Acting
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Travelling family man Paolo agrees to pose as husband to an unwed pregnant girl he meets on a train. However, once faced with her father, things do not go as planned.
Franco, a young man of noble descent, marries Luisa, daughter of a humble clerk, against his grandmother's will.
A nineteenth-century Italian noblewoman, imprisoned in a foreboding lakeside palazzo by her uncle, comes to believe she's possessed by a long ago mistress of the manor.
Toto (Aldo Fabrizi), a Roman coachman with an old fashioned horse-drawn carriage who objects to the competition from motorised taxis, doesn't want his daughter Nannarella to go out with Roberto, a young taxi driver. But it is Roberto who helps him when he gets into trouble with a former client, Mary Dunchetti (Anna Magnani), an arrogant singer.
The baron of Santafusca, descended from a noble family, leads a dissipated life. To pay debts he is forced to sell his house. He tries to steal from the house of a very rich priest and, surprised during the theft, he kills the priest, and then throws the body in an abandoned well. He continues his life of revelries and luxury, until the remorse for the crime trigger a process of self-destruction. The nightmares of the baron, tormented by the only evidence left of the murder, the hat of the priest ,drags him into a daring and hallucinated series of ups and downs to the brink of insanity and jail.
Paolo Bianchi, an average young man, picks up an underground newspaper on the street: he lives in northern Italy during the Nazi occupation and is mistaken for a communist, searched and beaten by the police. An influential friend manages to get him released, but now Paolo has a positive reputation among the partisans. To save him from further trouble, his friend gives him a document that corroborates his strong loyalty to the current regime: the safe passage he thus obtains helps, albeit inadvertently, the partisans on several occasions. Then the Allies arrive, accuse him of being a collaborator, and arrest him. His friend comes to his rescue.
A captain, a well-known flying ace, is developing his own device which will make a notable contribution to the prestige of his country's air force. One evening he occasionally meets a girl who strikes him with her mysterious behavior. In fact, he witnesses some completely inexplicable events that disturb him and take away the necessary serenity of mind to attend to his work, from which he feels detached. An explosion in the laboratory brings to the attention of an entire espionage network that was working to prevent the realization of the project.
This melodrama was directed by an émigré Russian from a story by Corrado Alvaro and Emanuele Caracciolo. The latter was murdered by the Nazis in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, before the film’s post-war release. Featuring Miranda and Girotti prior to neo-realist stardom.
