Before Italian director Francesco Rosi became highly acclaimed for his political realism in the 60’s and 70’s, his first feature film, La sfida (US: The Challenge) introduced this theme through a more traditional gangster story, yet one still based on a true story involving the real-world Camorra mafia that dominated Naples and the surrounding Campagna countryside at the time. Awarded with the jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, La sfida juxtaposes the crowds and chaos of Naples (prepare for plenty of Italians shouting in the streets) with the quiet farming communities so ripe for corruption and manipulation by the gangsters who want control of the fruits and vegetables trade (the trucks full of produce will remind noir fans of Jules Dassin’s 1949 Thieves’ Highway). The story is a familiar one: an ambitious kid from the slums crosses the wrong guy while attempting to swim with the sharks. The kid here is Vito Polara (the buoyant Spanish actor José Suárez who also starred in the Barcelona-set Criminal Squad (1950) and A Clean Shot (1964), a cigarette smuggler who cuts in on the rural produce market dominated by the ultimately unforgiving Don Salvatore Aiello (Decimo Cristiani), along the way demonstrating his masculine dominance by biting the neck of an octopus. Nino Vingelli plays Gennaro, Vito’s faithful and much wiser number two, while Rosanna Schiaffino plays Assunta, the maiden-whore who lives next door and makes it her mission to marry Vito (Schiaffino gets top billing despite her secondary role, her character reaching an emotional crescendo in the final frames). Rosi’s promising directorial talent is on full display here, his camera finding plenty of new perspectives on the desperate financial circumstances of so many in postwar Italy.