Maos Sangrentas translates to Bloody Hands in English, and that's just what this gruesome Brazilian melodrama delivers. The story begins when a gang of dangerous convicts escape from a penal colony. With the police in hot pursuit, the escapees cut a gory swath through the countryside. As his comrades are killed off one by one, the leader of the group descends into gibbering madness. In contrast to this, a subplot develops involving the least dangerous of the escapees, who murdered his wife in a peak of self-righteous rage and is now seriously in doubt about the wisdom of his deed. Principal scenes reworked in 1962 to make the film The Violent and the Damned (q.v.).
Two young men from Paris bring "wonderful civilizing ideas" into the brain. But, as they returned without pity, they began to call for an auction of the furniture and objects of art that garrison their "garconiére", last vestige of the passage of opulence. The great idea would be to install a cabaret in the favela for tourists in search of new sensations and also for the inhabitants of the city. On the hill, one of the boys experiences the greatest surprise: he found there, living among the humble, teaching to read to the children, Rosinha, an enchanted little princess, queen of the hill.
