Freely excerpted from Wikipedia:
In 1503, the French and the Spanish fight over the region surrounding the Sicilian castle of Morreale. Giovanna, the beautiful castellan, yearns to free herself from the foreign yoke and for this she wants to marry a brave knight. Graiano d’Asti deceives her by letting Ettore Fieramosca fight in his place and then bragging with Giovanna about the feat, thus managing to convince her to marry him.Read More »
PLOT:
Maria and Paolo are in love, but they are very young, and most importantly Maria is the daughter of the municipal sweeper while Paolo is the son of lawyer Bonelli, deputy mayor and leader of the opposition.
To complicate matters there is the reconstruction of a hospice destroyed during the war. The reconstruction would obstruct the panorama enjoyable from the villa of Paseroni, big industrialist and political wheeler-dealer.
Bonelli, great speaker, becomes mayor for the death of his predecessor, and gets bribed by Paseroni, while refusing the love of Paolo and Maria for the social differences, and because Paolo should go after Paseroni’s daughter.
At this point, Paolo and Maria flee to kill themselves, just as Bonelli is about to give a speech on the radio for the inauguration of the villa of Paseroni…Read More »
Synopsis:
In the thirties, during the Fascist Dictatorship, an insurance broker, Omero Battifiori, reaches a small country town from Rome seeking for new customers. The main authorities, expecting an incognito inspection from the Fascist Party of the capital, suspect him to be the inspector and a very important member of the Party. The misunderstanding leads to a number of equivocals until Omero reveals his identity.Read More »
The third feature film by cinema master Michelangelo Antonioni, La signora senza camelie [The Lady Without Camelias], expanded the expressive palette of contemporary Italian movies, demonstrating that a personal vision could take an explicitly poetic tack; that “seriousness = neo-realism” was perhaps already turning into something of a truism; and that Antonioni would answer to no-one but himself.Read More »
Plot summary :
In a village of the Po valley where the earth is hard and life miserly, the priest and the communist mayor are always fighting to be the head of the community. If in secret, they admired and liked each other, politics still divided them as it is dividing the country. And when the mayor wants his “People’s House”; the priest wants his “Garden City” for the poor. Division exist between the richest and the poorest, the pious and the atheists and even between lovers. But if the people are hard as the country, they are good in the bottom of there heart.Read More »
Quote:
Aldebaran is in some places erroneously reported as a “lost” film, but here it is! After
a couple of projects had either been postponed or fallen through for Blasetti, it was
suggested that he should make a film about the navy in peacetime. The result is this
strange film, which at the outset plays like a propaganda piece for the might of the Italian
navy, only to veer off into high melodrama, as it zeroes in on Commander Corrado Valeri
(Gino Cervi), and his conflict between duty and the jealousy of his wife. There are comedic
asides, a visit to a North African club, affording Blasetti to contribute the first scenes of
nudity in Italian film, and there are moments of heroics, including a mission to rescue the
doomed crew of a wrecked submarine. As if all of that was not more than enough, the film
features a star studded cast including Evi Maltagliati, Gianfranco Giachetti, Doris Duranti,
Elisa Cegani (in her debut), and even a brief cameo by Blasetti himself.Read More »
Alessandro Manzoni’s book I Promessi Sposi from 1823 seems to be one of the best kept secrets of the whole Italian literature. While by many considered to be the greatest novel ever written in the Italian language, it doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong reputation abroad. I first heard about it from an Italian friend during a long night of Totò films and beer some months ago, but when doing some googling after watching Camerini’s film during a train trip yesterday, I realized that I actually have a Norwegian translation myself, bought some years back when I spent most of my time going to book sales in Oslo and filling up my parents’ attic with everything I came across.Read More »