THE ROAD TO HOPE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 15

THE ROAD TO HOPE

(Lux Film) G Cert. ‘THE story of an attempt by a group of Sicilian miners to find their way to work and a new home in France, The Road to Hope is something like the sort of film I hoped Pietro Germi would make, or had made, when I reviewed his

Lost Youth, Looking for the flaws that marred his earlier films, I still find signs of a weakness for over-dramatic plot devices; but this is nevertheless a fine, moving piece about ordinary people facing the most fundamental of human problems. And if we seem to have made that journey through the alps beforewell, it has again been well done. The journey, however, ‘is a small part of the film, which spends much more time with the dwindling group as it meets this difficulty and that on its journey north through Italy; and (to tell the story backwards) most starkly impressive of all are the scenes and incidents in the Sicilian village where the film begins. Here the camera (Leonida Barboni) has caught as well as anything of the kind I have seen the statuesque figures of the women waiting for their men to end a sit-down strike in the mine, the faces of the men (most of them, I gather, non-professional actors) as they sit in the wine shop, and the white-walled,: sun-drenched village. These and later scenes when the group finds it has been used to help break a strike are a frightening reminder of the meaning of poverty-it recalled for me the depression years. Yet this isn’t in the end a gloomy film. Its journey is a journey towards hope; and it illuminates the best as well as the worst in our common human nature.