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.
Produced in Italy in breathtaking Technicolor, this biographical story of Puccini (played by L'avventura's Gabriele Ferzetti) spans his creative life from early student days to the height of success, including his early flop Madama Butterfly and his incomplete Turandot. Along the way he encounters three women who change his life, including a sexy, beautiful singer (Two for the Road's Nadia Gray) whom he drops for a small town girl (Sirocco's Marta Toren), and a servant girl who commits suicide over him. Well-selected excerpts from Manon, La Boheme, Madama Butterfly and Turandot are featured along with other Puccini music, including the voice of Beniamino Gigli. Sets, costumes and production values are first class, all sumptuously filmed by Claude Renoir.
Goethe's drama and Gounod's opera "Faust" is treated here like a movie rather than the usual photographed-opera from a stage method. Faust is a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for eternal youth, and the latter, with guileful glee, leads Faust to disaster along the paths of pleasure. Marguerite falls in love with Faust, and suffers as a consequence.
개비 도리옷의 새 노래 “만인의 여인”이 프랑스에서 히트할 조짐을 보이자 그녀의 매니저는 영화사와 새로운 계약서를 쓰기위해 협상을 벌인다. 곧 스튜디오는 새 영화 촬영준비로 한창이지만 개비는 행방이 묘연하다. 개비를 찾아 헤매던 매니저는 호텔 욕실에서 자살을 기도한 그녀를 발견한다. 병원으로 옮겨진 그녀는 마취제를 투여 받은 상태에서 과거 밀라노의 고향에서 살던 시절을 회상하기 시작한다.
