Violent Summer has a perfectly realized scene almost mid-way through the film. During an air raid blackout, Trintignant has invited his friends to his house. Searching for music to dance to, one of the guys finds a copy of the American pop song, Temptation by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown. The men and woman form couples, with Trintignant dancing with an insistant Jacqueline Sassard. Drago is dancing with one of Trintignant's friends. Zurlini cuts between the two would-be lovers glancing helplessly at each other, each in the arms of someone else, while the soundtrack underlines their mutual frustration in maintaining something other than a socially correct relationship.

A dance scene is also significant in Girl with a Suitcase. A 16 year old boy from a well-to-do family, Lorenzo, tries to make up for his older brother's mistreatment of a young, itinerant night club performer, Aida. Lorenzo follows Aida, who with a couple of other young women are entertaining three older, professional men. Lorenzo watches the three mature men dancing with their much younger partners. I cannot identify by composer or song title, but the musical themes virtually anticipate what would be heard in a few years in spaghetti westerns. Again, Zurlini films people dancing with music used as a form of counterpoint to emphasize the tension between characters.

Zurlini two films here share a similar visual style. Most of the shots are of two or more people, with characters reacting to each other while sharing the same screen space. Violent Summer has two exceptionally composed scenes, one with Trintignant seen just outside the room overhearing Drago and her mother meeting with a sailor who served with Drago's husband. A later scene following the dance shows Trintignant and Drago kissing with the camera pulling back to show Sassard off to the side, witnessing the lovers. Zurlini rarely cuts between characters, choosing medium and full shots, with the camera tracking in, out and around his players.

Girl with a Suitcase is the better known film. This is mostly due to the stardom of Claudia Cardinale, baby-fat cute at the time, but not quite the beauty she would be in 1963, the year of Eight and a Half, The Leopard and The Pink Panther. (I am hoping that year's Bebo's Girl by Luigi Comencini gets rediscovered.) For me, Violent Summer was the revelation. It was unfortunate that the film was originally released in the U.S. following the one-two punch of La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura, which could not have helped Zurlini establish even a toehold with even the most serious film critics. Both DVDs come with discussions about Zurlini from several professional associates adding some knowledge to Zurlini's working methods and unrealized projects. NoShame's films are pristine, a point reinforced by a brief supplement comparing the opening scene of Girl with a Suitcase in a previous DVD version with NoShame's complete, Italian language version. As the set subtitle is "the early masterpieces", along with their previous release of Desert of the Tarters, I hope this means NoShame will be releasing other Zurlini films in the near future.