Italian filmmaker Carmine Gallone was still in his "operetta" mode when he helmed 1938's Il Sogno di Butterfly (Dream of the Butterfly) Maria Cebotari plays opera diva Rosa Belloni, currently starring in a production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The plot thickens when Rosa's backstage life begins to mirror the travails of the character she is portraying. The climax comes when Harry Peters (Fosco Giachetti), the American father of Rosa's illegitimate child, returns after four years with his new wife in tow, leading inexorably to a doleful ending both on- and offstage. Critics complained about the substandard photography in Il Sogno di Butterfly, but this might have been due to poor laboratory work.
Mercante Fenicio
A story of the Second Punic Wars, beginning with Scipio's futile pleas to the Roman Senate to build an army to battle Hannibal, that climaxes with the battle of Zama.
Maestro Ronchetti
A favorite student of an old dance teacher gets casted in an important pantomime. When the teacher dies on the stage, she finds support from a journalist's affection to overcome the difficult moment.
Dubois
Marzanò
Il sindaco
There were very few commercial feature films made during the Italian fascist era that were as openly propagandistic as this famous (notorious?) dramatic paean to the Blackshirts. The story takes place in a small village in Italy in October of 1922, on the eve of the fascist "March on Rome", in which King Victor Emanuel III was persuaded to consign power to Benito Mussolini. Gianfranco Giachetti is Dr. Cardini, a doctor at the local psychiatric hospital, where a strike has been called by the local socialists. Cardini turns to the fascists to help avert the strike. His son Roberto (Mino Doro) rounds up fascist friends to fight those aligned with the strikers and the town's socialists.
Impiegato
A woman leaves her husband and her young daughter after she falls for a rally driver.
The Old Man with Bow Tie
His 1933 debut, following some years as a journalist and then script boy, was Treno popolare, an early sound lark about several Roman petit bourgeois on a day trip to the country that was influenced by the German proto-neorealist silent picture People on Sunday (1930). Produced at the height of the fascist era, Treno popolare was nonetheless free of propaganda, and featured the first film score by the legendary composer Nino Rota.
When his wife storms out of a dinner planned in honor of his American boss (because their dog is not allowed to be at the table) an engineer pretends that his secretary is the missus.
Gesualdo
Two different couples on blind dates get mixed up when they pick the same location to meet.
Chilone Chilonides
"The Roman Banquet, the golden glories, the unrivaled luxuries, the wine, the dance, the song, the beautiful women, the sumptuous splendors that taxed a barbaric world for a night of feasting and revel-- Re-created for your entertainment in the most colossal drama produced", reads an ad in the Daily Argus of New York. Unione Cinematografica Italiana's lavish production of the oft-told tale stars Emil Jannings as Nero.
Principe
