1950s Italian Movies

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.

Maruzzella is in love with Salvatore, who in turn is infatuated with Donna Carmela, Maruzzella's stepmother. As if that were not enough, Carmela deprives Maruzzella of her inheritance. When Salvatore comes to visit Renato, his old poor and needy schoolmate, the situation takes a strange development.

Paris, 1482. Today is the festival of the fools, taking place like each year in the square outside Cathedral Notre Dame. Among jugglers and other entertainers, Esmeralda, a sensuous gypsy, performs a bewitching dance in front of delighted spectators. From up in a tower of the cathedral, Frollo, an alchemist, gazes at her lustfully. Later in the night, Frollo orders Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer and his faithful servant, to kidnap Esmeralda. But when the ugly freak comes close to her is touched by the young woman's beauty...

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.

Two young hunters of wolves are involved in a conflict. Besides the dangerous wild wolves, beautiful Teresa is the center of attention.

A naive clerk finds himself involved in the theft of a ring containing a dangerous liquid.

Young lovers Orfeu and Eurydice run through the favelas of Rio during Carnaval, on the lam from a hitman dressed like Death and Orfeu's vengeful fiancée Mira and passing between moments of fantasy and stark reality. This impressionistic retelling of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice introduced bossa nova to the world with its soundtrack by young Brazilian composers Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

A disgraced member of the Spanish Navy must redeem his family's honor after his father betrays his country to the French.

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.

A middle-aged man meets a young woman who is waiting on a canal bridge for her lover's return.

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.

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Gina is the daughter of a provincial newsstand dealer and spends her time reading pulp magazines and dreaming of a glamorous vocation on the big city. She enters a beauty contest in a nearby city, without her father's permission, and, en route, meets Franco, a salesman.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A magistrate saves a young woman from drowning and they fall in love.

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.

Having been warned in dreams that Snow White is in danger, the Seven Dwarfs set out to rescue the princess from the evil Prince of Darkness.

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.

Carlo Mastelli, the young radio presenter of "New Voices" has run short of ideas and his program is likely to be suspended from the radio schedule if he does not find any new ones.

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Antonio is the humble servant of a rich family governed by the Marquis Gastone. He is a young man madly in love with Lulu, but she betrays him, and he desperately enlist in the foreign legion.

A bored civil servant accepts an invitation to visit a glamorous young lady. When she doesn't answer the door, then is later found murdered he panics!

Progressive schoolteachers Landi and Anna have a profound influence on two of their young students, Mirella and Franco. The two kids are enamored with one another and decide to experiment with some of the knowledge they've gleaned in the classroom.

A psychiatric-clinic medical director runs some tests on two patients, the Ragionier Antonio Vignanelli and Cavalier Peppino Caprioli, so they must retrieve some memories of family life in order to understand their mental illness.

A woman takes her ill husband's place in a smuggling ring and steals the heart of his partner.

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.

A tale on the Italian upper class of the '60s and their ways to kill time.

This short film is the only cinematographic experience of Alberto Moravia. It shows some typical themes of the writer: the bourgeois setting, the taste for detail, the eros and the violence that scratch indifference.

Francesco, a young doctor, is appointed doctor to the imaginary village of Pianetta in the province of Avellino, but is immediately in competition with Don Antonio, a so-called "healer".

Italy, 1916. Oreste Jacovacci and Giovanni Busacca are called, as all the Italian youths, to serve the army in the WWI. They both try in every way to avoid serving the army.

Set in an unspecified country and an unspecified time period, the film follows a communist intelectual who, after travelling the world for many decades, decides to return and settle down to the place he grew up in, a small coastal village seemingly forgotten by time itself. With him, he brings news of the dawn of a new world on the horizon, with which he wishes to connect with through constructing a modern highway. This news is welcomed in the village, however, the construction of the road begins to bring out violent conflicts, reveals forbidden romances and ends up regressing the community even further into the darkness from which it wanted to escape.

The construction of great temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite, followed by new and high taxes and the arrival of a plague, create discontent in the population, and threatens the love between a sculptor and a slave.

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.

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.

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A 1955 film directed by Giorgio Pastina.