The Challenge (1958) User Reviews

A Man's Desires Are Simple, But The World Is Complicated

[boblipton · 7/10 · 5 July 2020]

José Suárez has a good racket smuggling American cigarettes into Naples, but he's ambitious. He heads to the country, to become a broker for farm produce. That trade, however, is controlled by the Camorra. He comes to an understanding with them, but that puts him in their pocket. On his wedding day with Rosanna Schiaffino, they squeeze.

It's a dark and stormy movie by Francesco Rosi about the intersection between ambition, business, beautifully written and performed. Suárez offers a dynamite performance in a role that is simple in its motivation, but complex in its performance.

Italian black and white mobster story

[LW-08854 · 6/10 · 24 December 2023]

An Italian 1950s crime film set in Naples with Italian subtitles. The film sets out to tell the true story of how a mafia man came to dominate the vegetable market in post war Naples. We have all the aspects we expect from a mobster film, the climb to the top and all the others he must battle along the way to get there. The film appears to have been shot in Naples and does a good job of conveying the dusty and cracked streets and the sense of danger lurking around the corner. The film is a kind of love story too of sorts, but not one with too much tenderness or romance as you'll see. The film is very well acted but I couldn't really take away from it that much from it.

Respectable first feature from a major director.

[Mozjoukine · 26 April 2004]

Rosi, later director of SALVATORE GIULIANO and the Gian Maria Volonte thrillers, is running up to speed here but the strong use of location - Naples tenements contrasted to the farming community - makes him an interesting link between the Neo Realists and the political thriller lot of the seventies, Damiano and the rest.

Suarez, the lead, switches from cigarette smuggling to vegetables, forming an uneasy alliance with the rural crime Don. We know he's going to get his but before that happens he's paired with Schiafino among the laundry drying on the roof, so that their mothers can argue whether she's an under age innocent or the local slut, and moved her into a bay view flat. Some suspense builds with in the final drive back to the city.

Compare this one with the similar themed American JUKE GIRL and THIEVES' HIGHWAY.

The technicians are excellent, with Di Venanzo's total focus look evident here before his Antonioni successes made him famous.