Senso

However inferior it may be to La Terra Trema it can only strengthen Visconti's position as one of the major directors of the contemporary cinema.

Not usually seen as one of the cinema's great romantics, Visconti with "Senso" made a film that both celebrated and mocked the very idea of romantic love, and the film remains resolutely itself after all these years.

Senso is lush, broadly emotional and beautifully photographed.

Senso is an elegant, expensively-produced, period love story, set back in the Italian 1860s, and a stylist delight.

Like other Visconti melodramas, [Senso is] sumptuous in its Technicolor expressionism.

It is an obvious, rudimentary operatic approach to amour and an illustration of history that is likely to be fuzzy to anyone but a student of Garibaldi's 1866 campaign in and around Venice and Verona.

Visconti claims that in Senso he wanted to show the “melodrama” (read: the opera) of life. If this was his intention, his film is a complete success.

Visconti's determined attempt to make lifelike, dramatically convincing sense of individual human behavior as the expression of historical and social processes is both illuminating and liberating. This is the way toward life, not away from it.

As usual with Visconti, there is a welter of baroque effects and an acute sense of history.

Gorgeously upholstered by flashing, decadent passions and over-the-top operatics.