"A film can never be totally successful if it doesn't upset anyone." ~ Martin Ritt

Just when you think you’ve seen every type of WWII film from the immediate decades following the conflict, along comes one to surprise and disturb - an Italian-American project from 1960 that is eminently modern, intense and finely nuanced. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by American Martin Ritt from Jovanka and The Others, a novel by Italian writer Ugo Pirro. The script was refined by noted Hollywood Blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico and was made up of a fine international ensemble cast that included Hollywood stalwart Van Heflin and the fast rising French star Jeanne Moreau. The film is a minor marvel and was so far ahead of its time we’ve barely caught up in the 21^st century.

Five women living under Nazi occupation in a small Yugoslav town are accused of horizontally collaborating with the enemy, have their heads shaven to announce their shame and are run out of town. The five are led by Jovanka (Silvana Mangano) as they band together for survival. Mira (Carla Gravina), the youngest is pregnant by her seducer and the widow Marija (Barbara Bel Geddes) only wanted a child. Daniza (Vera Miles) is unfairly accused and slashes her wrist, and Ljuba (Jeanne Moreau) did it to protect her brother from being deported to a concentration camp, only to have her brother disown her. The outcasts fall in with a partisan group led by Velko (Van Heflin) - who had been responsible for Jovanka’s shaming - and join the fight against the Nazis with mixed results.

Most Hollywood films that addressed the war did so from a largely masculine, propagandistic position, rarely fleshing out female characters or taking risks around the censorship of the time. What sets Five Branded Women apart is the absolute willingness to address the collateral damage of war and the price women typically paid at the hands of soldiers from both sides. We know this is no run of the mill war film when the Nazi officer Keller (Steve Forrest), who had been having sex with the women and bragging about it is caught by the partisans and castrated unceremoniously, is shown yelling impotently at the women from his hospital window as they are marched out of town. Each woman had a different reason for succumbing to his attentions, but the fact that he has taken advantage of his relative power over them is front and centre. Only Jovanka had sex with him on her own terms, as one human to another and not as a political act, as she despises the war.

Sexual politics/abuse and exploitation from soldiers under duress and some behaving badly was always the women’s lot. It’s rare to see any issue around sexual abuse addressed in a mainstream film, and it would be decades before cinema would consider showing the ‘comfort’ women stations where women were forced into sex work. There’s no glossing over the lascivious nature of Keller’s intent, he shows snapshots of his conquests in the barracks and rates the women – the mind of guy who’d show pictures of his Tinder dates to anyone in eyeshot. The plot also shows a partisan, Branko (Harry Guardino) attempting to rape Jovanka after stumbling across the women bathing in the woods – there are threats from both sides and no easy lines for the audience to follow.

The other aspect of the film is the idea of the ‘good German’ as represented by Capt. Reinhardt (Richard Basehart), a peacetime philosophy professor who is captured and bonds with Ljuba. When he tells her there are “good Germans,” she asks, “How can you tell the difference between a good German and a bad German if they both invade your country?” – he nods and replies, “I grant your point.” It's a tender and quiet scene, beautifully played and staged after the German had help deliver Mira’s baby. Branko seduces Daniza and, unlike with Keller, she succumbs but as the two were on sentry duty and missed advancing enemy soldiers they are found guilty of breaching the rules and sentenced to death. The execution is particularly wrenching as Jovanka and Ljuba are included in the firing squad and Branko begs the two women to shoot him, ‘This should be easy for you…’ – all the bullets hit Branko and Daniza has to be shot by a single soldier separately. The ending is equally unsentimental and stays in the memory, very un-Hollywood and quintessentially European and beautifully handled by Ritt and his plucky cast.

Ritt helped manage some fine and nuanced performances from each of the women with Silvana Mangano shining in the lead role as Jovanka, a role Gina Lollobrigida had then backed away from. Both American actresses, Barbara Bel Geddes and Vera Miles are wonderful in their roles and Moreau is at the top of her game after her breakthrough roles in Louis Malle’s masterpieces, Ascension To The Scaffold and The Lovers, having paid a 10 year apprenticeship in support parts. Heflin underplays and is all the better for it, as does Basehart, and the smaller roles are filled by convincing types. The film is superbly shot on location by Italian cinematographic legend Giuseppe Rotunno and has a nice score from Angelo Francesca Lavagnino.

If Hollywood barely touched the subject of women’s ‘collaboration’ the French had, by a whisker, with the Alain Resnais masterpiece Hiroshima Mon Amour, but the French knew a thing or two about it and had a tortured history on the subject. Arletty, one of their iconic screen divas was convicted of horizontal collaboration after the war and her memorable defense was, ‘My heart is French, but my arse is international.’ Surely something that Jovanka would have appreciated. In reality ‘collaboration’ had many degrees and was as much about power or the lack of it as it was about sexual abuse and the film allows nuance and empathy with the women instead of the more typical black and white ‘moral’ denunciation.

Martin Ritt was no fan of the finished film, he claimed he did it for the money, got sick making it and disowned it later. Ritt would go on to have a significant career and make several essential entries in the American Cinema canon, but despite his protestations he helped create a great film in Five Branded Women, even if he viewed it as a mistake. It is richly detailed, fearless and full of humanist touches befitting the input from leftists like Wilson and Jarrico, whose credits were restored in 1998, and it is a Hollywood war film that has aged infinitely better than most of its contemporaries. That the film exists is surprising, but that it was made years before Second Wave feminism and the Counterculture movements gave women more agency in broadly patriarchal societies is a minor miracle.