Pietro Germi wrote the film without ever having been to Sicily, taking his inspiration from a novel by a former magistrate set in the early 1920s. Only afterwards did he physically encounter the location. He seemingly received an exciting confirmation of his own preconception, almost to the point of being an exponential reinforcement of it. Sicily is exactly as one imagines it; indeed, it is even more so… In previous films (The Testimony, Gioventù perduta) the model for illustrating postwar crime phenomena was the urban detective story, what today we would call film noir. Here the model changes. If the mafia is a phenomenon of the large landed estates, then it is obvious that an American-style film about the mafia can only have the western as its model. In creating a popular neorealism, in total accordance with the policy of the Lux production company, Germi aligns himself with a more “mature” western genre that is ready to blur clear moral distinctions: that model would appear to be the late works of John Ford, with My Darling Clementine released in Italy the year before. The influence of the western genre is evident from the very first scenes and from Carlo Rustichelli’s soundtrack that alternates a western march with an operatic-folkloric melody in the vein of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. Equally evident in the same scenes is the neorealist influence with the use of voice-over narration, a kind of hallmark, which in the beginning explains the social context and setting of the story…
Just like in the beginning of a western, the main character Guido Schiavi, played by Massimo Girotti, gets off the train alone, in a long shot. He is from Palermo, but everyone mistakes him for a foreigner […]. He is the new magistrate, dressed in city clothes – noir clothes we might say. Most of all, he is a city man who arrives in a village. After being warned by the old magistrate, he gets on a stagecoach to reach the town…
The mafia governs in a reckless manner, leading to the main conflict between the magistrate (the law of the state) and the mafia boss (the law of the gun). A classic conflict, like the conflict of the code of silence, which thwarts the investigations and would also become a cornerstone of mafia cinema.

Emiliano Morreale, La mafia immaginaria. Settant’anni di Cosa nostra al cinema (1949-2019), Donzelli, Rome 2020