27° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL

GIUSEPPE VERDI

by Carmine Gallone
Country: Italy
Year: 1938
Duration: 110'


GIUSEPPE VERDI
Twenty-year-old Giuseppe Verdi leaves his hometown Busseto
and moves to Milan. His plan is to study music at the city’s
Conservatory but he is not accepted. Distraught over the loss of his
wife and children, he first achieves success in 1842 with his opera
Nabucco. This is the beginning of a dazzling career that seems to
come to a halt eleven years later, when La Traviata was a fiasco at La
Fenice opera house in Venice. The opera was performed the following
year at La Scala in Milan, where it was a triumph and confirmed his
fame.

“The advent of pure opera on the silver screen did not occur by
chance; it was a logical consequence of musical performance in
films. Its absence would have been unthinkable. Why should opera
be excluded from cinema, a form of entertainment that is open to the
most varied types of manifestations? It was also logical that the first
experiments should take place in Italy, the cradle of melodrama, where
the biggest and most popular performances of this genre have been
staged. It was almost a must that we dare try.”

Biography

film director

Carmine Gallone

Carmine Gallone (Taggia, Imperia, Italy, 1886-Frascati, Rome, Italy, 1973) began writing plays at an early age and debuted as a film director in 1913 with The Naked Truth, starring Lyda Borelli, and Senza colpa, which starred his wife, Soava Gallone. In 1926 he and Amleto Palermi directed the blockbuster The Last Days of Pompeii and in 1927 he temporarily left Italy to work in Germany, France and Great Britain. In 1937 he filmed Scipio the African, for which he received the Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film at the Venice Film Festival. Over the following years he specialized in film adaptations of operas such as Rigoletto (1946), Il trovatore (1949) and Madama Butterfly (1954).

FILMOGRAFIA

filmografia essenziale/
essential filmography
La donna nuda (1914), Malombra (1917), Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei
(coregia/codirector Amleto Palermi, 1926), Liebeshölle (L’inferno dell’amore,
1928), Scipione l’Africano (1937), Giuseppe Verdi (1938), Rigoletto (1946),
La forza del destino (1949), Puccini (1953), Don Camillo monsignorema
non troppo
(1961), Carmen di Trastevere (1963).

Cast

& Credits

regia, produttore/
director, producer
Carmine Gallone
soggetto, sceneggiatura/
story, screenplay
Lucio D’Ambra,
Carmine Gallone
fotografia/cinematography
Massimo Terzano
montaggio/film editing
Oswald Hafenrichter
scenografia/
production design
Guido Fiorini,
Camillo Parravicini
costumi/costume design
Titina Rota
musica/music
Giuseppe Verdi
suono/sound
Hans Bittman, Ettore Forni
interpreti e personaggi/
cast and characters
Fosco Giachetti
(Giuseppe Verdi),
Gaby Morlay
(Giuseppina Strepponi),
Germana Paolieri
(Margherita Barezzi),
Camillo Pilotto
(Antonio Barezzi),
Cesco Baseggio
(il padre/Father),
Maria Jacobini,
(Luigia Uttini),
Maria Cebotari
(Teresina Stolz),
Febo Mari (Marelli),
Carlo Duse
(Temistocle Solera),
Lamberto Picasso
(Gaetano Donizetti)
produzione/production
Grandi Film Storici,
Italia Film
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