As leading lady Valentina Frascaroli demonstrated her extraordinary versatility, portraying the comic character Gribouillette just as masterfully as Mena in Sacrificata! of 1910, the first dramatic film in which she was the lead. Performing as a young peasant harassed by an unscrupulous landowner, Valentina revealed that expressive power that would win over a generation of viewers. The picture was a criticism of the abuse farm workers were forced to endure at the hands of the landowners.
The daughter of a troubled laborer in a foreign land in L’emigrante, daughter on the brink of suicide due to her father’s alcoholism in Il grande veleno, a young worker put in a mental hospital in Il segreto del vecchio Giosué, Valentina Frascaroli is one of the Italian actresses who best portrayed the concerns of social drama, the film genre to which Il delitto della piccina rightfully belongs. Written and directed in 1920 by Adelardo Fernández Arias, the film, which tells the story of the murder of a factory manager, carried out in legitimate self-defence by a young female worker he harasses, sets out to expose the aberrations poisoning the relationship between industrialists and the working class; at the time, this theme was powerfully relevant considering that Italy was experiencing a period of intense social unrest and union clashes that would go down in history as the ‘biennio rosso’ (red biennium): the film’s close connection with reality at such a turbulent time drove censors to prohibiting its release.
The biography of the Spaniard Adelardo Fernández Arias (1880-1951), metteur en scène of Il delitto della piccina, is intriguing. A multi-faceted and politically involved intellectual, Arias was a novelist, playwright and journalist. His first experience with film dates back 1912, when he directed an actualité reconstituée on the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister, José Canalejas Méndez. Between 1915 and 1920 he was active in the Italian film industry and collaborated on at least seventeen films, of which he was often simultaneously screenwriter, actor and director. Arias also became a producer; he first founded Victoria Film, then Titan and later Arias Film, the production company of Il delitto della piccina, its only surviving film. When Arias returned to Spain he resumed his literary and journalistic career and became known, during the Spanish Civil War, for his militant commitment to the Falange movement.

Giovanni Lasi