Critics reviews

Most critics consider the British story to be the strongest. Certainly, it is the most coherent. Still, the Italian sequence is recognizably Antonioniesque, particularly in the Venice cut Raro includes as an extra. The protagonist's mental state in the aftermath of his crime (planting a bomb in a factory) is made manifest in his aimless trek through Rome. The sequence demonstrates Antonioni's sensitivity to landscape and skillful use of the objective correlative.

The finished product, compromised upon release by conservative producers and distributors who would force the director to re-edit a significant portion of the film, isn't in any form one of Antonioni's benchmark accomplishments. What it is, however, is a fascinating snapshot of a young filmmaker figuring out his political and aesthetic ideologies on screen, and an early example of contemporary omnibus storytelling which has since proven both profitable and popular.

For the Italian episode, about a teen-age cigarette smuggler, he composed audaciously sculptural images of new modern architecture to infuse the world of technological rationalism with an amoral chill. The insolent wit of the French episode—based on a notorious true story—reflects Antonioni's collaboration with the flamboyant young right-wing novelist Roger Nimier.

The objective is journalistic, the new "burnt-out generation" and its obsession with "violence as personal triumph," Michelangelo Antonioni's blade-sharp compositions chronicle the war's amoral fallout in three different countries.