In 1951, two years after the “scandal” of the Fiamma che non si spegne, [Cottafavi] got the opportunity to work on a film with a small production company, Novissima Film. With little means, a number of technical and financial problems and working Sundays with the pieces of film given to him bit by bit, Cottafavi shot Una donna ha ucciso, a minor film that marked his comeback to directing. Followed by Traviata ’53 (1953), In amore si pecca in due (1953), Nel gorgo del peccato (1954) and Una donna libera (1954), Una donna ha ucciso was also the first of a pentalogy of melodramatic movies about the condition of women in contemporary society and the moral and social problems related to it. The film is based on a real crime story that took place immediately after the war. An Italian woman killed her English wartime lover for the sake of love. The story was reformulated by Cottafavi with the help of Siro Angeli and Giorgio Capitani. It was the producer who had the idea to make it a film; in fact, he had just gotten the rights to the autobiography of this woman who had been recently pardoned and released from jail. They planned to exploit the melodramatic and passionate elements of the story at a time when, for example, Raffaello Matarazzo’s films were enjoying enormous success (…).
The film’s realistic and “Zavattinian” side is reinforced by the fact that this woman actually appears in the opening and the ending, almost like a frame around the story of the murder she committed and a moral analysis of it. (…) Within this moralistic and somewhat educational framework, the film unravels like a serial story, with a highly realistic yet melodramatic structure. Perhaps it was this unusual dramaturgical structure that explains why audiences were puzzled and why the film was not well received (…) The importance of Una donna ha ucciso is that it was the first work of this pentalogy about women in contemporary society (…). Women’s issues and relationship problems in general are presented in a spiritual, moralistic yet anti-traditional perspective, offering a complex and in some ways provocative point of view; they are the underpinnings ofa larger discourse about interpersonal relationships in a society dominated by selfishness, abuse of power, psychological violence, and moral and cultural conditioning. Cottafavi used the melodrama, the serial story, the “comic strip” story, the popular drama – always checked by a sensitivity to style and an effort to represent stories, characters, settings and facts with the right dramatic proportions, within the limits of what was artistically and technically possible – in an attempt to reach a larger audience, (…) and to experiment with a vast range of expressive forms of film as an art for the masses, following in the footsteps of the great popular fiction of the 1800s and Italian melodrama, from Rossini to Puccini.

Gianni Rondolino, Vittorio Cottafavi cinema e televisione, Cappelli Editore, Bologna 1980