Corrado Alvaro

Women Without Names (Italian:Donne senza nome) is 1950 Italian drama film directed by Géza von Radványi and starring Simone Simon, Vivi Gioi and Françoise Rosay.[1] It is set in a displaced persons camp after the Second World War. It was made at Cinecittà in Rome.

The title of this Italian melodrama translates to Pact with the Devil. However, His Satanic Majesty does not appear in the film. Rather, this expensively produced period piece is more along the lines of Romeo and Juliet, with young love threatened by warring families. In his first Italian film, Hollywood veteran Eduardo Cianelli goes through his usual villainous paces as the scheming father of the male lead (Jacques Francois). The most fascinating performance is rendered by Umberto Spadaro, as the village idiot, or is he? Patto col Diavolo makes the most of the visual dynamics of Italy's mountainous Calabrian region.

Francesca and Walter are two-bit criminals in Northern Italy, and, in an effort to avoid the police, Francesca joins a group of women rice workers. She meets the voluptuous peasant rice worker, Silvana, and the soon-to-be-discharged soldier, Marco. Walter follows her to the rice fields, and the four characters become involved in a complex plot involving robbery, love, and murder.

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.

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.

Part One (Part Two was released as Addio Kira!) At 18, the beautiful and smart Kira comes to Petersburg as the Communists consolidate power. She rebuffs a cousin who rises in the Party and may remember the slight. She falls in love with Leo, the son of an aristocrat, who gets into political trouble and never gets out. Meanwhile, a Party leader, Andrei, also loves her, and she feigns love for him to get political protection for Leo and money to pay for his TB treatment. But can Leo forgive her being Andrei's mistress?