The Wide Blue Road

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Wide Blue Road (99 mins.) is one of the great forgotten European films of the 1950s.

It's only now receiving its U.S. theatrical premiere in a beautifully restored print brought to the screen with the help of director Jonathan Demme and Dustin Hoffman, a friend of Pontecorvo since the sixties.

"Starkly beautiful! Yves Montand's portrayal is a star performance radiant with macho glamour."—Stephen Holden, New York Times

"Spectacular, picture-postcard cinematography. [It feautres] the kind of expertly edited suspense sequences that helped make The Battle of Algiers so memorable...A handsome new restoration."—Ken Fox, TV Guide Online

Made a decade before Pontecorvo would achieve international fame for The Battle of Algiers, this debut feature stars Yves Montand as a small-town fisherman struggling to provide a better life for his family. Shot off the Adriatic coastal areas of Italy and Yugoslavia, the gorgeous locations are rendered in stunning color cinematography.

In helping to bring the film back to today's audiences, director Jonathan Demme explains that "I fell madly in love with The Wide Blue Road....Filmed in spectacular color and starring Yves Montand (what a hunk!)...this is such a great movie, enormously gripping and entertaining, as well as being early undeniable proof of Pontecorvo's and Montand's greatness."