Arguably Luchino Visconti's best film and certainly the most personal of his historical epics, The Leopard chronicles the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina and his family during the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Based on the acclaimed novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published posthumously in 1958 and subsequently translated into all ...
Based on a novel by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice stars Dirk Bogarde as a German composer who is terrified that he has lost all vestiges of humanity. While visiting Venice, Bogarde falls in love with a beautiful young boy (Bjorn Andresen). The relationship is ruined by Bogarde's obsession with the boy's youth and physical perfection; the composer ...
Luchino Visconti's pseudo-documentary look at the exploitation of Sicilian fishermen was based on Giovanni Verga's 1881 novel I Malavoglia. The townspeople of Aci Trezza, Sicily, portrayed themselves, speaking in their native dialects and fretting about economic hardship for over 160 minutes of screen time. As nobly neorealist as such an endeavor ...
Luchino Visconti's operatic masterpiece tells the story of the Parondis, a poor family from a village in southern Italy who come to Milan seeking a better life. Following the death of her husband, proud Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) picks up stakes and moves to the city with four of her sons: Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max ...
Shy young Marcelo Mastroianni ambles across a bridge one evening, where he meets a strange but alluring girl (Maria Schell) who is awaiting her lover. This chance acquaintance is the first strand in a complex web entrapping Mastroianni in a dreamlike world of flashbacks, flashforwards and false visions. The girl, suspecting that her lover is ...
Luchino Visconti (Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone) was a film director, true, but he was also a nobleman and a grand patron of traditional European culture: opera, art, music, crafts and literature. These interests enliven many of his films, but few have been so inspired as the four-hour epic, Ludwig, about the castle-building "mad king" of ...
Released in the US by 20th Century-Fox, Boccaccio '70 is a compendium of short subjects directed by three of Italy's top filmmakers. Each story is written in the style of the famed Italian essayist Boccaccio, albeit told in contemporary terms. First up is "The Raffle", written by Cesare Zavattini and directed by Vittorio De Sica: Sophia Loren ...
An introverted American professor (Burt Lancaster) has retired to an Italian house, but finds his life interrupted when a decadent family moves upstairs. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide
Often considered one of the first examples of Italian neorealism, Luchino Visconti's first film was this adaptation of James M. Cain's steamy novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which would also be made twice in the U.S., first in 1946 with Lana Turner and John Garfield and then in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. Massimo Girotti ...
In 1969, The Damned (La caduta degli dei) was director Luchino Visconti's most controversial film to date. Set in the 1930s, the film zeroes in on a Krupp-like family of German munition manufacturers. The Essenbeck clan is headed by the Baron (Rene Kolldehoff), but daughter Sophie (Ingrid Thulin) wants her Nazi boyfriend to take over the business. ...
Based on a novel by Gabriele d'Annunzio, The Innocent (L'Innocente) is set amongst the aristocracy of 19th-century Italy. Wealthy Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini) thinks nothing of squiring his mistress (Jennifer O'Neill) in full view of his friends and the public. But when Giannini's cast-off wife (Laura Antonelli) begins an affair with a young ...
Italian director Luchino Visconti dishes up his usual blend of elegance and decadence in Senso. The international cast includes French film star Alida Valli as a Italian countess married to a Venetian nobleman, and English leading man Farley Granger as an Austrian military officer. The two are swept up in the Austrian empire's evacuation of Italy ...
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