Tempesta su Parigi

The second installment in Italian director Riccardo Freda's adaptation of the epic Victor Hugo novel mostly sustains the superb mise en scene as described in my user review of the first part.

A couple of questionable decisions though are made in the script, which typical of Italian cinema was collaborated on by a number of writers: the young firebrand revolutionary Marius is no longer the abandoned scion of a reactionary Royalist but is now the missing son of the Paris chief of police. And the subplot in which Marius's ancestor had his life saved at the Battle of Waterloo (which made up a whole chapter in the original) by the sleazy money grabbing inkeeper Thenardier is eliminated, thus depriving us of the more complicated response Marius has to helping the elderly Valjean when he is surrounded by Thenardier's fellow thugs.

Look closely or you may miss several shots of a young Marcello Mastroianni as one of the student radicals, arrested after their failure at the barricades, and shot by a firing squad. This particular part of the story compared to the first film may have involved some writing by the politically oriented Mario Monicelli.