Vittorio De Sica

Carlo and Anne meet in Paris and fall in love. She becomes pregnant, but he is resistant to fatherhood.Read More »

An old woman’s poignant reminiscence of her youth in a convent school: the happy moments, the sad ones and the tragic love for a Garibaldian.Read More »

In this 1980 documentary, originally in three parts but presented here in its entirety, Vittorio De Seta presents the drama of the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the great Asian metropolis.Read More »

Plot Synopsis from allmovie.com
Doctor Beware was the U.S.-released title of Vittorio DeSica’s 1941 effort Teresa Venerdi. DeSica not only directed, but played the leading role of orphanage official Dr. Vignali. The thinnish storyline finds the good doctor becoming romantically involved with three women. It is up to orphaned girl Teresa Venerdi (Adriana Benedetti) to untangle all the plot lines–and, as a bonus, to come to the financial rescue of the improvident Vignali. When the film was released to the U.S. in 1951, supporting actress Anna Magnani, cast in a secondary role as one of Dr. Vignali’s amours, was given star billing.Read More »

Quote:
Nino Manfredi and Mariangela Melato are a couple who teach at the same elementary school and are dying to have a child of their own. At this school all the little students wear uniforms that make them look like miniature Austin Powers’. They also accompany the soundtrack with insipid songs that tell you what you are looking at. Whether you understand Italian or not, it soon gets on your nerves.Read More »

*** BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM – Oscar winner, 1972 ***

Plot
The film is set in Ferrara, northern Italy, between 1938-1943, and shows the lives of the Jewish Finzi-Contini family and their friends as they struggle against Mussolini’s fascism and anti-Semitism in wartime Italy. The Finzi-Contini family is one of the leading families in the town. The adult children, Micòl and Alberto, gather friends for tennis at their villa with its lovely grounds, keeping the rest of the world at bay. Into the circle steps Giorgio, a Jew from the middle class who falls in love with Micòl.Read More »

Synopsis
A tribute to Naples, where director De Sica spent his first years, this is a collection of 6 Napolitean episodes : a clown exploited by a gangster ; an inconstant pizza seller (Sofia) loosing her husband’s ring ; the funeral of a dead child ; the gambler Count Prospero B. defeated by a kid ; the unexpected and unusual wedding of Teresa, a prostitute ; the “professor” Ersilio Micci, a “wisdom seller”.Read More »

Released in the US as “After The Fox”, Caccia Alla Volpe is a 1966 collaboration of Vittorio De Sica and Peter Sellers. In this light romp Sellers plays Italian Master Thief Aldo Vanucci who escapes from prison to help his mother control his precocious young sister and to take part in smuggling gold bullion into Italy. With the Carabiniere always on his tail, Vanucci concocts a scheme to pose as Fellini-esque movie director Federico Fabrizzi filming a neo realistic film in a small Italian coastal town where he plans to receive the gold. Many icons are sent up in this film. De Sica himself shows he is not above a little self parody, Fellini of course gets jabbed and probably most notably, Victor Mature briefly came out of retirement to play handsome Tony Powell, a hilarious and thinly veiled caricature of himself, an aging over the hill star of the 40’s desperate to recapture his former starpower complete with his signature trench coat.Read More »

Stories about three very different women and the men they attract.

Episode 1. In Naples the street trader Adelina is sentenced to prison for selling bootleg cigarettes. The lawyer Verace tells her husband Carmine that according to the law a woman cannot be put in prison when she is pregnant and six months after the delivery. Adelina and Carmine start procreating one child after another to avoid imprisonment, but after the 7th child is born, Carmine is burned out and cannot make love anymore.Read More »