Guido Notari

Prince Paris of Troy, shipwrecked on a mission to the king of Sparta, meets and falls for Queen Helen before he knows who she is. Rudely received by the royal Greeks, he must flee...but fate and their mutual passions lead him to take Helen along. This gives the Greeks just the excuse they need for much-desired war.

Piccolo Hotel (aka Small Hotel) uses the titular establishment to weave together a vast tapestry of subplots, a la Grand Hotel. The guests include a domineering mother (Lola Braccini), her petulant daughter (Bianca Doria) and the daughter's gigolo boyfriend (Guido Notari). Also on hand is a worldly vamp (Laura Nucci) who also falls for the boyfriend, and the chronic-gambler son (Andrea Checchi) of the hotel's self-sacrificing landlady (Emma Grammatica). Though the film is set in Budapest, the characters are more Mediterranean than mittel-European. Piccolo Hotel was one of the entries in the Vienna Biennial Film Festival.

An American starlet inflames two Italian peasants who forget about their respective fiance's. One of them even thinks of marrying her and begins to plan for the engagement banquet. When the girl decides to live the countryside harmony reigns again.

An ex-boxer has trained his own son and leads him on to win the middle-weight championship of Italy. But the boy falls easy prey to a woman of light morals and renounces the hard work of sport to follow her to a winter luxury resort and at a certain moment, offers to marry her but she, not wanting to give up an advantageous connection, turns him down, advising the youth to not change the nature of their relationship. Then, the boy feeling the entire baseness of his situation, returns home to his parents who welcome him back with joy and takes up again a commitment to sport.

No synopsis available yet.

This 1948 film by Antonioni documents the lives of street cleaners in Rome. N.U. is short for Nettezza urbana, the Italian municipal cleaning service.

A sweeping, cinematic pseudo-documentary history of human flight, starting with the failed attempt of Icarus, and ending with the aviation triumphs of the fascist regime.

Giacomo Casanova returns to Venice, to help his brother, falsely accused of robbery.

During the 18th century, the empress of Russia Catherine the Great sends her lover Count Alexei Orloff to kidnap her rival for the throne, the pretender Elizabeth, Princess Tarakanova, from Venice. However, Orloff ends up falling in love with the princess.

The film is set in Naples. Two doubles, an American and a Neapolitan, alternate visiting Zaza, the maid of a magazine company, deceived by their resemblance.

The tale of two fish in love, threatened by an octopus and saved by an eel.

An opera singer hides an American soldier in his house in Nazi-occupied Rome.

No synopsis available yet.

Two half brothers, one a pilot, the other a repairman at the plane factory of their father, are in a disagreement due to the envy of the younger brother, son of the first wife of their father. Then both brothers fall in love with the same woman; this causes more conflict between the two, making worse an already tense situation.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

Italian filmmaker Carmine Gallone was still in his "operetta" mode when he helmed 1938's Il Sogno di Butterfly (Dream of the Butterfly) Maria Cebotari plays opera diva Rosa Belloni, currently starring in a production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The plot thickens when Rosa's backstage life begins to mirror the travails of the character she is portraying. The climax comes when Harry Peters (Fosco Giachetti), the American father of Rosa's illegitimate child, returns after four years with his new wife in tow, leading inexorably to a doleful ending both on- and offstage. Critics complained about the substandard photography in Il Sogno di Butterfly, but this might have been due to poor laboratory work.

No synopsis available yet.

Set during the Spanish civil war, the story of a commander of a fort Alcazar in Toledo, faithful to general Franco.

No synopsis available yet.

A young student of an upper-class background who is surrounded by classmates that are of working-class backgrounds, after a novel in diary format by Enrico Bottini.

The film is set in 1941 during the Second World War, when the city of Benghazi in Italian-ruled Libya was occupied by British forces. Italian inhabitants of Benghazi work to resist the British and discover their military plans. One man, Captain Enrico Berti, appears to be collaborating with the British but is in fact working undercover for Italian intelligence. The film ends with the city being recaptured by Italian troops and their Nazi German allies.

Manon escapes with the young nobleman Des Grieux, then becomes a high-class courtesan and finally forced to exile to America.

To secure her fortune with Monsieur Vaudieu de la Tour, the Machiavellian Claudia kills her lover's elder brother and steals his child. The boy is adopted by a coachman, and later, as secretary to the Minister of Justice, discovers the truth, punishes the bad guys, rewards the good ones and marries the daughter of another innocent man, unjustly accused by Claudia.