Chains

Those titular ties would be the circumstances that bind a persecuted wife and mother (Yvonne Sanson, in a role Joan Crawford would have relished had Hollywood tried its hand at a remake) who is cast out of her family when she is wrongly accused of having an affair with a criminal. Though dismissed in its day by critics who favored neorealism’s grit over gloss, melodrama maestro Raffaello Matarazzo’s deliciously overwrought, two-ton tearjerker is radical in its own subversive way, embedding within its soap-opera suds a Sirkian critique of bourgeois morality and the societal forces that shackle women. 35mm print courtesy of Istituto Luce Cinecittà.