We, the Women
We, the Women is a 1953 Italian portmanteau film divided into five segments and directed by five different directors. Four of these segments focus upon alleged events in the private lives of the film actresses Alida Valli, Ingrid Bergman, Isa Miranda, Anna Magnani; the fifth segment, shown as the prologue and titled "Concorso: 4 Attrici. Anna Amendola decides to leave her home to become an actress though her mother says that she can not come back if she does, she goes to Titanus film studios, where a casting is taking place to find a girl to be included in a segment of Siamo donne. The contest begins with the girls walking through a line, where they are checked for certain requirements age; the ones who pass this stage are given a meal by the studio, while a spotlight scans through the tables, finding girls for the screen test stage. Amendola passes through these stages. There are a series of screen tests, where several girls are asked questions about their dreams and ambitions; the results of the screen tests are not decided until the next day.
The next day, she is called up as a finalist, along with Emma Danieli. The story ends with the two finalists about to give interviews. Alida Valli is invited by Anna, to an engagement party that night. Valli starts her evening by going to a dance, where she dances with a producer and gives a radio interview. However, the dance bores her. At the engagement party, the guests treat her like a star, which makes her feel like a "freak in a sideshow", she is asked to dance with Anna's fiancé, a railroad engineer. A mutual attraction springs up between the two. In order to restore Anna's confidence, Alida Valli decides to leave the party immediately; the story ends with Alida Valli being driven away, while little kids are chasing after the car, asking for her autograph. Ingrid Bergman notices. At first she suspects it is her dogs or her children, but on notices a chicken walking around the area of her roses; the chicken belongs to the proprietress. Ingrid Bergman asks the proprietress to restrain the chicken, but the proprietress refuses to take effective measures.
Therefore, the chicken finds its way back to the roses. In order to resolve the dilemma, Ingrid Bergman comes up with a plan of her own, she tries to have her dog scare it. However, when guests arrive, she hides the chicken in a pantry closet; the story ends when the proprietress takes back the chicken, after hearing its clucking. Isa Miranda has portraits of herself, film memorabilia, an Oscar. However, she does not have any children; when driving home from the studio one day, she sees an explosion. She sees a boy holding his arm. A man helps put the boy into her car, she drives to the hospital. At the hospital, the boy is treated for his injuries. Miranda takes the boy home, where she notices several other children unattended. Since the mother is away, she decides to put the boy to bed and to take care of the other children until the mother comes home. During this experience, she regrets never having children; the story ends with her answering a ringing telephone. On the way to a singing engagement, Anna Magnani and a taxi driver have an argument over whether her dog is a lap dog, since it costs one lira more to carry a non-lap dog in a taxi.
In order to dispute this charge, she first presents the case to a policeman on the street, who charges her 14.50 lira because her dog does not have a license. She takes it to police station, where both the sergeant and the captain decide that it is a lap dog. Upon hearing this, the taxi driver states that he was acting in good faith; the taxi driver takes her to her singing engagement, where he charges her 14.50 lira for cab fare. In addition, he charges her one lira for the dog though he was just informed that it was a lap dog, she ends up paying the extra lira. The story ends with Magnani singing a song. Siamo donne on IMDb
Alfredo Guarini
Alfredo Guarini was an Italian screenwriter, film producer and director. Guarini is noted in particular for his management of the career of the Italian actress Isa Miranda, who he married. In the mid-1930s he was responsible for persuading her to work in a variety of different countries to build up a greater international profile after her breakthrough success in Everybody's Woman. A Woman Has Fallen Document Z-3 Charley's Aunt Red Passport Germany Year Zero The Walls of Malapaga Journey to Italy Esterina Thor and the Amazon Women Gundle, Stephen. Mussolini's Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy. Berghahn Books, 2013. Alfredo Guarini on IMDb
Rasputin (1954 film)
Rasputin is a 1954 French-Italian historical drama film directed by Georges Combret and starring Pierre Brasseur, Isa Miranda and Renée Faure. It portrays the fall of the Russian priest and courtier Grigori Rasputin; the film's sets were designed by the art director Jean Douarinou. Pierre Brasseur as Gregory Iefimovich Raspoutine Isa Miranda as La tsarine Alexandra Renée Faure as Véra Milly Vitale as Laura Jacques Berthier as Le prince Félix Youssoupoff / Youry Claude Laydu as Héliodore Denise Grey as La princesse Dikvona Micheline Francey as Anna Pracova Robert Berri as Le capitaine Soukoff Jean Wall as L'archimandrite Breham Raphaël Patorni as Le ministre Stumerof Michel Etcheverry as Pourlchkevitch Bruno Balp Nadine Bellaigue Charles Bouillaud as L'industriel Posinoff Maria Grazia Buccella Robert Burnier as Le tsar Nicolas II Pierre Cosson Germaine Delbat as La concierge Cécile Didier as La nourrice Ky Duyen as Le pédicure Cécile Eddy Richard Flagey as Dimitri Suzanne Grey as L'employée aux bains Jean Lanier as Le docteur Anne Laurent Robert Lombard as Boris Goulief Jean-Claude Maurice Alexandre Mihalesco René Pascal Roland Piguet Sacha Pitoëff as Le chef de la police Roger Saget as La basse Jean Thielment as Le garçon de bains Jacques Todescano Hélène Vallier as Une infirmière Jany Vallières as Une dame Orio Caldiron & Matilde Hochkofler.
Isa Miranda. Gremese Editore, 1978. Rasputin on IMDb
Malombra (1942 film)
Malombra is a 1942 Italian drama film directed by Mario Soldati and starring Isa Miranda, Andrea Checchi and Irasema Dilián. It is based on the novel Malombra by Antonio Fogazzaro, adapted into a 1917 silent film of the same title, it was made at Cinecittà with sets designed by Gino Brosio. It was produced by Riccardo Gualino's Lux Film; the film is a gothic melodrama, set in the castle on the edge of Lake Como during the Nineteenth century. Isa Miranda as Marina di Malombra Andrea Checchi as Corrado Silla Irasema Dilián as Edith Steinegge Gualtiero Tumiati as Il conte Cesare d'Ormengo Nino Crisman as Nepo Salvador Enzo Biliotti as Il commendator Napoleone Vezza Ada Dondini as Fosca Salvador Giacinto Molteni as Andrea Steinegge Corrado Racca as Padre Tosi Luigi Pavese as Il professore Binda Nando Tamberlani as Don Innocenzo Doretta Sestan as Fanny Paolo Bonecchi as Il dottor Pitour Elvira Bonecchi as Giovanna, la governante Giovanni Barrella as L'ispettore della cartiera Giacomo Moschini as Giorgio Mirovitch, il notaio Anna Huala as La governante di Fosca The movie was shot in the Villa Pliniana, Torno.
Gundle, Stephen. Mussolini's Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy. Berghahn Books, 2013. Malombra on IMDb
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film studio based in Hollywood, a subsidiary of the American media conglomerate Viacom since 1994. Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world, the second oldest in the United States, the sole member of the "Big Five" film studios still located in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollywood. In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor put 22 actors and actresses under contract and honored each with a star on the logo. In 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films in digital form only; the company's headquarters and studios are located at 5555 Melrose Avenue, California, United States. Paramount Pictures is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America. Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world after the French studios Gaumont Film Company and Pathé, followed by the Nordisk Film company, Universal Studios, it is the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles.
Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the Famous Players Film Company. Hungarian-born founder Adolph Zukor, an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time. By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, Zukor was on his way to success, its first film was Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth. That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky, opened his Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish known as Samuel Goldwyn; the Lasky company hired as their first employee a stage director with no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who would find a suitable site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles, for his first feature film, The Squaw Man. Starting in 1914, both Lasky and Famous Players released their films through a start-up company, Paramount Pictures Corporation, organized early that year by a Utah theatre owner, W. W. Hodkinson, who had bought and merged several smaller firms.
Hodkinson and actor, producer Hobart Bosworth had started production of a series of Jack London movies. Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor. Famous Players and Lasky were owned while Paramount was a corporation. In 1916, Zukor maneuvered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, Paramount. Zukor and Lasky bought Hodkinson out of Paramount, merged the three companies into one; the new company Lasky and Zukor founded, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, grew with Lasky and his partners Goldwyn and DeMille running the production side, Hiram Abrams in charge of distribution, Zukor making great plans. With only the exhibitor-owned First National as a rival, Famous Players-Lasky and its "Paramount Pictures" soon dominated the business; because Zukor believed in stars, he signed and developed many of the leading early stars, including Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clark, Pauline Frederick, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Wallace Reid. With so many important players, Paramount was able to introduce "block booking", which meant that an exhibitor who wanted a particular star's films had to buy a year's worth of other Paramount productions.
It was this system that gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but which led the government to pursue it on antitrust grounds for more than twenty years. The driving force behind Paramount's rise was Zukor. Through the teens and twenties, he built the Publix Theatres Corporation, a chain of nearly 2,000 screens, ran two production studios, became an early investor in radio, taking a 50% interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928. In 1926, Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg, an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations, they purchased the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility at 5451 Marathon Street for US$1 million. In 1927, Famous Players-Lasky took the name Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. Three years because of the importance of the Publix Theatres, it became Paramount Publix Corporation. In 1928, Paramount began releasing Inkwell Imps, animated cartoons produced by Max and Dave Fleischer's Fleischer Studios in New York City.
The Fleischers, veterans in the animation industry, were among the few animation producers capable of challenging the prominence of Walt Disney. The Paramount newsreel series Paramount News ran from 1927 to 1957. Paramount was one of the first Hollywood studios to release what were known at that time as "talkies", in 1929, released their first musical, Innocents of Paris. Richard A. Whiting and Leo Robin composed the score for the film. By acquiring the successful Balaban & Katz chain in 1926, Zukor gained the services of Barney Balaban, his brother A. J. Balaban, their partner Sam Katz (who would run the Paramount-Publix theatre chain in New York City from the thirty-five-stor
La Ronde (1950 film)
La Ronde is a 1950 French film directed by Max Ophüls and based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 play La Ronde. Set in Vienna in 1900, it shows ten amorous encounters across the social spectrum, from a street prostitute to a nobleman, with each scene involving one character from the previous episode; the French term'La Ronde' can mean any of the following: circling around, doing the rounds, a round of drinks, a circular dance. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards; the master of ceremonies opens proceedings by telling the audience that they will see various episodes in the endless waltz of love. A prostitute takes a soldier under a bridge; the soldier picks up a chambermaid at a dance hall. The chambermaid willingly succumbs to the son of her employers; the young man starts an affair with the young wife of an older businessman. She has an edgy discussion in bed with her husband; the husband gets her drunk. The shopgirl falls for a poet, pursuing an affair with an actress; the actress invites a count to visit her in bed next morning.
That evening, he ends up in the bed of the prostitute, so completing the circle. In order of appearance: Anton Walbrook as the Master of Ceremonies Simone Signoret as Léocadie, the Prostitute Serge Reggiani as Franz, the Soldier Simone Simon as Marie, the Chambermaid Daniel Gélin as Alfred, the Young Master Danielle Darrieux as Emma, the Wife Fernand Gravey as Charles, the Husband Odette Joyeux as Anna, the Shopgirl Jean-Louis Barrault as Robert, the Poet Isa Miranda as Charlotte, the Actress Gérard Philipe as the Count Although at the time of production, Schnitzler's son was still enforcing his father's stipulation that the play — Reigen — should never be performed or adapted, Ophuls was able to secure the rights to it because of Schnitzler's additional stipulation that his French-language translator was to own the rights to the French version; the film was classified by New York film censors as "immoral" and therefore unacceptable for public screenings. At the end of 1953, the film's producers appealed to the U.
S. Supreme Court and, in 1954, La Ronde was approved for exhibition in New York without any cuts. La Ronde, directed by Roger Vadim, based on the same play La Ronde on IMDb La Ronde at AllMovie La ronde: Vicious Circle an essay by Terrence Rafferty at the Criterion Collection
Femme fatale
A femme fatale, sometimes called a maneater or vamp, is a stock character of a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers leading them into compromising and deadly situations. She is an archetype of art, her ability to enchant and hypnotise her victim with a spell was in the earliest stories seen as being supernatural. In American early 20th century film, femme fatale characters were referred to as vamps, in reference to Theda Bara, who played a seductive woman referred to as a "vampiress" in the 1915 film A Fool There Was. Many female mobsters have been known to be femme fatales in many film noirs as well as James Bond films; the phrase is French for "fatal woman". A femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, or sexual allure. In many cases, her attitude towards sexuality is intriguing, or frivolous. In some cases, she uses coercion rather than charm, she may make use of some subduing weapon such as sleeping gas, a modern analog of magical powers in older tales.
She may be a victim, caught in a situation from which she cannot escape. A younger version of a femme fatale is called a fille fatale, or "fatal girl". One of the most common traits of the femme fatale includes promiscuity and the "rejection of motherhood", seen as "one of her most threatening qualities since by denying his immortality and his posterity it leads to the ultimate destruction of the male". Femmes fatales are villainous, or at least morally ambiguous, always associated with a sense of mystification, unease; the femme fatale archetype exists in the culture and myths of many cultures. Ancient mythical or legendary examples include Lilith, Circe, Clytemnestra, Helen of Troy, Visha Kanyas. Historical examples from Classical times include Cleopatra and Messalina, as well as the Biblical figures Delilah and Salome. An example from Chinese literature and traditional history is Daji; the femme fatale was a common figure in the European Middle Ages portraying the dangers of unbridled female sexuality.
The pre-medieval inherited Biblical figure of Eve offers an example, as does the wicked, seductive enchantress typified in Morgan le Fay. The Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute shows her more muted presence during the Age of EnlightenmentThe femme fatale flourished in the Romantic period in the works of John Keats, notably "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia". Along with them, there rose the gothic novel, The Monk featuring Matilda, a powerful femme fatale; this led to her appearing in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, as the vampire, notably in Carmilla and Brides of Dracula. The Monk was admired by the Marquis de Sade, for whom the femme fatale symbolised not evil, but all the best qualities of Women. Pre-Raphaelite painters used the classic personifications of the femme fatale as a subject. In the Western culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the femme fatale became a more fashionable trope, she is found in the paintings of the artists Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Franz von Stuck and Gustave Moreau.
The novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans includes these fevered imaginings about an image of Salome in a Moreau painting: No longer was she the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body. She is seen as a prominent figure in late nineteenth and twentieth century opera, appearing in Richard Wagner's Parsifal, George Bizet's "Carmen", Camille Saint-Saëns' "Samson et Delilah" and Alban Berg's "Lulu". In fin-de-siècle decadence, Oscar Wilde reinvented the femme fatale in the play Salome: she manipulates her lust-crazed uncle, King Herod, with her enticing Dance of the Seven Veils to agree to her imperious demand: "bring me the head of John the Baptist". Salome was the subject of an opera by Strauss, was popularized on stage and peep-show booth in countless reincarnations. Another enduring icon of glamour and moral turpitude is Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. While working as an exotic dancer, she took the stage name Mata Hari.
She was put to death by a French firing squad. After her death she became the subject of books. Other famous femmes fatales are Isabella of France, Hedda Gabler of Kristiania, Marie Antoinette of Austria, most famously, Lucrezia Borgia. One traditional view portrays the femme fatale as a sexual vampire. Rudyard Kipling took inspiration from a vampire painted by Philip Burne-Jones, an image typical of the era in 1897, to write his poem "The Vampire"; the poem inspired the 1913 epon
