Four Ways Out (La Città Si Difende) 1951 ITA SUB ENG 1080p BluRay...

Year: 1951
Country: Italy
Director: Pietro Germi
Cast: Renato Baldini, Cosetta Greco, Paul Muller, Fausto Tozzi
IMDB: Link

Language : Italian
Subtitles : English





Although it won the Award for Best Italian Film at the 12th Venice Film Festival, *La città si difende* (1951) was not generally well-received by Italian critics, either at the festival or upon its theatrical release. The magazine *La Rivista del cinematografo* succinctly identified its main flaw as its “almost complete lack of inspiration” and concluded that it was a film “on which one would do well not to dwell and for which, even from a moral standpoint, a positive judgment cannot be given.” Even on the left, the reviews were not positive, and Germi himself did not consider it one of his most successful films.

Certainly, these assessments contributed to the film’s gradual descent into obscurity, thereby also overshadowing that reworking of the noir genre through national models that Italian cinema had begun to undertake as early as the 1950s—and not only with the subsequent *Un maledetto imbroglio* (1959), also directed by Germi, which is usually honored with the title of “the first Italian crime film.”

This reworking—which, in response to accusations of a lack of inspiration leveled at the director—was explicitly highlighted by Angelo Solmi in *Oggi* in one of the few positive reviews of *La città si difende*, described as “an original attempt, rooted in the Italian tradition of realism, and not a mere copy of transatlantic models”: “the characters […] are truly crafted to live and die, with their good and bad sides, in the shadow of the buildings in our cities and not the skyscrapers of New York or Chicago.”

The story of four men from different social classes—from the urban working-class immigrant from the countryside to the rebellious young man from the petty bourgeoisie, from the intellectual artist to the fallen nouveau riche—who find themselves facing the consequences of their reckless and improvised robbery of the ticket office at the stadium in Rome, meant that *La città si difende* was immediately linked to *Jungle of Asphalt* (1950).

Because of its title and its shared interest in exploring urban space, some reviewers also compared it to Jules Dassin’s *La città nuda* (1948), which opened with a programmatic declaration to show the city as it truly was. However, while the urban narrative of Dassin’s film centered on the police’s leading role in criminal investigations, Germi seems more interested in revealing the inevitability of the criminals’ capture, whose tragic outcome is determined not so much by police records as by individual fate.

To the opening bird’s-eye view of Manhattan in Dassin’s film—a perspective that, following De Certeau, shows us a dominated and legible city—*La città si difende* significantly contrasts a nighttime street shrouded in fog, a scene that will reappear in the second half of the film during one of the four criminals’ attempt to stow away on a ship bound for Corsica.

Rather than being associated with a perspective of police control, urban space seems to become a force that acts independently of authority, often towering over and oppressing the four men—as in the opening shots inside the stadium, in the scenes filmed in the courtyards of public housing projects, or in the final scene, where domestic security itself is called into question in a literal and metaphorical struggle for survival.

The film’s synopsis, submitted for prior review to the General Directorate of Entertainment, described the big city and its anonymous inhabitants as an organism driven, “by a sort of unconscious intuition, to sift through and expel from its womb the pernicious elements that compromise its balance and that of the society—however slight—in which it operates.” However, it is the city itself—with its illusory promise of prosperity from which the four men are excluded, from restaurants displaying food to signs promising installment plans for home furnishings—that confines the four to the margins, from which they struggle in vain to escape. ( Luca Prono)

[ About file ]

Name: Four Ways Out.Pietro Germi.1951.BluRay.ZiGZAG.mkv
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:59:29 +0200
Size: 8,511,680,756 bytes (8117.371326 MiB)

[ Magic ]

File type: Matroska data
File type: EBML file, creator matroska

[ Generic infos ]

Duration: 01:19:57 (4796.876 s)
Container: matroska
Production date: Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:32:16 +0200
Total tracks: 4
Track nr. 1: video (V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC) {und}
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Muxing library: libebml v1.4.4 + libmatroska v1.7.1
Writing application: mkvmerge v95.0 ('Goodbye Stranger') 64-bit

[ Relevant data ]

Resolution: 1440 x 1080
Width: multiple of 32
Height: multiple of 8
Average DRF: 24.252952
Standard deviation: 2.427312
Std. dev. weighted mean: 2.29359

[ Video track ]

Codec ID: V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Resolution: 1440 x 1080
Frame aspect ratio: 4:3 = 1.333333
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Display aspect ratio: 4:3 = 1.333333
Framerate: 23.976024 fps
Stream size: 8,318,997,452 bytes (7933.614208 MiB)
Duration (bs): 01:19:57 (4796.875378 s)
Bitrate (bs): 13874.02723 kbps
Qf: 0.372082

[ Audio track ]

Codec ID: A_FLAC
Sampling frequency: 48000 Hz
Channels: 1
Sample size: 16-bit

[ Video bitstream ]

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Weighted prediction: P slices - explicit weighted prediction
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P-slices: 20312 ( 17.661 %) ####
B-slices: 94014 ( 81.744 %) ################
I-slices: 684 ( 0.595 %)
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[ DRF analysis ]

average DRF: 24.252952
standard deviation: 2.427312
max DRF: 34

DRF<4: 0 ( 0.000 %)
DRF=4: 27 ( 0.023 %)
DRF=5: 44 ( 0.038 %)
DRF=6: 189 ( 0.164 %)
DRF=7: 192 ( 0.167 %)
DRF=8: 155 ( 0.135 %)
DRF=9: 78 ( 0.068 %)
DRF=10: 120 ( 0.104 %)
DRF=11: 17 ( 0.015 %)
DRF=12: 2 ( 0.002 %)
DRF=13: 5 ( 0.004 %)
DRF=14: 6 ( 0.005 %)
DRF=15: 8 ( 0.007 %)
DRF=16: 24 ( 0.021 %)
DRF=17: 78 ( 0.068 %)
DRF=18: 175 ( 0.152 %)
DRF=19: 422 ( 0.367 %)
DRF=20: 1183 ( 1.029 %)
DRF=21: 3900 ( 3.391 %) #
DRF=22: 10682 ( 9.288 %) ##
DRF=23: 17254 ( 15.002 %) ###
DRF=24: 32671 ( 28.407 %) ######
DRF=25: 22541 ( 19.599 %) ####
DRF=26: 11190 ( 9.730 %) ##
DRF=27: 6191 ( 5.383 %) #
DRF=28: 3830 ( 3.330 %) #
DRF=29: 2155 ( 1.874 %)
DRF=30: 1127 ( 0.980 %)
DRF=31: 510 ( 0.443 %)
DRF=32: 188 ( 0.163 %)
DRF=33: 41 ( 0.036 %)
DRF=34: 5 ( 0.004 %)
DRF>34: 0 ( 0.000 %)

P-slices average DRF: 22.624212
P-slices std. deviation: 2.189665
P-slices max DRF: 31

B-slices average DRF: 24.625269
B-slices std. deviation: 2.317471
B-slices max DRF: 34

I-slices average DRF: 21.445906
I-slices std. deviation: 2.097408
I-slices max DRF: 27

[ Edition entry ]

UID: 18400637553065453611
Hidden: No
Selected by default: Yes
Playlist: No
Chapters:
00:00:00,000-00:07:35,413: Chapter 01 {eng}
00:07:35,413-00:14:57,480: Chapter 02 {eng}
00:14:57,480-00:22:38,482: Chapter 03 {eng}
00:22:38,482-00:32:24,109: Chapter 04 {eng}
00:32:24,109-00:38:36,022: Chapter 05 {eng}
00:38:36,022-00:43:48,835: Chapter 06 {eng}
00:43:48,835-00:54:10,456: Chapter 07 {eng}
00:54:10,456-01:00:52,732: Chapter 08 {eng}
01:00:52,732-01:10:37,692: Chapter 09 {eng}
01:10:37,692-01:19:56,876: Chapter 10 {eng}

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 4-10-2026 22:33:31