Renzo Rossellini

Birth : 1908-02-02, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Death : 1982-05-13

Movies

The Gift
Self
After the release of "Nostalgia", Andrei Tarkovsky runs out his Soviet authorities permission to work abroad: he has to go back home. But he understands from the messages of some friends and colleagues that his life in Russia would be even tougher than before. So he then decides to break with Soviet authorities and, a year before the Milan Conference of 1984 during which he will announce publicly his decision, he leaves his friends that are hosting him in Rome and takes refuge in a secret location.
City of Signs
Thanks
Italy, March 1980. César travels to the ruins of Pompeii with the extravagant intention of recording psychophonies, supernatural echoes of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the city in the 1st century, but he does not succeed. However, on one of the tapes a strange phrase, much more recent, is recorded, words that César has already heard somewhere…
Caligola
Original Music Composer
The perversion behind imperial Rome, the epic story of Rome's mad Emporer. All the details of his cruel, bizarre reign are revealed right here: His unholy sexual passion for his sister, his marriage to Rome's most infamous prostitute, his fiendishly inventive means of disposing those who would oppose him, and more.
The Possessed
Original Music Composer
While visiting his favorite resort village during winter, a writer investigates the apparent suicide of a woman he was infatuated with.
Vanina Vanini
Original Music Composer
Vanina Vanini, a bored, spoiled Roman countess, falls in love with a dedicated young patriot who is in Rome to assassinate a traitor to the brotherhood of the Carboneria.
The Tartars
Original Music Composer
The Tartars and the Vikings maintain a fragile peace in the harsh landscape of the Russian Steppe. When the leader of the Vikings, Oleg, declines to accompany the Tartars on a campaign against the Slavs, there is an explosion of violence. After Oleg kills the Tartar leader and kidnaps his daughter, the dead man's brother, Burandai, retaliates by holding Oleg's wife, Helga, hostage. The stalemate can be resolved only on the battlefield.
Viva l'Italia!
Original Music Composer
The film shows how Italy's historic national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi (embodied by Renzo Ricci) leads a military campaign known as Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 and conquers Sicily and Naples. When the Bourbon monarchy has left Southern Italy, he supports Victor Emmanuel II of Italy who achieves a lasting unification under the aegis the House of Savoy. Roberto Rossellini has said he was prouder of this film than of any other film he ever made.
Escape by Night
Original Music Composer
In Nazi-occupied Rome, a beautiful bootlegger, to the chagrin of her lover, gives sanctuary to three escaped POWs: an American pilot, a Russian sergeant and a British major.
Legions of the Nile
Original Music Composer
Octavio secretly sent his consul Curridio to Alexandria in a final attempt to reach peace. In the city, he meets Berenice, a mysterious and beautiful dancer who falls in love. Actually, the dancer is the queen Cleopatra who leads a double life using this name.
General Della Rovere
Original Music Composer
The Gestapo forces con man Victorio Bardone to impersonate a dead partisan general in order to extract information from his fellow inmates.
The Magistrate
Original Music Composer
Emilia Bonelli is an overly ambitious and driven woman. This dominant personality trait has its effects on her henpecked husband Luigi, and her daughter Carla. Circumstances ultimately lead to the courtroom and an aloof judge in the persona of Andrea Morandi.
The Love Specialist
Original Music Composer
A Texas girl wins a trip to Italy where she meets a prince who's afraid to admit that he's flat broke (so is she). They strike up an affair, but things come to a crazy conclusion when he tries to bribe a horse to win a race at the Palio racing grounds.
Pirate of the Half Moon
Original Music Composer
Gianna Maria Canale as the Duchess who is offered a banquet and requests for a hard-boiled egg. The stingy Spanish lord, who used his last gunpowder to fire a salute to the noble lady and thus has no more when a bunch of pirates, led by Nadir, launches an attack against his castle. Nadir is the dashing fiery hero.
Montecarlo
Original Music Composer
Stylish, sophisticated and absolutely broke, Dino and Maria pursue a romance until they realize neither of them has any money, which forces the gold diggers to turn their attention to a wealthy widower and his daughter. A compulsive gambler who owes several anxious investors a small fortune, Dino has trouble cutting his losses, no matter how bad the losing streak.
Defend My Love
Conductor
As part of a story, a reporter goes to meet Elisa, a young woman he met a few years ago on a trial on which she was finally exonerated.
Defend My Love
Original Music Composer
As part of a story, a reporter goes to meet Elisa, a young woman he met a few years ago on a trial on which she was finally exonerated.
Orient Express
Original Music Composer
Porta un bacione a Firenze
Music
After a difficult eye operation, Simonetta, an Italian-American girl, returns for a vacation in Florence, the home town of her family. Here he meets Alberto, a sculptor.
Beautiful but Dangerous
Original Music Composer
Lina, a music hall singer, has fallen in love with Sergei, a Russian prince. Maestro Doria, who gives her voice lessons and who hopes to make her his mistress, takes her to Paris where she becomes the star of the "Folies-Plastiques".
Torna piccina mia!
Original Music Composer
A family of wanderers adopts a girl who is left alone after getting lost. Meanwhile, his father adopts an orphan. Some time later, as an adult, the girl becomes the main attraction of the Luna Park where the wanderers work, and falls in love with the adopted son of the missing father. This arouses envy and spite from a barker from the Luna Park, secretly in love with the girl, who begins to spread slander on their behalf.
The Sign of Venus
Conductor
Agnese has many men who woo her and live with her cousin Cesira, who has the opposite problem with men and wishes she would also have men woo her.
The Sign of Venus
Original Music Composer
Agnese has many men who woo her and live with her cousin Cesira, who has the opposite problem with men and wishes she would also have men woo her.
The Queen of Babylon
Original Music Composer
In this Biblical epic, a brave Chaldean rebel takes on his evil nemesis, a cruel Assyrian king. En route to his fateful meeting, the rebel hides in the humble hut of a luscious peasant girl.
Casta diva
Original Music Composer
As soon as he graduated from the Naples Conservatory, Vincenzo Bellini meets Maddalena Fumaroli and immediately falls in love with her.
House of Ricordi
Original Music Composer
The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.
Fear
Original Music Composer
Irene Wagner, the wife of the prominent German scientist Professor Albert Wagner, had been having an affair with Erich Baumann. She does not disclose this to her husband, hoping to preserve his innocence and their "perfect marriage". This fills her with anxiety and guilt. However, Johann Schultze, Erich's jealous ex-girlfriend, learns about the affair and begins to blackmail Irene, turning Irene's psychological torture into a harsh reality.
Journey to Italy
Original Music Composer
This deceptively simple tale of a bored English couple travelling to Italy to find a buyer for a house inherited from an uncle is transformed by Roberto Rossellini into a passionate story of cruelty and cynicism as their marriage disintegrates around them.
Theodora, Slave Empress
Original Music Composer
Teodora, a Roman courtesan and former slave girl, marries the Roman emperor Justinian and assumes the throne as Empress of Rome. But the divide between nobility and slave is too great. Teodora seeks justice for her people, and revolution and armed conflict erupt in both Byzantium and Rome.
The Slave of Sin
Original Music Composer
A former prostitute and a Polish infant are the only survivors of a train crash. Despite their mutual love, the woman's past comes back to haunt her.
Storm
Original Music Composer
Where Is Freedom?
Original Music Composer
A barber, murderer because of jealousy, spends twenty years in jail. He cannot, however adjust himself to a changed world and to the hypocrisy of his own relatives and decides to return behind bars.
Angels of Darkness
Music
When "Tamara" throws herself from the window of their brothel, her colleagues are made to realise that a new law will close down the source of their livelihood. The girls must now find honest work.
Angels of Darkness
Original Music Composer
When "Tamara" throws herself from the window of their brothel, her colleagues are made to realise that a new law will close down the source of their livelihood. The girls must now find honest work.
Il figlio dell'uomo
Music
A pared to the bone revisionist essay on the life of Christ.
Giuseppe Verdi
Original Music Composer
The life and loves of great composer Giuseppe Verdi are played against a background of the great operas of the 19th Century. A tender love story of his successful and turbulent life, with more than 20 excerpts from his acclaimed operas.
Per salvarti ho peccato
Original Music Composer
Little Luigi, the son of Guido and Elena, has a strange illness. To save him, they must inject his blood into a healthy person with his same blood type in order to create antibodies the fight off the infection.
Napoletani a Milano
Original Music Composer
Afterfive people die in crumbling Naples housing run by Northerners, the Southern relatives trek to Milan to sue for damages.
The Man From Cairo
Original Music Composer
"The Man from Cairo", a Michaeldavid production for distribution by Lippert, with Ray Enright the only credited director on the film print, finds Mike Canelli, the man from Cairo, nosing around Algiers with mystery surrounding the people he meets and the things he does and has done to him, all deriving from the war-time theft of $100,000,000 in gold which lies somewhere in the adjacent desert. People representing many nationalities and reasons are also seeking the gold. It boils down to a battle between Canelli and the original looter aboard a speeding train.
Noi peccatori
Original Music Composer
Wir tanzen auf dem Regenbogen
Original Music Composer
Europe '51
Original Music Composer
A wealthy, self-absorbed Rome socialite is tacked by guilt over the death of her young son. As a way of dealing with her grief and finding meaning in her life, she decides to devote her time and money to the city’s poor and sick. Her newfound, single-minded activism leads to conflicts with her husband and questions about her sanity.
Milady and the Musketeers
Original Music Composer
Very stylish Italian swashbuckler - The Three Musketeers from the viewpoint of Milady de Winter
The Machine That Kills Bad People
Original Music Composer
In Amalfi, a village on the Italian coast, an old man who seems to have strange powers gives Celestino Esposito, the local photographer, a dangerous ability.
Pentimento
Music
A cabaret singer, now a widow, is dethroned and expelled downstairs by a fiery rival.
L'eroe sono io
Original Music Composer
A Woman Has Killed
Original Music Composer
In 1951, two years after the “scandal” of the Fiamma che non si spegne, Cottafavi got the opportunity to work on a film with a small production company, Novissima Film. With little means, a number of technical and financial problems and working Sundays with the pieces of film given to him bit by bit, Cottafavi shot Una donna ha ucciso, a minor film that marked his comeback to directing. (Gianni Rondolino)
The Affairs of Messalina
Music
A story, set in Rome of 44 A.D., concerning the amorous and political intrigues of the evil Empress Messalina, the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and her eventual hounding to death.
Revenge of the Black Eagle
Original Music Composer
When a soldier returns home from the wars, he finds that a local landowner has been terrorizing his family. He disguises himself as a bandit known as "The Black Eagle" and begins taking revenge on the landowner by ravaging his "empire". However, things take a different turn when he falls for the landowner's beautiful daughter
Rome-Paris-Rome
Conductor
Vincenzo, a railwayman who works on the Rome-to-Paris line, has a wife in Italy and a mistress in France: Ginette, a widow with a four-year-old daughter. When he's offered a job in Paris he decides to move, but unfortunately his wife and petulant brother-in-law insist on accompanying him to Paris, and he must decide between the two women in his life.
Rome-Paris-Rome
Original Music Composer
Vincenzo, a railwayman who works on the Rome-to-Paris line, has a wife in Italy and a mistress in France: Ginette, a widow with a four-year-old daughter. When he's offered a job in Paris he decides to move, but unfortunately his wife and petulant brother-in-law insist on accompanying him to Paris, and he must decide between the two women in his life.
City of Violence
Music
Amore e sangue (released in the U.S. as "City of Violence"), the 1951 Marino Girolami (billed as "John Wolff") West German/Italian romantic action adventure war thriller.
The Flowers of St. Francis
Narrator (voice) (uncredited)
In a series of simple and joyous vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of the People’s Saint: humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice. Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis’s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St. Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.
The Flowers of St. Francis
Original Music Composer
In a series of simple and joyous vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of the People’s Saint: humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice. Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis’s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St. Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.
Stromboli
Original Music Composer
After the end of World War II Karen, a young displaced woman from Lithuania, marries Italian fisherman Antonio to get away from her internment camp. But the life on Antonio's island, Stromboli, threatened by its volcano, is a tough one and Karen cannot get used to it.
Germany, Year Zero
Original Music Composer
In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.
L'amore
Original Music Composer
In the first episode, a heartbroken woman talks to her ex-lover on the phone. In the second, a pregnant woman believes she is carrying the child of Saint Joseph.
Rocambole
Original Music Composer
In the 19th century, a thug from the slums of Paris pretends to be a young aristocrat, but is unmasked by a demi-mondaine, from the same background as him.
Assunta Spina
Music
Assunta, a commoner of Naples, is scarred by her lover Michele for jealousy.
The Charterhouse of Parma
Original Music Composer
This adaptation of Stendhal's timeless masterpiece of French literature tells the tale of Fabrice Del Dongo (Grard Philipe) a young archibishop who gives his heart and soul to romance rather than to the Church creating upheaval in the lives of evergone around him the Countess of Sanseverine (Maria Casares) is but one of the may women who love him. In turn she incurs jealous retributions from those in high places who desire her. For his crimes Fabrice is thrown in Prison where from Crimes Fabrice is thrown in prison where form his lonely window he falls in love with his jailer s daughter and plans a daring escape she however calls his plan insane and takes a vow to the Virgin Mary to never see him again ever if his escape succeeds the Charterhouse of Parma explodes with conflicting desires man s desire form God vs. his desire for romance.
I fratelli Karamazoff
Sound
Sinfonia fatale
Original Music Composer
An American composer moves to Italy and falls for a local country girl right before the start of World War II.
Paisan
Original Music Composer
Six vignettes follow the Allied invasion from July 1943 to winter 1944, from Sicily north to Venice.
Before Him All Rome Trembled
Original Music Composer
An opera singer hides an American soldier in his house in Nazi-occupied Rome.
Eugenia Grandet
Original Music Composer
Eugenia is a daughter of a wealthy but miserly man living a simple life in the provincial town of Saumur. Eugenia's inexperience leads her to fall in love with an unworthy man.
Desire
Original Music Composer
Paola, a Milan call girl, returns home to her village in the Abruzzi mountains in an attempt to go straight. Rejected by her father, blackmailed by a former lover, and lusted after by her brother-in-law, she turns to her beloved sister for support. Denied succor, like so many of Rossellini’s isolated figures, Paola awaits the arrival of her fiancé, who has offered her a new start, but instead decides that life is untenable.
Rome, Open City
Original Music Composer
During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944, the leader of the Resistance is chased by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a way to escape.
The Children Are Watching Us
Original Music Composer
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 of Italian neorealism, The Children Are Watching Us is a vivid, deeply humane portrait of a family’s disintegration.
Il viaggio del signor Perrichon
Music
The Man with the Cross
Original Music Composer
Ukraine, 1942. Italian troops are fighting against the Soviet Union. A military chaplain volunteers to stay behind with a badly wounded Italian soldier, even though this means certain capture.
We the Living
Music
The second part (Part One released the same year was Noi vivi) of the adaptation of Ayn Rand’s debut novel We the Living , a story of life in post-revolutionary Russia and Rand's first statement against communism.
Le due orfanelle
Music
Giarabub
Original Music Composer
The Italian troops at Giarabub defend themselves against the British.
A Pilot Returns
Original Music Composer
A young Italian pilot is interned in a British prison camp after his plane is shot down during the war against Greece. He falls in love with a doctor's daughter and manages to escape during a bombardment. He reaches home, wounded, just as news arrives of the Greek surrender.
A Garibaldian in the Convent
Original Music Composer
An old woman's poignant reminiscence of her youth in a convent school, the happy moments and the sad, and her tragic love for a Garibaldian.
Teresa Venerdì
Music
A comedy of errors in which the sweetly incompetent Dr. Pietro Vignali (de Sica) has been run deep into debt by his girlfriend, Loletta Prima (Magnani). After his creditors threaten to sell his belongings, he takes a job as an orphanage health inspector to pay his debts and ends up engaged to wealthy Lilli, daughter of a mattress tycoon, and chased after by the orphan Teresa Venerdí, while trying to keep his life in order.
The White Ship
Original Music Composer
Although released anonymously, as was the custom with all films produced by the Italian Navy, La Nave Bianca is the first feature-length effort directed by Roberto Rossellini; it is also very much the work of its co-writer and supervisor Francesco De Robertis. The film combines a documentary look at the Italian Navy during World War II with newsreel combat footage and a scripted love story performed by non-professional actors.
Red Roses
Original Music Composer
A comedy of errors about marriage and infidelity. Vittorio De Sica's debut film.
The Little Adventurers
Original Music Composer
During the Ethiopian war, thirteen boys embark clandestinely on a merchant ship bound for Africa. Following the shipwreck, they are castaway on a desert island...
Princess Tarakanova
Music
A film about the story of princess Élisabeth Tarakanova.
Under the Southern Cross
Music
Venice Film Festival 1938
Mister Max
Original Music Composer
Vittorio De Sica, heir to a large sum of money and owner of a newspaper vending stall, makes enough money out of his business to take a vacation at a fashionable resort. He is given a cruise ticket by an aristocrat who is an old school friend, and is mistaken for the aristocrat when he uses a camera that has his friends name on it. Assia Noris plays a maid who falls in love with him because of who he is and not who others think he is. Happy ending comes when De Sica marries Noris, who is more real than the pampered society belles he has been partying with.
L'antenato
Music