Set in the agricultural Po Valley region of northern Italy, Giuseppe De Santis’ Riso Amaro (US: Bitter Rice) is a unique noir drama in the Italian neorealism tradition. Jewel thieves Walter (Vittorio Gassman) and girlfriend Francesca (Doris Dowling) hide from the police by blending in with the annual migration of female laborers to the Po Valley rice farms; while Francesca lives in the dorms and works in the fields, Walter hides in a rice loft and plots a heist of the harvest with a gang of accomplices. Francesca befriends Silvana (Silvana Mangano), who’s dating the handsome soldier Marco (Raf Vallone), but each woman is drawn to the other’s man; in the end, only two of the four will survive. Cinematographer Martelli uses long shots and high angles to turn the rice fields into multi-level set pieces, the laboring, often singing bodies choreographed like a Broadway musical; later, he transforms a rice barn into transcendent sand dunes where Walter hides from the world. The thrilling final 30 minutes ramp up the noir ethos, low-key lighting, slow zooms and dramatic tension culminating in a gunfight in a slaughterhouse (surely the only noir in which a human corpse hangs from a meat hook) and a climactic chase up a tower, the torch-bearing laborers swarming like fireflies below.