“We are doomed, you and me,” says the borderline psychotic, former Nazi collaborator Daniela (Vivi Gioi) as she places her hand on a lever that will set off a field of land mines. She’s speaking to Alberto (Andrea Checchi), her lover and accomplice in a group of bandits who have stolen four million lire from a local co-op community, leaving it broke and subject to immediate foreclosure. In addition to murdering a couple of men in the process, the bandits also kidnapped young Giovanna (Carla Del Poggio) whose new husband Michele (Massimo Girotti) leads the other farmers to hunt down the thieves and retrieve their collective life savings. Despite its postwar setting in the Italian countryside, Giuseppe De Santis’s Caccia tragica (US: Tragic Hunt) feels like a war film because its story and characters illustrate the chaos and brutality that lingered after the world’s deadliest conflict: citizens wander, families live in barracks, guns are drawn on battlefields, mines are detonated (poor dogs!). Martelli’s camera pans and levitates to catch sweeping views of the chaos, the film’s dynamic energy felt in the rapid cutting, the frequent cacophony of sounds (radio music, farmers chanting, church bells overlapping), etc. It’s an astounding debut for De Santis, even if most don’t rate it as highly as his Bitter Rice (1949) released two years later.