The location for the major part of Alberto Lattuada’s new film, Anna, a very modern hospital, and in fact Milan’s new Ospedale Maggiore, would seem the setting for a documentary made with extreme skill. It is material which, even considered in its own right, has a rhythm, an interest, [and] constitutes a story. The very modern atmosphere, the new materials of which it is made, the extreme care for hygiene, somewhat soften the daily tragedy which takes place here. The apparatus of science almost softens the grief. The detachment of the photography permits us to look at the splash of blood on a surgeon’s gown as he works, and the extreme pallor of the face of a dying woman. There is close attention to the way the surgeon puts on his gloves, to show whether this is a real doctor or an actor. It is the cruel perfection and indifference of the modern machine. At every pulsation the city sends here those who wear out and break. It is a rhythm and a cycle. We cannot say that the director has not profited from this vision, which would have excited a Balzac, with its frozen symphony of whites, varnish, gloss paint, linen. Such a documentary almost becomes hallucinating. It would have been sufficient and perfect for his story if the director had used it as a single theme. (…) However, confronted by such techniques of a modern complex, perhaps the human events would have had to be extremely simple, touching, without the shadow of conventionality. It is, however, a conventional episode, conventionally observed.

Corrado Alvaro, “Ospedale e amore,” Il Mondo, 23 February 1952