Bruno, a chauffeur having some problem in keeping a job, meets one morning Mariuccia, a taxi driver’s daughter working as a perfumery’s shop assistant, and trying to impress her, pretending to be rich, uses his employer’s car to took her on a trip to the lakes, but things don’t work as planned and to conquer Mariuccia’s hearth won’t be so easy…

In the huge steel factories in Terni (Umbria, Italy), two friends: Mario and Pietro, fight for the love of the same girl, Gina. Pietro dies because of a work accident at the factory. The other workers think Mario is responsible for the death of his friend. Mario, who is innocent, is forced to quit, but his love for Gina and his dedication to his job help him out of his crisis.

Gemma, caught between her desires and reality, struggles to navigate her marriage and personal ambitions.

1941 film by Mario Soldati

A film made up of four episodes: a jar repairer gets trapped in a vat because of his hunch; a young unmarried mother is forced to beg to buy herself a fan; Rosario Chiarchiaro appears before a law court for casting spells; the discomfort of an overtight jacket gives a wedding witness the strength to persuade the bridegroom's reluctant parents to bless his union.

A former Fascist takes his son and escapes across the border into France, where he tries to avoid being recognized and having to pay for his wartime crimes.

This utterly gorgeous Gothic melodrama would be widely hailed as a masterpiece, had it not been made in Italy during the Mussolini regime. A gross injustice, as Malombra - unlike Piccolo Mondo Antico, Mario Soldati's earlier film of an Antonio Fogazzaro novel - contains not one moment of triumphalist flag-waving or Fascist family values. Oddly akin to Rebecca in its atmosphere of death-haunted romance and voluptuous doom, it reaches a peak of visual refinement of which Hitchcock could only dream.
Its star is Isa Miranda (famous, and not without reason, as Italy's answer to Garbo and Dietrich) playing a headstrong but unstable young noblewoman, confined by her uncle to a gloomy villa on the shores of Lake Como. A yellowed and crumbling letter, found in an old spinet, convinces her that she is the reincarnation of her uncle's first wife - another troubled beauty who died a virtual prisoner after being caught in a forbidden love affair. When a handsome young writer (Andrea Checchi) comes to stay, Miranda decides that HE is the reincarnation of the dead woman's lover. Gradually, she lures him into her web of sex and revenge...
What more to say without spoiling the fun? Miranda gives a performance to rival any of the great divas of Hollywood. Only Davis and Stanwyck, perhaps, could play a bad girl so boldly without losing all sympathy. The evocation of 19th century aristocracy, in its full decadent splendour, is visually and dramatically flawless - a model for such later Italian gems as Visconti's Senso and The Innocent.
It helped, perhaps, that Soldati himself was a leading novelist. Blessed with an absolute respect for the classics he adapted, but in no way inhibited by them. He was also the guiding spirit of the now-forgotten 'calligraphic' movement, which brought the Italian cinema to such wondrous aesthetic heights during World War Two, only to collapse before the horror of Neo-Realism. Can we blame Soldati for giving up film-making in disgust and going back to writing novels?
So if you've ever felt (as I do) that Rossellini's much-touted Rome - Open City is the work of an amateur...well, Malombra is the film you have to see!

When peasant girl Nives is deserted by smuggler Gino Lodi, she betrays him to the police. Police officer Enzo Cinti, who loves Nives, traces her to the Po River cane-fields, where she is working as a cutter to support herself and an infant son, and warns her that Gino has escaped from prison and is seeking revenge. She rejects his offer to protect her. Gino finds Nives, mourning the drowning death of their son. He surrenders himself to the police and then walks at Nives' side in the funeral procession.