Though now regarded as one of Italy's finest filmmakers, the 21-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci was a little-known poet and novelist in 1962 when he made his first film, La commare secca, known in English as The Grim Reaper. Bertolucci was still fairly new to the film business at the time, having served as first assistant to director Pier Paolo Pasolini on his own first feature, Accatone the previous year, a job he acquired since Bertolucci's father had published Pasolini's first novel.

In fact, Pasolini was originally slated to direct The Grim Reaper and had written the original story; however, he decided to turn over the directorial reins to Bertolucci in order to direct Mamma Roma instead. The milieu of this story is pure Pasolini territory, carrying forward the themes of street survival and prostitution from Accatone. The end result turned out to be an acclaimed calling card for the young Bertolucci, who went on to helm the more internationally recognized Before the Revolution (1964) and the experimental Partner (1968) before breaking through to the English-language mainstream with The Conformist (1970).

Despite its respectable notices for a debut film, Bertolucci's depiction of the conflicting narratives about the fate of a murdered prostitute (told from various viewpoints a la Kurosawa's Rashomon) wasn't initially seen by most English-speaking critics and viewers apart from screenings at the 1962 Venice Festival and London Festival. Eventually it was shown in America as part of the New York Film Festival in 1966, paired up with Peter Goldman's short film Pestilent City, well after Before the Revolution had hit the art house circuit. Bertolucci's use of non-professional actors led many to compare him to both Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini, but the approach here is already different and a bit more stylized than his older peers, mixing poetry and politics into a filmic style that would define him throughout the rest of his career, most notably with 1900 (1976) and The Last Emperor (1987).

Despite Bertolucci's ascent throughout the '70s, American audiences outside the festival scene were kept from seeing The Grim Reaper until 1982, with Andrew Sarris in Village Voice calling it "fascinating not only for its unveiling of a stunning talent but also for its certification of the Pasolini-Bertolucci connection...The Grim Reaper works on every level-melodrama, spectacle, reportage-to make this directorial debut truly memorable." The film also attained quite a bit of mystique in retrospect by the time most viewers saw it, as Pasolini was murdered in 1975 under circumstances eerily similar to this film. The still-percolating rumors about the circumstances of his death now hold up an eerie mirror to this film, which demonstrates through its punctuating afternoon storms how the truth can be an enormously difficult beast to tame under any circumstances.

By Nathaniel Thompson