WE CANNOT get past ‘BITTER RICE’ quickly because, apart from the director’s molding of Mangano’s character into a tragic result related to  her obsession with an exciting foreign culture, various other values make the film the forerunner of a new type of European cinema which evoked the rustic rural roots of society based on manual labour, agricultural cultivation and harvests, and a realistic portrayal of feminine sensuality related to such work, including cuisine made from the same products sowed, etc. At the same time, it should be stated that director de Santis was no Socialist bigot, but a truly educated man, an artist of broad cultural appreciation who was an avid lover of the same North American sub-culture of Jazz and its dances, radio, comic books, etc, which he merely used to show the cultural impact on a young peasant girl, isolated, envied by some meek conformist peers, and who, without proper guidance, degenerated into impulsive criminal behaviour fuelled by her infatuation with a roguish man.
Mangano’s erotic and spirited interpretations of her scenes in ‘Bitter Rice’ set her apart from other young Italian actress of 1948/50, and projected the first outline of a theme in which a wonderful, open-minded, liberal and caring Roman Catholic Christian love that was not just words or quotes from religious texts, but applied human sentiment and physical acts began embracing us film viewers.
Both the Mother Earth erotic closeness to nature, evoked by the peasant rice girls, combined with the more social issues of exploitive labour and the importance of rice as an industry to make ‘Bitter Rice’ a popular film well beyond Europe and North America. And one of the places it was an instant success in cinemas was 1950s British Guiana, probably the leading rice producing country in the Caribbean/Latin American region.
We must cast our thoughts back to the countless films made in those early post-war years when both European cinema (especially Italy and France) and classic Hollywood found examples of cinematic form and content, which were significant and relevant beyond Europe and North America, and applicable to obscure, stereotyped colonial territories.
‘Bitter Rice’ was just a fraction of a quantity of high-quality films rarely relooked at properly today by film criticism.

‘Bitter Rice’ in BG
The case of ‘Bitter Rice’ in British Guiana illustrated the necessity of cinematic art, whose questions and implications connected intellectually with others who influenced and led societies.
Amongst the almost daily lineups outside the marquees of 1950s and 60s Georgetown cinemas was frequently seen a remarkable, petite young American woman, Janet Jagan, a socialist like de Santis, but from Chicago. She had married the Oriental dental student, Cheddi Jagan, from coastal sugar and rice producing British Guiana, and returned with him in the late 1940s to form the colony’s first socialist party which united workers and intellectuals above their diverse ethnic origins.
Outside the nastiness of politics, the Jagans’ idea of socialism was much more than politics; they emphasized universal education and culture, a modernity based on critical assessments of juxtaposed ‘peasant’ and ‘modern’ values enriching each other, and ultimately becoming the main social progression which builds a peace-loving civilized nation.
In the public bookstore within their Party’s headquarters could be had the most open-minded international critical literature, not only by English social thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Sir Herbert Read, Raymond Williams, etc, but unquestionably great non-Anglo writers of the world like Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Moliere, Hugo, Colette, Anais Nin, Simone de Beavoir, Francoise Sagan, Sartre, Camus, Saint-Exupery, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavesse, Thomas Mann, Gunther Grass, Dostoyevesky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, Gorky, Pushkin, Gogol, Pasternak, etc.
The best contemporary American literature was there, too, black and white. The Jagan’s were avid cinephiles who respected the professional film choices made for the public by local cinema managers and staff; they understood the educational importance of visible public collective guidance via cinema attendance.
In 1960, when their Party won a second term in office, Dr. Jagan removed the colonial law that forbade cinemas to open on Sundays, suggesting that religion had a fixed priority over cultural and social influence.
Leading by their visible individual yet public acts, the presence of the Jagan couple in lineups outside city cinemas while being elected leaders of the nation, emphasized public guidance not just by policies, but by personal example. If our leaders were in a lineup outside a cinema, what were the films playing there? What sort of film interested them? People wanted to know and see them too. ‘Bitter Rice’ was just one of those sorts of films they were seen at, amongst over a hundred other weekly titles, from those just made to vintage classics made decades earlier.
Mangano’s films would come to emphasize the imaginative relevance of her roles to those far away from Italy.