Movies: Cesare Zavattini

Six vignettes explore love and desire in Rome, from prostitution and heartache to unwed motherhood and the male gaze....

A tribute to Naples, this film presents six episodes: a clown exploited by a gangster, a pizza seller losing her husband’s ring, a child's funeral, a gambler beaten by a kid, a prostitute's unusual wedding, and a "wisdom seller" offering advice....

In his first collaboration with renowned screenwriter and longtime partner Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child. Heralding the pair’s subsequent work on some of the masterpieces ...

An elderly gentleman and his dog find themselves out of a home with little means....

The plot weaves several episodes with several groups of people, Roman families, youth gangs and young love couples, who spend a Sunday at the beach of Ostia....

In a post-war Rome (1946) a cat burglar inadvertently saves the life of a would-be suicide man who returns from the war to find that he has been betrayed by his fiancée while fighting in the war. From that moment the thief takes the ex-soldier under ...

Five portraits of actresses in their "common" life, seen as women rather than movie stars....

Based on the Nikolai Gogol story but set in 1950s Italy, "The Overcoat" is the story of a poor city hall clerk whose only desire is to buy a new overcoat....

Under provincial Italian law at the time, once a roof is erected, the occupants cannot be evicted from a building. This comedy follows the efforts of a family to erect the roof on a house overnight so that a newlywed couple can have their own home....

A dying German magnate invites his youngest son and daughter-in-law home to discuss the future of the family's shipbuilding empire. There, the daughter-in-law stumbles upon a secret of the family's Nazi past....

Hall Bartlett directs the rural drama The Children of Sanchez, based on the tome The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family written by Oscar Lewis in the '60s. Anthony Quinn stars as the widowed Jesus Sanchez, a poor farmer struggling...

Episodic film with flashbacks about the lives of some sick and infirm people travelling on the same train, making a pilgrimage to the shine of Our Lady of Loreto....

The film consists of six short stories created by different directors, but all the stories share one thing: a warm irony to current events....

After saving a tramp from suicide, a millionaire takes his clothing and disappears. Word is out that he will give a million dollars to anyone who is kind to a tramp....

Anna Zaccheo is a beautiful young woman from a working class Neapolitan family. Her main concern is to find herself a suitable husband. She meets a young sailor Andrea one day and gets engaged to him. But while she is waiting for Andrea to return fro...

Vittorio De Sica is a teacher struggling to take care of his family and always dreaming that Parliament will increase the salaries for teachers and life will become easier for his wife, Maria Mereander, and kids. An Indian prince (Sabu) visits Italy,...

Immediately after the war, bandits attack a truck that is transporting newlyweds Michele and Giovanna and the accountant of an agricultural cooperative charged with bringing four million lire into office....

A family man travelling for work, Paolo Bianchi, meets on a train a lonely girl, Maria. He sees her again on a bus and she reveals him that she's in troubles: she's pregnant, her baby's father has left her and she doesn't know how to tell to her pare...

A wealthy young woman falls in love with a radio singer without ever having seen him. She forces her strange family (forgetful father, mother with ideas of grandeur, three sisters with a passion for singing and another who takes care of abandoned chi...

The story of the Cervi family. Rural farmers brought up to be idealogically opposed to fascism during the era of Mussolini's rule of Italy and World War 2....