The title of this Italian melodrama translates to Pact with the Devil. However, His Satanic Majesty does not appear in the film. Rather, this expensively produced period piece is more along the lines of Romeo and Juliet, with young love threatened by warring families. In his first Italian film,...
Based on a real-life mystery in the newspapers after World War I, this conventional, straightforward story is about a poorly-dressed man who is brought into the police station in Turin for stealing flower pots from the cemetery. He is rather brutally interrogated, and then because he has no idea...
Naples 1821. Alphonse, a young poet belonging to a noble French family, is caught by a storm at sea. Fortunately the boat manage to reach the shores of Procida, where Alphonse is welcomed by the family of Andrea. Here he meets the beautiful Graziella.
A widowed, baptized Catholic half-Jewish woman in Rome is raped by a young German soldier in early 1941. She becomes pregnant and gives birth to a boy who grows up alongside his 16-year-old half-brother, who is enthusiastic about Mussolini's fascist ideas. A film adaptation of a novel that...
A wealthy and self-serving man, sets out on a perilous ocean voyage with his son. An unexpected incident with the vessel causes him to reflect on his not so perfect life.
A thief caught red-handed tells the landlord a very strange fact that happened to him looking through the keyhole of another apartment where he was stealing.
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...
After shooting to fame with Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960), actor Marcello Mastroianni (1924-1996) starred in more than 160 films in his nearly half-a-century career. Directors Mario Canale and Annarosa Morri look into the melancholic charm of one of the most famous Italian actors...
After dying in a car accident, wealthy shoe industrialist Carlo Bacchi finds himself in the afterlife, where he is condemned to hell for having committed evil while alive. Defending himself against the accusation in an impassioned plea, however, he succeeds in obtaining to return to earth for a few...
During the reign of King Alboin, the peasant Bertoldo, sly and smart, manages to always get away with pranks and pleasantires with great mastery, and, even if his clumsy wife Marcolfa and their foolish son Bertoldino always put him in trouble, his shrewdness and acumen save him from any...
On his way to Africa, Don Pietro, a young missionary priest has his suitcase stolen in the station of Naples. While trying to retrieve his baggage he realizes how miserable the city of Naples is. Then he decides that his mission is there in Naples, He creates his 'The Boys' Town' a shelter for poor...
The Cheerful Squadron is a 1954 Italian war-comedy film directed by Paolo Moffa and Interpreted by movie stars like Paolo Stoppa, Vittorio De Sica, Alberto Sordi and Silvana Pampanini. Based on the military environment novel The Allegro Squadron by Georges Courteline (1886), this film presents a...
Louise of Habsburg-Lorraine, young and beautiful wife of the Crown Prince of Saxony, manifests democratic sentiments that make her pleasing to the people, but not to the court. In 1902 old King George would like to have her committed to an asylum, but she escapes to Florence where she meets and...
