Perhaps inspired by Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Luigi Comencini co-wrote and directed La tratta delle bianche (US: Girls Marked Danger), a sleazy and sensationalist noir that revolves around a weeks-long dance contest involving the riffraff of a desperate postwar Italian landscape. Featuring an early role for Sophia Loren (credited as Sofia Lazzaro), the film follows Alda (Eleonora Rossi Drago) and Lucia (Silvana Pampanini), two beautiful, young women trying to survive in a community of gangsters, convicts, burglars, and pimps. While the dance contest represents hope and opportunity, and a less demeaning way for girls to profit from their bodies, it also serves as a sex slave recruiting venue for vicious gangster Machedi (the excellent Marc Lawrence, a common face of American noir) and his associate Michele (Vittorio Gassman), both of whom have romantic designs on Lucia, whose primary goal is raising money for a lawyer to help get her lover Carlo (Ettore Manni) out of prison. The film blends over-the-top melodrama and implausible plot points into a thoroughly entertaining romp through sex, violence, and tragedy (the U.S. release required nearly 30 minutes of cuts to please the Hays office), noir visuals especially prominent in the opening sequence and final act, with high angles, intricate framing, and deep shadows animating the desolate landscapes of an Italy — and Italians — struggling to rebuild.