Delitto d’amore is a very original variant on the tradition of melodrama, to which Comencini had already contributed several very interesting examples, not only when operating squarely within the genre, but also when mediating it through comedy, or in inquest-like explorations of reality … Even if conventional elements abound, they are necessary to define an environment; they are not realistic, but exaggerated, as if they derived from yet more conventions … As in a comedy, a simple anecdote is bolstered by a plethora of secondary characters and distinctive touches which serve not only to define the frame but also to reinforce, rather than diminish, the central love story. Gemma and Sandrelli, two good-looking stars of the cinema of the era, are expertly directed but their performances are little more than an affectionate characterisation of two carefully drawn individuals. Yet the power of their characters derives from their origins in classic populist melodrama – Frank Borzage, for example, or Paul Fejos; the cinema of the Popular Front, certain examples of Russian and Nordic cinema, or perhaps the novels of Vasco Pratolini … Tenderness is the key to the story and the characters, a love story set amongst the working class of the industrial periphery between the 1960s and the 1970s … Delitto d’amore is a film which hails from a time before an entire social class and an era disappeared … It is a document of a way of existing in our country and a way of telling stories in our cinema which are gone forever.

Goffredo Fofi, in Luigi Comencini. Il cinema e i film, edited by Adriano Aprà, Marsilio, Venice 2007