Love Is Not a Many Splendored Thing: Pietro Germi’s L’uomo di paglia (1958)

This chapter examines L’uomo di paglia within the framework of post-war Italian representations of labour and industrial modernity. Combining textual analysis with production history and reception studies, it argues that the film occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of neorealist legacies, melodramatic conventions and emerging debates on social change during the economic boom. Through the story of Andrea Zaccardo, a factory worker whose extramarital affair destabilises his family life, the film expands the visibility of the industrial working class in Italian cinema while simultaneously foregrounding questions of morality, gender and everyday experience. Particular attention is devoted to the representation of factory labour, the construction of audience identification through melodramatic strategies and the film’s negotiation of traditional masculine values in a rapidly modernising society. The chapter ultimately interprets L’uomo di paglia as an anti-modernist male melodrama that uses the emotional trajectory of its protagonist to reflect on the tensions generated by economic growth, changing social norms and the cultural transformations of late-1950s Italy.