La Terra trema (1948) ***

In Sicily, the fishermen live at the mercy of the greedy wholesalers. One family risks everything to buy their own boat and to operate independently. A curious film: very Marxist in its class-struggle rhetoric, but basically promoting small-c capitalism as a solution to big-C Capitalism's oppression of the working people. It's quite dated in this over-the-top melodramatic excesses, but beautifully filmed.