Toth Database - Cinema

The Stragglers 

Year: 1955

Duration: 78 min

Color: B/N

Genre: Dramatic

Director: Francesco Maselli

Producer: C.V.C. 

Photograph: Gianni Di Venanzo

Music: Giovanni Fusco

Set design: Gianni Polidori 

Performers and characters

Lucia Bosè as Lucia

Jean –Pierre Mocky as Andrea

Isa Miranda as Countess Louise

Leonardo Botta as Ferruccio

Antonio De Teffè as Carlo

Goliarda Sapienza as Lucia's aunt

Ivy Nicholson as Isabella

Mario Girotti as appearance

weft

In the summer of 1943 Countess Luisa and her son Andrea left Milan to escape the bombings and retreated to their country villa, where they housed two of Andrea's peers, cousin Carlo, son of a fascist hierarch who fled to Switzerland, and friend Ferruccio, son of an army officer engaged in war.

The three young men spend time doing nothing, sunbathing along the river, only vaguely aware of the ongoing conflict, thanks to radio london broadcasts. They begin to become aware of the seriousness of the situation when displaced people arrive from the city and Andrea, out of weakness and not out of solidarity, is forced to accept to host some of them in the villa, with the opposition of his mother.

Among the evacuees is the young worker Lucia, whom Andrea falls in love with and thanks to whom she finally leaves her golden world to face the tragic reality that surrounds them and take responsibility. In the absence of his mother, to whom he is linked by a morbid relationship and to whom he is in complete awe, he seems to mature and, when Italian soldiers arrive in the village, escaping a German convoy that was taking them to the labor camps, he finds the courage to hide them in the villa, supported by Carlo and Lucia. But Ferruccio recounts what is happening to the old fascist authorities in the country, who inform the Germans.

After discovering the boy's deli, the fugitive soldiers flee in trucks to the mountains and the partisans. Lucia, Carlo and Andrea should go with them, but the arrival of the Countess, accompanied by a German officer, extinguishes all the resourcefulness of the last, who agrees to stay with her and abandon her companions to their fate. Mind drives away in the car, safely, Andrea sees the German soldiers searching the villa and popi when he hears gunshots he understands, with despair, that Lucia has been killed.

notes

The film was restored by the Philipp Morris Design Cinema Association with the Adriana Prolo Foundation the restoration was directed by Giuseppe Rotunno.