Una questione d'onore (1966)
Directed by Luigi Zampa

Film Synopsis

In Sardinia, an ordinary peasant farmer named Efisio Mulas manages to get himself caught up in a fierce vendetta between rival factions that are constantly at each others' throats.  It all begins when Efisio marries his beautiful girlfriend, Domenicangela Piras, who has just been let out of prison after attacking him with a billhook.  Agostino Sanna has decided that his enemy Alvaro Porcu should die, and when his nephew, Don Leandro, refuses to carry out the killing he goes after Procu himelf.  The old man dies in the attempt and Efisio is mistaken for his killer.  To clear himself of this murder, Efisio agrees to hunt down Porcu and Don Leandro and kill them.

In the end, the peasant finds he cannot honour his side of the bargain and so returns to Sardinia, just before Porcu is struck down by an unknown assailant.  Cleared of the charge of murdering Porcu, Efisio is released but on returning to his home village he learns that his wife is pregnant.  Only Efisio knows he was with his wife on the day she conceived the child, and so the villagers are left wondering who the real father is.  Efisio now has a terrible dilemma.  He can either accept paternity of the child, and thereby confess he was in the village when Porcu was murdered, or else he can face being treated as a social outcast for the rest of his life.  It seems that the only way out is for him to murder the blameless Domenicangela...