Isolated. Initially this might amaze, Freda is, and above all was, isolated in the country where directors fought the hardest, precisely against isolation. They fought to come together around common notions, around what is called neo-realism. But it is precisely this movement, for its very substance (decidedly more verbal than creative), which definitively set aside all those who did not openly show a connection with it. In reality, I know few filmmakers, besides Freda, who at a certain time in their career did not have something to do with the doctrine, to a greater or lesser degree. We must obviously keep in mind that, curiously enough for a movement of its kind (neo), the number of filmmakers who claim to have prepared for or invented it, is distinctly higher than the number of filmmakers who acknowledge to have followed it. Then the trend changed: neo mythologism arrived. The fate of Italian cinema in general, in some way caught up to Freda; and it is within the vast legions of his imitators that we must now ask that he be recognized. […] This cinema is naturally spectacular: all human relations are resolved in terms of space. Separations, alliances, lacerations, groupings, betrayals, escapes, adherences, conversions, these are the substance of his direction; and this is his application: everything must become readable, firstly deep in the heart, within an option based on defending a value, and above all on the same grounds as the struggle in which the action finally expresses itself, coming forth and freeing itself from expectations, from preparations, from its own cloudy, choleric, and melancholic motivations. Dragged along for kilometers, finally taken from the sheath, the shiny blade might come in handy. Emotion is thus not absent, but real and tenfold.

Jacques Lacassin, in «Présence du cinéma», n. 17, Spring 1963