(…) I regard this film, with its romantic atmosphere but realist themes and epic style, as the most worthy and perhaps the most remarkable work created by the young master director Alberto Lattuada. For, breaking out of the restrictive frame of a Neo-realism now turned back upon itself, he often attains, with the river and the cornfields, a visual beauty and grandeur that are profoundly exalting. (…) From Bacchelli’s huge novel, whose sociological and sentimental theme is set on the Po, in the region of Ferrara at the end of the last [19th] century, the writers Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, who are among the most respected in Italy, have taken the most dramatic episode, trying perhaps a little too feebly – from the moment when it is no longer a matter of the book, but of the film, it doesn’t matter – to restore its objective tone. It is thus that their sympathies – and those of Lattuada too, it goes without saying – evidently lean towards the side of the farmers against the landlords. For the story of the mill and its inhabitants unfolds in parallel with that of the peasants oppressed by their masters; a trade union and a general strike will affirm their rights. However, the miller’s daughter mourns her fiancé, killed by his own brother. In short, this sombre love story, which one would say is symbolically and fatally directed by the spirit of the river, acquires an importance almost equal in the content of the story to that of the social struggles. I do not think that we need complain.

Émile Grêt, “Il Mulino del Po,” Ciné Suisse, n. 445, 24 August 1949