The beginning of the end of Italian neorealism was when managers began to inject sex and violence for a better box office. This film explores the exploitation in the Italian countryside of female rice pickers and ends in a black shootout. We have mud wrestling in between, stunning 18-year-old silvana mangano dancing and vittorio gassman as a gangster running from the police, but after 50 weird years, the movie holds up remarkably well. Suggested
Review of Bitter Rice
