Having since 1933 worked in different genres (comedy, crime, historical drama, etc), Matarazzo was hesitant about the direc­tion his career should take at the start of the Fifties. He considered directing a melodrama, but, as always full of self-doubts, he did not know if he should take this route. The people around him, his friends, and notably Monicelli and Freda (…) totally approved of his choice. Buoyed up by their support, Matarazzo threw himself whole-heartedly into this adventure. Exploring a genre entirely new for him, with Catene (a film which came largely to top the Italian box-office in the years 1949-50) he achieved a success as huge as it was unexpected, and which engendered a long series of films spread over practically the entire decade. (…) In the universe in which Matarazzo’s melodramas take place, the cult of religion and family is paramount. This universe exists only through the relationship which everyone has with God and with his family. When this relationship is threatened with destruction, all the energy of the characters and of the film is put in motion to restore it, setting itself to manipulate secretly – and sometimes even openly – social conventions, public opinion, justice etc, as is very evident in the final sequences of Catene in which it is only the public lie of the heroine which effects the restoration of family unity. Catene already contains all the basic elements of the series of the six following films (…): the perfect couple, Nazzari-Sanson; the skill of the dramatic progression in which the growing misfortune of the characters goes side by side with a lyric intensification of mise en scène; the rigorous simplicity of the dialogues; the care and the almost diaphanous purity of the photography.

Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma, Laffont, Paris, 1992