion, and inscribes his own homosexual yearning in the figure of the Spaniard – Frank Deasy has described the film as “drenched in longing.” “As good a first feature as has ever been made” (Phillip Lopate), Ossessione is, incidentally, Alain Resnais’ favourite Visconti film.