Country: Italy
Year: 1942
Duration: 135'
The young noblewoman Marina di Malombra is segregated in a villa on Lake Como by the austere uncle, Count Cesare di Ormengo, who will only release her on her wedding day. Stimulated by solitude, Marina identifies herself little by little with a suicidal aunt of whom she has found a secret letter and of which she believes to be reincarnation. In her hallucination, unable to distinguish reality from her obsession, she entices the young writer Corrado and will go as far as the brink of madness and murder.
Biography
film director
Mario Soldati
Mario Soldati (Turin, Italy, 1906 - Tellaro, La Spezia, Italy, 1999) made his debut as a storyteller in 1929 with the short story collection Salmace. After a period spent in the United States, in 1931 he returned to Italy, where he began working at the Cines-Pittaluga. He made his directorial debut in 1939 with Dora Nelson, inaugurating a style of very elegant formal invoice, influenced by literary ancestry, as testified by the Piccolo mondo antico (1941) and Malombra (1942). Curious and attentive to new languages, as well as a narrator and filmmaker, he will also be a pioneering television author, realizing, with Alla ricerca dei cibi genuini - Viaggio nella valle del Po (1957), one of the fundamental moments of our country’s television.
FILMOGRAFIA
filmografia essenziale/essential filmography
Dora Nelson (1939), Piccolo mondo antico (1941), Tragica notte (1942), Malombra (1942), Quartieri alti (1945), Le miserie del signor Travet (1946), Eugenia Grandet (1946), Daniele Cortis (1947), Fuga in Francia (1948), Quel bandito sono io (1950), Il sogno di Zorro (1952), Jolanda, la figlia del Corsaro Nero (1952), La provinciale (1953), La mano dello straniero (1954), La donna del fiume (1955), Policarpo, ufficiale di scrittura (1959).
Declaration
film director
“Malombra is all dominated by an initial story, which is this. Meanwhile, what was Malombra? Malombra is a very beautiful novel in total, very beautiful. Full of defects and full of inconsistencies, of ridiculous things, but essentially with something extremely alive. And to say that, out of all the films I’ve shot, it’s the one I shot most believing in cinema. At the time of the Piccolo mondo antico I didn’t believe in cinema. I believed in love, yes. And at the time of Malombra I believed in cinema.”
Cast
& Credits
mario soldati
MALOMBRA
Italia/Italy, 1942, 35mm, 135’, 35mm, bn/bw
malombra
regia/director
Mario Soldati
soggetto/story
dall’omonimo romanzo di/from the novel of the same title by Antonio Fogazzaro
sceneggiatura/screenplay
Mario Soldati, Mario Bonfantini, Renato Castellani, Ettore Maria Margadonna, Tino Richelmy
fotografia/cinematography
Massimo Terzano
montaggio/film editing
Gisa Radicchi Levi, Giovanni Paolucci
scenografia/production design
Gastone Medin
costumi/costume design
Maria De Matteis
musica/music
Giuseppe Rosati
suono/sound
Bruno Brunacci
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Isa Miranda (Maria Vittoria di Malombra), Andrea Cecchi (Corrado Silla), Irasema Dilian (Edith Steinegge),Gualtiero Tumiati (il conte/Count Cesare di Ormengo), Nino Crisman (il conte/Count Nepomuceno Salvador di Ormengo), Ada Dondini (la contessa/Countess Fosca Salvador), Giacinto Molteni (Andrea Stefano Steinegge), Enzo Biliotti (Vezza), Corrado Racca (padre/father Tosi), Nando Tamberlani (don Innocenzo), Doretta Sestan (Fanny), Paolo Bonecchi (Zorzi), Elvira Bonecchi (Giovanna), Giovanni Barella (Giuseppe)
produzione/production
Lux Film
