The film stars Gary Merrill, Elga Andersen and Georges Rivière.

The film is set in Tuscany in 1912 where retired Judge George Dennison, his wife Claire, and their son Robert arrive at a Villa in Mount Argentario for the summer.

[2] By the late 1950s, director Brunello Rondi was considered a respected and well-known intellectual in Italy.

What really interests me is to grasp with a film set in 1912 the origins of today’s disease within the bourgeoisie, and to portray its degeneration with extreme violence.

But it’s only a pretext, in a story full of hatred set in the last years of the "Belle Époque," when some kind of false euphoria was decomposing, while one could glimpse the first signs of the impending war, the signs of hatred and the strengthening of class struggle.