Hollywood turned to the rising problem of delinquent youth in the unsettled years after World War II and the new DVD of Michelangelo Antonioni's little known I Vinti (The Vanquished) shows a similar concern from European studios. Released in 1953, several years before he hit his stride with the enigmatic L'avventura, I Vinti was an ambitious set of three stories in three nations about nihilistic youth who commit the ultimate crime, murder.
The stories were based on real incidents, but the telling ran into all sorts of trouble. Censors in France objected to aspects of the French segment and their Italian counterparts managed to reinvent the episode in Rome to sidestep politics. The most interesting segment was set in London and concerned a sociopath who killed in an elaborate scheme to win fame and with the media's complicity. Antonioni was forced to open I Vinti with a too-long narration over a sequence of newspaper headlines and photos of dangerously violent youth, the tone pitched in a key out of keeping with the film that followed. It's a rather static, even stilted preface to a flawed production with many intriguing moments nonetheless. The new DVD release of I Vinti is a fascinating look at the early days of a great filmmaker.
