Silvana Mangano

During planting season in Northern Italy's Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker falls in with a small-time criminal who is planning a daring heist of the crop, as well as his femme-fatale-ish girlfriend. Both a socially conscious look at the hardships endured by underpaid field workers and a melodrama tinged with sex and violence.

A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy named Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), his infatuation developing into an obsession even as rumors of a plague spread through the city. Based on the novella by Thomas Mann, this late masterpiece from Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the...