The Green Ray is our ongoing series of heritage films shown in their original 35mm format, or in restored digital copies. This time we will be screening a 35mm print of Il vedovo (Dino Risi, 1959). “In the late 1950s, a specifically Italian film genre developed, whose most brilliant and incisive representative is undoubtedly Dino Risi. Just as neorealism had narrated and captured in images the difficult times of the postwar period, this ‘Italian comedy’ thrived, in its early years, on the ground of the economic boom then gripping the Peninsula, relentlessly X-raying the transformation of the country and the evolution of the customs and characters that accompanied it […] Relegated from the forefront of a very extensive filmography that boasts several peaks of biting darkness, it is a film that richly deserves to be rediscovered […] Alberto Sordi, one of the filmmaker's and the genre's favorite actors, with a fearsome precision in a performance that is sometimes vibrant, sometimes suspended and almost bovine, is a figure of the new man, a dejected businessman mistreated by the disdain and personal fortune of his wife (the surprising Franca Valeri, who shows how to despise with affection), but whom Nothing can make him lose his air of an upstart, confident in his status […] Sordi gives face and body to this new man, individualistic and petty, obsessed with success and conformity.” (Nicolas Le Thierry d'Ennequin)