The novel La ragazza di Bube by Carlo Cassola that won the Strega Prize in 1960 was one of the era’s bestsellers. A film adaptation was inevitable, also because films about Fascism and the Resistance had been in vogue in Italy for several years. The story tells of a working-class girl engaged to a former partisan who is arrested for a murder that took place during the tumultuous days following the liberation. It is the portrait of a woman, a fact which Marcello Fondato’s screenplay accentuates through the deliberate choice of recounting the story as a long flashback told in her words. Comencini’s direction emphasizes this reflection on the past and enters into dialogue with the cinema of the post-war years. On the one hand, its remoteness is emphasized by the use of flashback and Carlo Rustichelli’s melancholy leitmotif. On the other, the film’s style is both lively and refined: the close ups with dense backgrounds, the use of the almost virtuoso scenes (the dialogue in the cinema foyer with the lights gradually being dimmed), the high contrast chiaroscuro cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo (along the lines of his previous work on Salvatore Giuliano and 8½), and scenes such as the deposition at the trial, shot as a static long take without reverse shots. Claudia Cardinale plays a problematic and nuanced heroine, staring into space or with her eyes downturned. She inhabits the post-war period but simultaneously reveals to us how remote those years now are. She is a character closer to the women of Antonioni’s cinema than those of neorealism.