Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas - Eclipse From The Criterion Collection

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festival goers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of superstar director Raffaello Matarazzo. Though turning to neorealism for character types and settings, these haywire hits about splintered love affairs and broken homes, all starring mustachioed matinee idol Amedeo Nazzari and icon of feminine purity Yvonne Sanson, luxuriate in delirious plot twists and overheated religious symbolism. Four of them are collected here, chronicles of men and women on long and serpentine roads of redemption, each less restrained and more wildly fun than the last.

Chains:

Matarazzo breakthrough melodrama concerns the virtuous wife of a mechanic whose happy family is torn asunder when a former flame reenters her life by chance and pursues her relentlessly.

Tormento:

A good-hearted woman, in desperation after years of persecution by her vicious stepmother, runs off with her upstanding and ambitious but poor lover - but a bewildering turn of events shatters their new life together.

Nobody's Children:

A mountain of misfortune is heaped upon an impoverished village girl and a wealthy count who try to come together romantically despite the nasty machinations of his mother.

The White Angel:

The torment isn't over for the couple from Nobody's Children: in this immensely satisfying, almost surreal sequel, the ship of sorrow sails on, this time with a plot that includes a boat accident, a doppelganger, a prison riot, and so much more.

Upplagd i sortimentet: 13 Juli, 2011