A son is born to a young couple in pre-war Italy. The child opens his eyes for the first time to see his loving mother and suckles at her breast. The father is overwhelmed by jealousy, fearing the infant will take away his wife’s love and cast him into the void. In a grim act, the father abandons the baby in the desert, and the film’s setting shifts to the ancient world of Greece. The child is rescued and raised as the son of King Polybus Ahmed Belhachmi and Queen Merope Alida Valli of Corinth, growing up convinced they are his true parents, and he is named Oedipus Franco Citti.
As he grows, a taunt from a classmate about being a foundling unsettles him, fueling inner torment and troubling dreams. He travels to the Oracle of Delphi to seek the god’s guidance, hoping to learn the truth about his identity. The Oracle’s oracle-like message foreshadows a terrible fate: he is destined to kill his father and wed his mother. He leaves Corinth to avoid fulfillment of the prophecy, wandering the desolate road in a bid to outrun what the gods have in store for him.
On a crossroad, a wagon bearing Laius Luciano Bartoli encounters him. Oedipus, treated as a beggar, clashes with the road’s guard, and in the ensuing confrontation he kills Laius and the wounded soldier, while Laius’s servant escapes to tell the tale. Not long after, he meets roving bands of displaced people fleeing a terror in Thebes, where a Sphinx has plagued the land. Oedipus confronts the creature and, by answering its riddle, pounds the mythic threat into the abyss and is hailed as a savior. He is then made king and marries Jocasta, Silvana Mangano Queen of Thebes, who becomes his wife without the knowledge that she is his birth mother.
A new catastrophe follows: a plague grips Thebes. Oedipus sends Creon Carmelo Bene to consult the Oracle for guidance. Creon returns with news that the city’s suffering can only end if Laius’s killer is brought to justice. Oedipus seeks out Tiresias Julian Beck, the blind prophet, to learn the killer’s identity. Tiresias is reluctant, sensing pain for both the speaker and the listener, but Oedipus pressingly pursues the truth, and suspicions rise that the killer is among those close to him. Jocasta reveals that Laius was slain at the crossroads and that the Oracle had warned of a crime tied to their family; she also notes that the prophecies have not always proven true. The old servant who survived the desert journey is summoned and he confirms the terrible truth.
The revelation total. Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself in a moment of devastating clarity. The film then shifts to modern Italy, where Oedipus and Angelo Ninetto Davoli roam town to town playing the flute, their travels echoing the long, unsettled road of fate. Oedipus returns to the meadow where he first opened his eyes as a child, seeking a quiet end and, somehow, peace.
