Count Anikoff, a Russian officer, challenges his best friend, Sergei, to a duel when he finds him courting the young woman he, too, is in love with. Sergei can't bring himself to kill his friend. He fires only after taking the bullet out of his pistol. Now, it is the Count's turn to fire...
In a run-down South American town, four men are paid to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin into the jungle through to the oil field. Friendships are tested and rivalries develop as they embark upon the perilous journey.
A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
A wealthy, possessive husband's investigation reignites his young wife's past love, leading them to plot against him. As obstacles fall away, their passion faces a new test.
In the tenth year of the Trojan War, tensions between Achilles and Agamemnon divide the Greek camp while giving hope to the Trojans.
Evelyne, the young wife of Judge Bertal, falls in love with Remy, who lives in Paris, on holiday in Italy. After following him in the lovers city, she realises Remy is whom she really loves, and decides to return home to inform her husband – but her plane crashes.
Story of a student in the town of Trieste, shaken up by the economic crisis.
After his father is killed in a plane crash, Bart Cordell returns back home to France to claim his inheritance: to lead the industrial empire his father built. But when a prostitute tries to set him up for a drug smuggling charge, he is forced to accept that his father may have been assassinated and that the killers are out to get him as well...
Silvio refuses to fight for the fascists and joins the resistance with Elena. After the war, his vitriolic newspaper articles cause him to be sentenced to imprisonment.
A young man comes back to his hometown to be confronted with a bourgeois obnoxious family who has always despised his - now dead - parents because they were music hall artists, "entertainers". But because he's the sole legatee of an uncle's fortune, his relatives become friendly with him... at least for a while.
The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.
Centuries ago in the Orient, the fiscal exactions on the people lead to a revolt against the usurper of the throne, and the empowerment of a new leader.
The life of Saint Benedict, the founder of Western Monasticism.
Italian version of 'Princess Tarakanova'. A film about the story of princess Élisabeth Tarakanova.
Biblical figure Jacob is forced to flee for his life when an enraged Esau vows to kill him.
The last days of Napoleon on the island of Saint Helena.
Luisa's dreams of love comes true in a hotel in the mountains.
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.
The ordeal of Françoise who, deceived by her husband, sees her dying child. After a few events in the backdrop of a festival, the husband returns, she pushes him away, driving him to suicide. Another man she thinks she loves is already married.
A biopic of soprano Maria Malibran (1808–1836). A beautiful singer, Maria Malibran, is forced to turn to the stage after her husband takes to gambling, and goes to Paris where she falls in love with a famous violinist. When her money-seeking husband reappears, the couple go to London, where they find happiness. A composer falls in love with Maria but when his affections are unrequited, he becomes broken, takes to drinking and dies.
Daniele Orsenigo, a young Venetian fighting for the unification of Italy, has an important message to deliver to the Carboneria of Parma.
Unlike most Italian films of the 1940s, Augusto Genina's Cielo Sulla Palude opened in Venice rather than Rome. The film's American title was Heaven Over the Marshes, and indeed most of the story is set in the disease-ridden Pontine Marshes on the outskirts of Rome. This was the home of Maria Goretti, a pious young girl who was murdered by her would-be seducer. For reasons elucidated in the course of the film, Maria's short time on earth made her worthy of Sainthood, which was actually bestowed upon her shortly after the release of this film. Maria Goretti is well-played by Ines Orsini. Cielo Sulla Palude served as the comeback feature for director Augusto Genina, whose previous pro-fascist films had caused him to be blacklisted after WW II.
Naples, 1880. Two young sisters from a noble family, after losing their parents, get taken in by a friend of their family.
Franco, a young man of noble descent, marries Luisa, daughter of a humble clerk, against his grandmother's will.
It explores the tragic events leading up to the murder of 21-year-old Willy Monteiro Duarte, highlighting the intertwining of chance encounters, rivalries, and latent tensions.
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Geremia, an aging tailor/money lender, is a repulsive, mean, stingy man who lives alone in his shabby house with his scornful, bedridden mother. He has a morbid, obsessive relationship with money and he uses it to insinuate himself into other people's affairs, pretending to be the "family friend". One day he is asked by a man to lend him money for the wedding of Rosalba, his daughter. Geremia falls in love at first sight with the bewitching creature and and soon indulges in a "beauty and the beast" relationship...
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In a run-down South American town, four men are paid to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin into the jungle through to the oil field. Friendships are tested and rivalries develop as they embark upon the perilous journey.
Shares a lead actor
The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a cyclist is hit off the road by a jeep in the night before Christmas Eve.
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Two law school friends find themselves at odds when one becomes a Justice Department lawyer and the other goes into politics.
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At the end of World War II, shallow, self-centered Mara is the prettiest girl in her small Italian village; Bebo is a Communist partisan who is finding it difficult to adjust to the dull banalities of life in peacetime. When Mara’s father, a passionate Communist, declares that his daughter will marry the returning hero, her reactions range from joy to bitter resentment.
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Carlo and Elisa are a successful couple. He’s a university professor and writer facing a creative block; she’s a brilliant, sharp-witted journalist, known for her internationally published editorials. They live in Rome, moving between accomplishments and routine, affection and something that might be fading. In search of new energy, they travel to Morocco with their lifelong friends, Anna and Paolo, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Vittoria—bright, curious, a little eccentric. Tensions soon rise.
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A sweeping drama set in the chaotic aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, where the life of top UN diplomat Brazilian Sérgio Vieira de Mello hangs in the balance during the most treacherous mission of his career.
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A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
Shares a lead actor
A man decides to cook for himself and finds a revolver (which may have belonged to John Dillinger) hidden in his kitchen.
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Marcello, a shy tenor, is afraid of singing in public. Two friends of his think of having an elegant youth on the stage pretending to be singing while Marcello dubs him behind the scenes. The scam is successful but after a while Marcello summons the courage to go on stage himself.
A documentary on the history of Italy's peplum genre.
An Italian fur merchant who is going to Sweden for the first time to attend the annual fur auctions in Stockholm.
The Honourable Mario Agosti, incorruptible politician, has a twin brother, Filippo, hedonist and swindler, the true black sheep of the family. Posing as the illustrious brother, Filippo comes into contact with the world of politics and finance, and is not slow to profit from the powerful characters whom he gets to know. Mario will have to serve the paradoxical consequences.
Gerardo, an aspiring actor, trying unsuccessfully to cross over from comedy to tragedy, is involved, due to his ability to mimic dialects of Italy, in a scam concocted by Lallo against a rich cloth-merchant.
Out of love for an actress, Isabelle, the Baron de Sigognac joins a traveling troupe en route to Paris. When an actor dies, he takes over his role: that of Captain Fracasse.
A comedy of errors about marriage and infidelity.
Two partners return from the war to find their coffee plantation in the hands of an unscrupulous overseer. One is attracted to an exotic native girl that the overseer has at the plantation.
La Contessa di Parma was the sole directorial contribution by Allesandro Blasetti in 1937. The first of several expensive costume dramas upon which the director established his international reputation, the film stars Elisa Cegani as Marcella, a model in the dress shop owned by enterprising Umberto Melnati. To improve his business, the owner instructs his models to dress up as society ladies and attend all the best parties. And that's how humble little Marcella comes to be mistaken for the popular Duchess of Parma -- and by extension, how our heroine wins the love of football hero Gino Vanni (Antonio Centa). A little wanting in the way of plot or logic, La Constessa di Parma is at least consistently good to look at.
Eve is to marry Jacques, the son of a general. But the general does not want a fatherless girl as a daughter-in-law. To remedy the problem Eve, who is the resourceful kind, sets about finding herself a father. She finds one in the person of a charming forty-five- year-old man. The brooding fiancé remains reluctant though and Eve is about to get engaged with her pseudo father when the latter suddenly remembers that he is ...Eve's real father!
Based on a Pirandello play, Vittori De Sica plays a wealthy young social lion who has to constantly fight off a horde of women who are eager to marry him because of his position and money. He weds Elisa Cegani, a servant girl, who turns out to be a more appealing wife than any of the others could have been. Assis Noris decorates the screen well as one of the chasers and pursuers. In 1937, De Sica and Noris made a film, "II Signor Max," which, other than the setting and character role names, basically has the same plot as this film.
Adventures of two provincial actors looking for anyway done with something to eat. They are joined by a girl, Lili. They represent a magic number, but all I get are miscues and boos.
A woman becomes convinced that her husband is an infamous wife-killer intent on adding her to his list of victims.
Gianni is a poor, young newspaper salesman in Rome. However, during his vacations he poses as Count Max Varaldo, an aristocrat. Once, on a cruise in Naples, he meets Donna Paola, a wealthy snob, and her shy maid Lauretta. After trying to establish a relationship with Donna Paola, Gianni, disappointed, decides to drop his alter ego Max and propose to Lauretta. However, she now believes that he is a Count, which leads to a series of comic misunderstandings.
An electronic engineer is called by the Hungarian Television Directorate to test the new television installations. He arrives in the capital, Budapest, together with his girlfriend.
A wealthy widow becomes infatuated with an adventurer posing as a poet and, forgetting her responsibilities as a mother and her no longer young age, falls prey to a love frenzy in her family that puts her at odds with her daughter, who has just left boarding school, and her own brother, who is all about scientific research. The girl, who has learned of the alleged poet's less-than-honest intentions, tries every means to drive him away and restore her mother's sentimental balance. For this she pretends to be in love with him who, attracted by her youth and rich dowry, proposes that she elope.
Former batsman Carlo Mezzetti, who has been left homeless with his daughter Annuccia, takes advantage of favorable situations and legal loopholes to find temporary accommodation, illegally occupying vacant houses.
