A modest Neapolitan man meets a young woman with excessive hairiness. He exhibits her at fairs and marries her. It is after marriage that he receives a tempting offer from a French manager.
An old woman's poignant reminiscence of her youth in a convent school, the happy moments and the sad, and her tragic love for a Garibaldian.
Tapioca, a small-time thief, hides out in an elegant apartment, where he is soon joined by Cascarilla, one of his apprentices who has become better than his master. When the owners arrive home, the latter offers the wife a bunch of love letters she has written to various lovers for ten million.
The Queen of Sheba falls in love with the King of Israel. The King of Israel, however, is in love with someone else.
While Rodolfo tries to become a lyric singer, his lifestyle deeply annoys his father-in-law.
The owner of a cheese factory fears communists and mistakes a meek youth who works for him for one of them. He invites him to his house to win his confidence and the youth falls in love with his daughter.
The young and poor Pietro Haguet accepts a job offer from the rich Marion, who wants to free herself from the suffocating presence of so many suitors, evidently interested only in her assets. Pietro's job therefore consists in posing as her boyfriend. Then things change and the two fake boyfriends discover that they are really in love with each other.
Old fashioned opera adaptation: A feisty and free spirited woman of the Tyrol withdraws to a mountain peak when she is separated from the man she loves. When he later attempts to rejoin her, disaster results.
An acid portrait of Italian youth at the time, I DELFINI follows a dreary season of discontent and viciousness in the lives of a thoroughly unpleasant group of mostly rich youngsters in a small Adriatic coast city.
The singer Cécile Hervey celebrates great achievements, while her sister Elda lives quietly with her aunt Claire on land. Elda is engaged to neighbor Bruno Leveson, but is irresistibly attracted by his brother Raoul, which she will marry. Raoul cheats on her, even before the marriage, with her sister Cecile.
The Turin noblewoman Maria Clotilde di Bard, the sole and elderly heir to an ancient Savoyard title, is reduced to living in the attics of the palace due to the embezzlement of a dishonest administrator. The young lady, who has always been alone due to a great love that never led to marriage with Baron Nigra, befriends the daughter of the palace owner, who tells her about her love for an aeronautical engineer: an unhappy love, because her father is against it. Maria Clotilde discovers that the young man is her brother's illegitimate son, taken away at an early age and never recognized, and therefore the sole heir to the Bard name. The shady administrator also ruins the new owners, who find themselves penniless. But in a trunk kept by the damsel there is years of correspondence between her and Baron Nigra, whose immense historical value restores the Bard family to its former glory and thus allows for a happy ending with the marriage of the two young people.
A story of the Second Punic Wars, beginning with Scipio's futile pleas to the Roman Senate to build an army to battle Hannibal, that climaxes with the battle of Zama.
Called to perform at the Scala, a young baritone begins a transatlantic romance with a famous pianist. The singer, having been skewered by a critic after his last performance in Milan, attempts to find a way to win over the audience and the critics, while wooing his love interest.
Gaby is expelled from school after a married teacher commits suicide after telling her he can't live without her. Though she has done nothing, she is punished for his act.
A comedy about a hobo and a millionaire who swap roles after the millionaire rescues the hobo from a suicide attempt.
To secure her fortune with Monsieur Vaudieu de la Tour, the Machiavellian Claudia kills her lover's elder brother and steals his child. The boy is adopted by a coachman, and later, as secretary to the Minister of Justice, discovers the truth, punishes the bad guys, rewards the good ones and marries the daughter of another innocent man, unjustly accused by Claudia.
Anna, a rich lady, decides to finance in great secrecy a singular enterprise: the founding of a real center for the creation of ideas, directed by Mario Morelli, a poet and songwriter perpetually waiting for great success, and a painter, Enrico Bovio, who cannot find the inspiration or the model for a portrait of a woman he wants to finish. Both are short of money and, convinced of the brilliance of their ideas, wish to open that bizarre business, called precisely the "Bazaar of Ideas".
Two siblings lose their parents amidst turmoil in revolutionary France and are adopted by a peasant family. Once grown up, the older brother enlists in the Napoleonic Wars.
Martha Eggerth heads the cast of Casta Diva, but the central character is famed Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini, here played by American actor Phillips Holmes. Paying but scant attention the facts, the film concentrates on Bellini's colorful love life. Evidently the film went through several rewriting processes, as witness the curious performances of Donald Calthrop and Arthur Margetson, whose characters do complete about-faces halfway through the story. Amidst so many British accents, Martha Eggerth's Polish intonations seem out of place, but she photographs beautifully and sings quite well. Casta Diva was attractively filmed on location in Naples. Not to be confused with the 1954 remake (by Gallone himself) or to the English language version "The Divine Spark" (also directed by Gallone and starred by Eggerth).
The great Italian opera composer recalls his eventful life on his deathbed: his childhood in Busseto, his studies in Milan, his first opera "Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio", the death of his wife and his children killed by smallpox.
Five young men dream of success as they drift lazily through life in a small Italian village. Fausto, the group's leader, is a womanizer; Riccardo craves fame; Alberto is a hopeless dreamer; Moraldo fantasizes about life in the city; and Leopoldo is an aspiring playwright. As Fausto chases a string of women, to the horror of his pregnant wife, the other four blunder their way from one uneventful experience to the next.
This adaptation of Stendhal's timeless masterpiece of French literature tells the tale of Fabrice Del Dongo (Grard Philipe) a young archibishop who gives his heart and soul to romance rather than to the Church creating upheaval in the lives of evergone around him the Countess of Sanseverine (Maria Casares) is but one of the may women who love him. In turn she incurs jealous retributions from those in high places who desire her. For his crimes Fabrice is thrown in Prison where from Crimes Fabrice is thrown in prison where form his lonely window he falls in love with his jailer s daughter and plans a daring escape she however calls his plan insane and takes a vow to the Virgin Mary to never see him again ever if his escape succeeds the Charterhouse of Parma explodes with conflicting desires man s desire form God vs. his desire for romance.
Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto is a 1941 Italian historical drama film directed by Goffredo Alessandrini and starring Amedeo Nazzari, Clara Calamai and Lamberto Picasso. Nazzari portrays the painter Caravaggio as a wayward genius. It was one of his favourite screen roles.
In post war Italy during the fifties it is very difficult to find a house to rent and a family ends up living in a former brothel.
Maria, a prostitute, meets Cesare in a police station, a drunkard reporter. Cesare falls in love with her and wants to save her from her bleak life but the girl refuses any help.
1017 AD. The Republic of Pisa is organizing a fleet to drive out the Saracens who are infesting the Mediterranean. While the forces are away "The Gorgon," the young daughter of a Pisan nobleman who has been heroically killed, comes to be solemnly invested as the figurehead virgin who will maintain a lantern to celebrate the men's victorious return. In charge of the home guard is an ambitious young Florentine who feels deprived of the forthcoming honour and glory, and who seeks revenge by violating the sacred person of the virgin. He gains access to her well guarded quarters, but when the Gorgon falls helplessly in love with him, his desire for vengeance falls away. His plot exposed, he commits suicide rather than invoke the wrath of the Pisans. The Gorgon too takes her life by throwing herself from a high tower. Meanwhile, the victorious Pisan vessels return.
A story, set in Rome of 44 A.D., concerning the amorous and political intrigues of the evil Empress Messalina, the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and her eventual hounding to death.
Young Rosalia marries the painter Corrado Palmieri, but gets disowned by her family, opposed to the marriage. Then during a fight, Corrado kills his brother in law and is sentenced to a life sentence.
Italian filmmaker Carmine Gallone was still in his "operetta" mode when he helmed 1938's Il Sogno di Butterfly (Dream of the Butterfly) Maria Cebotari plays opera diva Rosa Belloni, currently starring in a production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The plot thickens when Rosa's backstage life begins to mirror the travails of the character she is portraying. The climax comes when Harry Peters (Fosco Giachetti), the American father of Rosa's illegitimate child, returns after four years with his new wife in tow, leading inexorably to a doleful ending both on- and offstage. Critics complained about the substandard photography in Il Sogno di Butterfly, but this might have been due to poor laboratory work.
A playwright, a troop of actors, a director, and the playwright's uncle scheme against each other for their own interests regarding the success or failure of the play
A forty-year-old employee marries a seemingly quiet girl who turns into a mantis after the wedding.
A singer saves a heavy alcoholic journalist. Fate has a new meeting for them: the two are found in a police station where she was brought with the accusation of prostitution.
In his first collaboration with renowned screenwriter and longtime partner Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child. Heralding the pair’s subsequent work on some of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism, The Children Are Watching Us is a vivid, deeply humane portrait of a family’s disintegration.
A young girl learns that she is the daughter of an executed politician and conspires to avenge her father's memory.
A young engineer with ambitious plans tries and fails to get support from his traditional industrialist father. Only when the industrialist's son is injured in an unsuccessful experiment does the father change his mind.
An Italian film from 1939.