Corrado Alvaro

Francesca and Walter are two-bit criminals in Northern Italy, and, in an effort to avoid the police, Francesca joins a group of women rice workers. She meets the voluptuous peasant rice worker, Silvana, and the soon-to-be-discharged soldier, Marco. Walter follows her to the rice fields, and the four characters become involved in a complex plot involving robbery, love, and murder.

This is the sad story of several desperate ladies incarcerated somewhere in Italy in a camp for displaced women after the end of World War II. Among them, Anna, a Yugoslav, who has seen her husband killed in Trieste by political enemies. She is pregnant and her one and only aim right now is her baby to be born. Janka, a beautiful Polish girl who has lost her mind, is reunited with the physician who sent her to a brothel for Nazi officers. As for Yvonne, a light-hearted French woman, she is prepared to do anything to leave the place, including to marry out with an Albanese ice cream man, despite his unappetizing looks. At least,she will stop being a woman without a name.

At 18, the beautiful and intelligent Kira comes to Petersburg as the Communists consolidate power. She rebuffs a cousin who rises in the Party and may remember the slight. She falls in love with Leo, the son of an aristocrat, who gets into political trouble and never gets out.

The title of this Italian melodrama translates to Pact with the Devil. However, His Satanic Majesty does not appear in the film. Rather, this expensively produced period piece is more along the lines of Romeo and Juliet, with young love threatened by warring families. In his first Italian film, Hollywood veteran Eduardo Cianelli goes through his usual villainous paces as the scheming father of the male lead (Jacques Francois). The most fascinating performance is rendered by Umberto Spadaro, as the village idiot, or is he? Patto col Diavolo makes the most of the visual dynamics of Italy's mountainous Calabrian region.

After having been captured in a Crimea during a failed attempt to flee overseas, Leo returns in Petersburg for Kira.