(1957, b/w; The Cry, Italian) Having lived with Aldo (Steve Cochran), a mechanic at the refinery in a rural Italian village, for seven years while her husband had been working in Sidney, Australia, Irma (Alida Valli) receives word of her spouse's death. When Aldo says they can now get married, Irma declares that she's changed: "just let me go … to someone else."

She won't tell him who - "It's something I can't control" - or that her new lover is a younger man. Having wasted so many years of his life, Aldo refuses to look at things objectively, as his mother points out that Irma's husband might have returned instead of died. Failing in his own attempts at convincing Irma to stay - they have a young daughter Rosina - in anger and frustration he repeatedly strikes her in public.

In classical literature a tragedy is the result of a great fall due to obstinacy. He departs town with Rosina, stopping at the home of his friend Elvia (Betsy Blair) and her younger sister Edera (Gabriella Pallotta). Elvia has been turning away suitors in hopes of eventually winning over Aldo, but after a dance at which Elvia tells Aldo of Irma's bringing his valise with clothes and expresses her blighted hope of long held expectation followed by inebriated Edera's embracing and kissing him, he once again takes to the road with Rosina.

Getting a lift on a tanker truck, father and daughter get off at a petrol station where they become acquainted with Virginia (Dorian Gray), a widow, and her incorrigibly drunk father. Aldo decides to stay on with the buxom owner of the filling station. After she has her father moved into an old-age home, she says to Aldo of Rosina: "We must put her some place too."

Aldo sends Rosina on a bus back to Irma before continuing his odyssey, getting a job with a dredging crew where he meets the very pretty but troubled Andreina (Lynn Shaw), living in a nearby shack. Hungry and fed up (discarding the idea of going to Venezuela) he backtracks until he returns to his hometown and an ambiguous ending.

Alienation imbued with enigmatic emotions and tragic consequences is director Michelangelo Antonioni's theme (co-written with Elio Bartolini and Ennio De Concini): Aldo, unable to forget the years with Irma, repeatedly refuses the many opportunities of leading a satisfactory life with any of the various attractive women who offer themselves to him.

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