Movies: Cesare Zavattini

World War II vet Paul Sutton falls for a pregnant and unwed woman who persuades him -- during their first encounter -- to pose as her husband so she can face her family....

Unemployed Antonio is elated when he finally finds work hanging posters around war-torn Rome. However on his first day, his bicycle—essential to his work—gets stolen. His job is doomed unless he can find the thief. With the help of his son, Antonio c...

A young widow flees from Rome during WWII and takes her lonely twelve-year-old-daughter to her rural hometown but the horrors of war soon catch up with them....

Three tales of very different women using their sexuality as a means to getting what they want....

After World War II, a woman refuses to believe her husband, missing on the Russian front, is dead. Flashbacks reveal their brief courtship and marriage. Years later, she travels to Russia with his photo, determined to find him. What will she discover...

Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He en...

A lord’s servant, Ali Baba, is sent to retrieve a slave for his master, but ends up on an adventure filled with gold, mischief, love, and forty famous thieves instead....

An anthology of four comic moral tales about the hypocrisies surrounding sex in 1960s Italy: frothy young love and office politics in the big city; milk advertisements that begin to haunt an aging prude; a trophy wife enduring her husband's very publ...

When elderly pensioner Umberto Domenico Ferrari returns to his boarding house from a protest calling for a hike in old-age pensions, his landlady demands her 15,000-lire rent by the end of the month or he and his small dog will be turned out onto the...

At a track near Rome, shoeshine boys are watching horses run. Two of the boys Pasquale, an orphan, and Giuseppe, his younger friend are riding. The pair have been saving to buy a horse of their own to ride......

Five short stories loosely dealing with the roles of women in society. A superstar actress travels to a mountain resort, only to evoke jealousy from women and lust from men. A woman offers to take an injured man to the hospital. A widowed father and ...

A criminal mastermind sets up a phony film production as part of a plan to smuggle stolen gold....

Film director Blasetti is looking for a little girl for his new movie. Along with other mothers, Maddelena takes her daughter to Cinecittà, hoping she’ll be selected and become a star. She is ready to sacrifice anything for little Maria....

A tribute to Naples, this film presents six episodes: a clown exploited by a gangster, a pizza seller losing her husband’s ring, a child's funeral, a gambler beaten by a kid, a prostitute's unusual wedding, and a "wisdom seller" offering advice....

Agnese has many men who woo her and live with her cousin Cesira, who has the opposite problem with men and wishes she would also have men woo her....

While on vacation in Rome, married American Mary Forbes becomes entangled in an affair with an Italian man, Giovanni Doria. As she prepares to leave Italy, Giovanni confesses his love for her; he doesn't want her to go. Together they wander the railr...

Episodic film with flashbacks about the lives of some sick and infirm people travelling on the same train, making a pilgrimage to the shine of Our Lady of Loreto....

In his first collaboration with renowned screenwriter and longtime partner Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child. Heralding the pair’s subsequent work on some of the masterpieces ...

The film consists of six short stories created by different directors, but all the stories share one thing: a warm irony to current events....

Hall Bartlett directs the rural drama The Children of Sanchez, based on the tome The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family written by Oscar Lewis in the '60s. Anthony Quinn stars as the widowed Jesus Sanchez, a poor farmer struggling...