According to film historian Ettore M. Margadonna, Amleto Palermi (1890-1941) “began in the sentimental comedy, but gradually deepened the tone of his pictures until we find him doing La Peccatrice in which new roots of Italian realism are detectable.” The story concerns a young woman who has suffered years of meaningless jobs and exploitation because she was abandoned by a former lover. In 1940, a young film critic named Michelangelo Antonioni wrote that “for the first time in Italian Cinema an attempt is made to give clear cinematic completeness to a character and consequently to a film, with a fusion that is reciprocally functional of phonic vision and rhythmic values, of a penetrating expressivity.”