The 40 most popular 1950s italian movies, ranked. Click any film for ratings, reviews, trailers, and where to watch.


Ghost Captain
1953 · 1h 30m · IT
A disgraced member of the Spanish Navy must redeem his family's honor after his father betrays his country to the French.


Ulysses
1954 · 1h 40m · IT
A retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, focusing on Ulysses's ten-year journey home to Ithaca following the Trojan War, where he faces various mythical challenges while his wife Penelope fends off suitors.


Sans famille
1958 · 1h 40m · FR
The Remi abandoned by his foster father sold to the troubadour Vasalis, in his living through the rural villages the people to entertain, gehoplen his three dogs and a monkey. In the beginning Remi takes its new master, but a demanding and hard man, and the animals have not been too much with the clumsy boy. But gradually creates a bond between Remi and his new comrades, until their friendship is suddenly disrupted when Vasalis is arrested for vagrancy and sentenced. Then Remi, alone in the world, along with his animal friends in position to try to keep ...


Nights of Cabiria
1957 · 1h 50m · IT
Rome, 1957. A woman, Cabiria, is robbed and left to drown by her boyfriend, Giorgio. Rescued, she resumes her life and tries her best to find happiness in a cynical world. Even when she thinks her struggles are over and she has found happiness and contentment, things may not be what they seem.


Jealousy
1953 · 1h 26m · IT
A Sicilian nobleman is very jealous of his mistress and when she gets married flies off his handle and commits a murder of which an innocent man is accused. He is however tormented by his conscience.


I Vitelloni
1953 · 1h 43m · FR
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.


Peppino, le modelle e... chella llà
1957 · 1h 28m · IT
Young painter Teddy is successful with women but not very clever about selling pictures. He is in love with Elisabetta but cannot marry her because he is penniless. The couple asks for help from Peppino, a retired clerk who often uses Teddy's painting, pretending that they are his so he can impress the women he likes.


Melody of Love
1952 · 1h 36m · IT
A comedy with lots of Neapolitan songs and shots of the Bay of Naples finds Maria Morelli unable to marry her singing sailor/lover, Giacomo because her father, Don Salvatdore Morelli objects. She can't elope because her father has an heart ailment and uses it to hold Maria. Giacomo misunderstands and takes off on a global singing tour.


The Widower
1959 · 1h 27m · IT
Alberto Nardi is a Roman businessman who fancies himself a man of great capabilities, but whose factory teeters perennially on the brink of catastrophe. Alberto is married to a rich and successful businesswoman from Milan, Elvira Almiraghi who has a no-nonsense attitude and barely tolerates the attempts of her husband to keep his factory afloat with her money.


The Hunchback of Notre Dame
1956 · 1h 55m · FR
In 1482 Paris, Frollo, Chief Justice of benevolent King Louis XI, becomes infatuated by the beauty of Esmeralda, a young Romani girl. The hunchback Quasimodo, Frollo's protégé and bell-ringer of Notre Dame, lives in peace among the bells in the heights of the immense cathedral until he's involved by the twisted magistrate in his malicious plans to free himself from Esmeralda's alleged spell, which he believes to be the Devil's work.


Othello
1951 · 1h 33m · IT
Manipulated by his jealous ensign Iago, the Moorish general Othello is driven to believe that his new wife Desdemona is unfaithful, setting in motion a chain of deception, jealousy, and violence that leads to tragedy.


Pentimento
1952 · 1h 30m · IT
A cabaret singer, now a widow, is dethroned and expelled downstairs by a fiery rival.


Vendicata!
1956 · IT
No overview available


The Sixth Continent
1954 · 1h 36m · IT
This 95-minute, full-color documentary was released in the U.S. as Sixth Continent. That continent is Africa -- or, more specifically, the coast of Ethiopia. Director Folco Quillici takes his cameras deep, deep into the waters near the coastal islands of Dalach, observing the passing parade of sea life on an up-close-and-personal basis. Particularly thrilling is a shark attack and its aftermath, with the cinematographers obviously in the thick of things. Gian Caspare Napolitano provides the narration, while the lush, evocative musical score is the handiwork of Roberto Nicolosi.


The Roof
1956 · 1h 37m · IT
Under provincial Italian law at the time, once a roof is erected, the occupants cannot be evicted from a building. This film follows the efforts of a family to erect the roof on a house overnight so that a newlywed couple can have their own home.


Guendalina
1957 · 1h 43m · FR
Wealthy teenager Guendalina is a child of divorce. Oberdan, likewise a teenager, is a boy from a blue-collar family. Escaping from the tribulations of her home life, Guendalina creates a dream world of her own, casting Oberdan as her personal Prince Charming. Despite parental objections, girl and boy fall in love. Interestingly enough, the relationship between Guendalina and Oberdan remains pure and chaste throughout their film, which is more than can be said for their parents. their respective parents behave with marked laciviousness.


Tragico ritorno
1952 · 1h 38m · IT
Marco, returning home to Livorno after having spent eight years in prison, finds his wife Giovanna married to another man, who the son believes is his real father. He decides to commit suicide but then he meets Elisa, who dissuades him and he begins to live with her and her father.


Alina
1950 · 1h 23m · IT
A woman takes her ill husband's place in a smuggling ring and steals the heart of his partner.


Umberto D.
1952 · 1h 31m · IT
When elderly pensioner Umberto Domenico Ferrari returns to his boarding house from a protest calling for a hike in old-age pensions, his landlady demands her 15,000-lire rent by the end of the month or he and his small dog will be turned out onto the street. Unable to get the money in time, Umberto fakes illness to get sent to a hospital, giving his beloved dog to the landlady's pregnant and abandoned maid for temporary safekeeping.


La Luciana
1954 · 1h 22m · IT
A tale of the complicated Neapolitan lives and loves of Maria and Alberto; her smuggling father Don Gennaro and some espionage.


Rivalità
1953
A melodrama supervised by Roberto Rossellini.


Double Cross
1951 · 1h 35m · IT
A businessman is wrongly accused and convicted for the murder of his associate.


Due lacrime
1954 · 1h 28m · IT
Italian made romanic drama.


Lauta mancia
1957
No overview available


White Nights
1957 · 1h 41m · FR
A middle-aged man meets a young woman who is waiting on a canal bridge for her lover's return.


Roman Tales
1955 · 1h 35m · FR
Alvaro is been in jail and so he consider himself the most fit to lead his three friends Mario, Otello and Spartaco. The four young men decide to start a business. They need only a van to start a transport company. But they lack the money. How can they get it?


Forbidden song
1956 · 1h 34m · IT
A married woman is startled by the return of her former fiancé, whom she thought was killed during the war.


Big Deal on Madonna Street
1958 · 1h 46m · IT
Best friends Peppe and Mario are thieves, but they're not very good at it. Still, Peppe thinks that he's finally devised a master heist that will make them rich. With the help of some fellow criminals, he plans to dig a tunnel from a rented apartment to the pawnshop next door, where they can rob the safe. But his plan is far from foolproof, and the fact that no one in the group has any experience digging tunnels proves to be the least of their problems.


Liebe
1956 · 1h 36m · DE
Anna falls madly in love with an Italian violinist, who instead marries her sister Monika.


Goya
1950 · 16m · IT
Presents life in 18th century Spain as the painter Francisco de Goya showed it to us.


Miracle in Milan
1951 · 1h 37m · IT
Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. But when greedy developers threaten the community’s land, Totò will need all the help he can get in order to find an impossible way out.


Il coraggio
1955 · 1h 33m · IT
A wealthy trader saves the life of a poor suicidal man who then decides that his savior has the responsibility of taking care of him and his family.


La Strada
1954 · 1h 55m · IT
When Gelsomina, a naïve young woman, is purchased from her impoverished mother by brutish circus strongman Zampanò to be his wife and partner, she loyally endures her husband's coldness and abuse as they travel the Italian countryside performing together. Soon Zampanò must deal with his jealousy and conflicted feelings about Gelsomina when she finds a kindred spirit in Il Matto, the carefree circus fool, and contemplates leaving Zampanò.


Red Love
1952 · 1h 20m · IT
No overview available


Noi peccatori
1953 · 1h 26m · IT
A man and a woman love each other, but they can’t marry because he’s ashamed of his unjustly incarcerated mother. What’s more, he loses his eyesight in an accident.


Soledad
1959 · 1h 22m · ES
Soledad and Miguel are two young people in a romantic relationship. Don Ramón, a wealthy stranger, arrives in their small town and marries Soledad. Miguel leaves town and wanders aimlessly throughout the region with a peddler.


Hercules
1958 · 1h 39m · IT
In this melange of characters and events from separate mythological stories, Hercules, demigod and superman, arrives in the ancient Greek kingdom of Iolcus to tutor Iphitus, son of king Pelias; immediately on arrival, he falls in love with the king's delectable, briefly clad daughter Iole. Before he can win her, he must succeed in a series of quests, in the course of which he teams up with Jason, true heir of Iolcus, whom he accompanies on the famous voyage of the Argonauts.


Papà Pacifico
1954
After she inherits a huge sum of money, a girl suddenly leaves a working-class man that she previously used to fancy.


Journey to Italy
1954 · 1h 25m · IT
Married for eight years with no children, Brits Katherine and Alex Joyce are driving to Italy, their ultimate destination just outside of Naples to sell the villa they have just inherited from his uncle, the villa where they will be staying during their time there. On the drive, they come to the realization that this trip marks the first time that they have truly been alone together, and as such don't really know one another in the true sense.


Elementary School
1954 · 1h 36m · FR
Dante Trilli, who has been teaching in his village school for about twenty years, wins a competition for Milan. Waiting for him is his childhood friend, where he is the janitor in the school where Trilli will teach.
1950s cinema fought television with everything it had: widescreen formats, colour, and spectacle. Underneath the scale, it was also the decade of Japanese cinema's international breakthrough and the birth of the modern art film.
Italian cinema runs from the neorealists working in bombed-out postwar streets to Fellini's spectacle, the Spaghetti Western, and the lurid giallo thrillers that shaped modern horror. Few national cinemas have exported this many distinct genres.