Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.
In a village of the Po valley where the earth is hard and life miserly, the priest and the communist mayor are always fighting to be the head of the community. If in secret, they admired and liked each other, politics still divided them as it is dividing the country. And when the mayor wants his "People's House"; the priest wants his "Garden City" for the poor. Division exist between the richest and the poorest, the pious and the atheists and even between lovers. But if the people are hard as the country, they are good in the bottom of there heart.
Energetic priest Don Camillo returns to the town of Brescello for more political and personal duels with Communist mayor Peppone.
The film follows the life of Napoleon from his early life in Corsica to his death at Saint Helena. The film is notable for its use of location shooting for numerous scenes, especially at the French estates of Malmaison and Fontainebleau, the Palace of Versailles, and sites of Napoleonic battles including Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Determined to survive at any price, Edith, a young Jewish woman deported to an extermination camp, manages to survive by accepting the role of kapo, a privileged prisoner whose mission is to ruthlessly guard other prisoners.
The film shows how Italy's historic national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi (embodied by Renzo Ricci) leads a military campaign known as Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 and conquers Sicily and Naples. When the Bourbon monarchy has left Southern Italy, he supports Victor Emmanuel II of Italy who achieves a lasting unification under the aegis the House of Savoy. Roberto Rossellini has said he was prouder of this film than of any other film he ever made.
A French fugitive arrives in Genoa, where he becomes entangled with an Italian woman and her daughter.
Tapioca, a small-time thief, hides out in an elegant apartment, where he is soon joined by Cascarilla, one of his apprentices who has become better than his master. When the owners arrive home, the latter offers the wife a bunch of love letters she has written to various lovers for ten million.
Thérèse, a young flower girl, tries hard to remain virtuous but the whole world seems to conspire against her, whether her petty Paris family, or her relatives in the province bristling with false respectability, or her lustful employer, or the boy she loves who seduces her and abandons her. But at the end of the day there is Yvon, her childhood friend. Will he be the one that will love her truly?
Francesco, a young doctor, is appointed doctor to the imaginary village of Pianetta in the province of Avellino, but is immediately in competition with Don Antonio, a so-called "healer".
The Remi abandoned by his foster father sold to the troubadour Vasalis, in his living through the rural villages the people to entertain, gehoplen his three dogs and a monkey. In the beginning Remi takes its new master, but a demanding and hard man, and the animals have not been too much with the clumsy boy. But gradually creates a bond between Remi and his new comrades, until their friendship is suddenly disrupted when Vasalis is arrested for vagrancy and sentenced. Then Remi, alone in the world, along with his animal friends in position to try to keep ...
The daughter of a seamstress, Jeanne Bécu could hardly imagine she would later become one of the most influential women of the Kingdom of France...
Ulisse is a naive young man out looking for a job after being released from the army. He drops the offer he gets from a group of fascists to go in with the Fossatis, a family of anarchists (unknown to him).
A young girl comes to prison and experiences the entire prison subculture. The inmates she befriends vary from big tough dangerous dames to smaller submissive ladies who are totally lost in prison life.
A distress call from a trawler leads various people to come to the crew's aid.
A famous violinist enlists in a music school in order to woo one of the students.
A young man comes back to his hometown to be confronted with a bourgeois obnoxious family who has always despised his -now dead - parents because they were music hall artists, "entertainers". But because he's the sole legatee of an uncle's fortune, his relatives become friendly with him.. at least for a while.
Young Prince Nechljudov is summoned as a judge in a murder trial. A rich merchant was found dead in the room of the inn where he was staying and the prostitute Maslova was accused of the crime. Nechljudov recognizes in the woman the maid of the aunts he had seduced and abandoned years before and tries to convince the authorities of her of his innocence but to no avail. Convinced that he is responsible for her moral fall, he follows her to Siberia where she must serve her sentence.
A new teenage student arrives at a prestige boarding school in Bavaria, having not only the ability to play the guitar and sing, but also to charm animals and detect ghosts. Quickly becoming part of a secretive club of five other students, he is inadvertently stranded by them at an abandoned chateau on an island in the middle of a large lake, where he encounters an enchanting young woman who wants to escape... Also filmed in a separate German-language version with largely different cast, MARIANNE MEINE JUGENDLIEBE, q.v.
