Neorealism, noir, or both? However you categorize it, Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito (US: The Bandit) quite literally depicts the moral chaos and confusion afflicting the men who came back from fighting in World War II. Amadeo Nazzari is outstanding as Italian soldier Ernesto, whose survival on the battlefield feels anticlimactic when his homecoming is acknowledged by nobody whatsoever: his mother is dead and his sister has disappeared (to work as a prostitute, we soon learn). Italian superstar Anna Magnani plays Lidia, the streetwise moll who helps Ernesto escape the police and introduces him to her gang. In addition to being the most dramatic scene in the film, Ernesto’s bittersweet reunion with his sister Maria (Carla Del Poggio) marks a turning point in the character’s psychological journey: from this point onward, he readily settles in for a life of crime. As in so many films of the period, Lattuada paints Italy immediately following the war as a dark and desperate place where residents are forced to live in the moment if they’re going to live at all.