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Locarno Film Festival artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro has come to Saudi Arabia for the first time to serve on the jury panel for the works-in-progress showcase at the Red Sea Film Festival’s industry section, the Red Sea Souk. A former head of the Venice Critics’ Week, Nazzaro has been tracking Arabic cinema for a while and programming pics that are breaking its mold. He spoke to Variety about the challenges directors from the region face as they try to do new things.

My impression is that Arab directors these days are less beholden to an auteur vision of cinema. Do you agree?

This is something that has been going on for quite some time. The fact is there has been a great change of paradigm within cinema from the Arab world and from the Mena region at large. This is largely because institutions such as the Doha Film Institute...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival has revealed the lineup for its 75th edition, sticking to its promise of discovering new talent.

A slew of debuting filmmakers will showcase their works, from Italy’s Nicola Prosatore with “Piano Piano” to Caterina Mona, focusing in “Semret” on an Eritrean single mother working at a Zurich hospital and dreaming of becoming a midwife.

Thomas Hardiman’s U.K.’s proposition “Medusa Deluxe,” a murder mystery set in a competitive hairdressing competition — boarded by New Europe Film Sales — is also bound to generate some excitement.

“‘Medusa Deluxe’ is one of the coolest debuts of the year,” the company’s CEO Jan Naszewski enthused to Variety.

“I’m sure it will rock the Piazza Grande and give the festival a great spark.”

But Locarno will also bring in heavyweights, starting with a screening of the much-anticipated Brad Pitt vehicle “Bullet Train,” directed by “Atomic Blond” helmer David Leitch,...

Joseph L. Anderson's Spring Night, Summer Night (1967) is showing September 1 – October 1, 2018 on Mubi as part of the series byNWR.Treated like a lost link in American Cinema and being placed by scholars somewhere between John Cassavetes and the L.A. Rebellion movement, Joseph L. Anderson’s Spring Night, Summer Night is foremost a problematic approach to a rural community. The film is set in south-eastern Ohio and follows the story of a young conflicted love. The cast in large parts consists of locals and amateurs. Carl, son of a local farmer, in a sudden outburst of emotion impregnates Jessica, a passive woman who wants to keep the child. What is more, they could be brother and sister. Anderson, who collaborated with Donald Richie on The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, spent about two years researching the coal-mining area in Ohio to prepare his first feature film in what he called “New Appalachian Cinema.

Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia is ramping up production of restored Italian cinema gems with several high-profile titles set to screen at upcoming festivals including the Taviani Brothers’ “Good Morning Babilonia” which plays Thursday on Locarno’s Piazza Grande, presented by Paolo Taviani.

The fablelike “Babilonia,” which is about two immigrant stonemasons who work on the sets for D. W. Griffith’s ”Intolerance,” has been praised by Locarno artistic director Carlo Chatrian as “not just a homage to the great Italian tradition of art and craft workshops, but also an insightful interpretation of what cinema is about.”

The film’s restoration was supervised by its original cinematographer Beppe Lanci, as Csc chief Felice Laudadio points out.

Laudadio has been instrumental to the current push for more restorations being done by the Csc’s film archives. “The plan from now up to next May is for 12 films, which has never been done before,...

Weaver, Giuseppe Tornatore and Pierre Bismuth to particpate in ‘Close Encounters’ event in October

Sigourney Weaver, director Giuseppe Tornatore and French artist, filmmaker and Oscar-winning co-writer of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Pierre Bismuth, will participate in the ‘Close Encounters’ talks series of the Rome Film Festival to be held October 18 -28.

They join Martin Scorsese who will be at the festival for two days to receive its lifetime achievement award, as announced earlier this month. Scorsese will also take part in a Close Encounters event, said artistic director Antonio Munda who hosted a press conference to unveil the...

Martin Scorsese will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award and take part in an interview about his career and Italian cinema at this year’s Rome Film Festival (October 18-28).

The iconic director will present the restored version of an as-yet undisclosed Italian classic film and serve as the subject of an in-conversation session with festival director Antonio Monda. His award will be presented to him by Italian director Paolo Taviani.

Also among the festival’s Close Encounters interview program will be Sigourney Weaver, Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore, artist and screenwriter Pierre Bismuth, acclaimed Italian DoP’s Luca Bigazzi and Arnaldo Catinari as well as feted editors Giogiò Franchini and Esmeralda Calabria.

Rome is also revealing snippets of its film lineup today, including Notti Magiche by Paolo Virzì, retrospectives of Peter Sellers and Maurice Pialat, the restoration of Italiani Brava Gente by Giuseppe De Santis and an exhibition on Marcello Mastroianni.

ZamaThe programme for the 2017 edition of the Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and includes new films from Darren Aronofsky, Lucrecia Martel, Frederick Wiseman, Alexander Payne, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Abdellatif Kechiche, Takeshi Kitano and many more.COMPETITIONmother! (Darren Aronofsky)First Reformed (Paul Schrader)Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton)The Leisure Seeker (Paolo Virzi)Una Famiglia (Sebastiano Riso)Ex Libris - The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman)Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu)The Whale (Andrea Pallaoro)Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh)Foxtrot (Samuel Maoz)Ammore e malavita (Manetti Brothers)Jusqu'a la garde (Xavier Legrand)The Third Murder (Hirokazu Kore-eda)Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (Abdellatif Kechiche)Lean on Pete (Andrew Haigh)L'insulte (Ziad Doueiri)La Villa (Robert Guediguian)The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)Suburbicon (George Clooney)Human Flow (Ai Weiwei)Downsizing (Alexander Payne)Out Of COMPETITIONFeaturesOur Souls at Night (Ritesh Batra)Il Signor Rotpeter (Antonietta de Lillo)Victoria...

Richard Brooks' exciting Humphrey Bogart picture is one of the best newspaper sagas ever. An editor deals with a gangster threat and a domestic crisis even as greedy heirs are selling his paper out from under him. Commentator Eddie Muller drives home the film's essential civics lesson about what we've lost -- a functioning free press. Deadline - U.S.A. Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1952 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date July 26, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter, Ed Begley, Warren Stevens, Paul Stewart, Martin Gabel, Joe De Santis, Audrey Christie, Jim Backus, Willis Bouchey, Joseph Crehan, Lawrence Dobkin, John Doucette, Paul Dubov, William Forrest, Dabbs Greer, Thomas Browne Henry, Paul Maxey, Ann McCrea, Kasia Orzazewski, Tom Powers, Joe Sawyer, William Self, Phillip Terry, Carleton Young. Cinematography Milton Krasner Film Editor William B.Murphy Original Music Cyril J. Mockridge Produced by Sol C. Siegel...

Bitter Rice

Written by Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Gianni Puccini

Directed by Giuseppe De Santis

Italy, 1949

The opening credits of Bitter Rice parade an array of Italian film industry luminaries, figures who would help redefine the country’s national cinema, picking up where neorealism left off and setting the stage for the remarkable work that would emerge in the decades to come. Screenwriters Carlo Lizzani and Giuseppe De Santis (who also directed) were two of eight individuals contributing in one way or another to the script, though they were the two who would share an Academy Award nomination for its story. Cinematographer Otello Martelli had nearly 50 films under his belt by the time of Bitter Rice, but in the years that followed he would most memorably man the camera for Federico Fellini’s finest films. And producing the movie was the venerable Dino De Laurentiis, really just at the start of his legendary career.

This week the Criterion Collection released Giuseppe De Santis’s 1949 film, Bitter Rice.

Both a socially conscious look at the hardships endured by underpaid field workers and a melodrama tinged with sex and violence, this early smash for producer extraordinaire Dino De Laurentiis and director Giuseppe De Santis is neorealism with a heaping dose of pulp.

Bitter Rice is currently available to stream on Hulu Plus. Order the Blu-ray from Amazon.

Throughout the year, Press Notes will collect various links to reviews of new Criterion Collection releases from around the web, published on the release date and updated as new reviews are posted.

Blu-ray.com

The new transfer is very good. I did some direct comparisons with the old R2 Italian DVD release and can confirm that the improvements in terms of detail, clarity, and especially depth are quite remarkable. Even in areas where it is obvious that time has...

Forget the proletarian messages, this Italian Neorealist classic is really an exploitation film about ogling brazen, buxom babes in short-shorts, up to their knees in a rice paddy. Hollywood actress Doris Dowling is the nominal star but new discovery Silvana Mangano became the knockout dream of every Italian male suffering from postwar shortages (cough). Giuseppe De Santis delivered the perfect combo -- an art film that pulled in every lonely guy nella cittá. Bitter Rice Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 792 1949 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 109 min. / Riso amaro / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 12, 2016 / 29.95 Starring Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone. Cinematography Otello Martelli Film Editor Gabriele Varriale Original Music Goffredo Petrassi Written by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Franco Monicelli, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini Produced by Dino De Laurentiis Directed by Giuseppe De Santis

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Way back in...

Criterion digs Bitter Rice out of obscurity this month, a pulpy mix of social drama and dime store pathos from director and screenwriter Giuseppe De Santis. Premiering at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival, the title was also nominated for an Oscar in 1950 for Best Story. Lumped in with the neo-realism movement, it’s been a well-regarded minor title, but its problematic noir elements seem to have denied it prominent classification, at least compared to De Santis’ contemporary, Roberto Rossellini, whose Rome, Open City (1945) birthed the movement (and had just finished his notable war trilogy the year prior to release of this title). But De Santis creates something a bit stranger with this hybrid, a darker examination of sex and violence from the perspective of two central female characters. In its native language, the title is a pun since the Italian word for rice can also be substituted for the word laughter,...

Cinephiles and historians can (and do) debate about which postwar Italian movies were a "betrayal" of the intentionally cultivated neorealism movement. But more plainly, a case could be made that neorealism got tired of itself. Or, more readily, Italian neorealism had always, in different ways, allowed for more than just soul-searing tales set amid a world of bombed out rubble. How best to go about its mission of humanizing postwar Italy is a question that would fall upon its individual filmmakers. Giuseppe De Santis, a younger and clearly vigorous filmmaker in 1949 when Bitter Rice (aka Riso amaro) was released, saw fit to infuse the film with a healthy dose of pulpy crime. Specifically, American pulpy crime; lurid, dangerous, kind of sexy. This infusion would be both...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

The robbery spree of ‘the machine gun soloist,’ as the real life smash-and-grab jewelry thief Luciano Lutring was dubbed by the exploitative inflammatory Italian press of the day, sprawled across Europe like a globetrotting Bonnie and Clyde, complete with wife, mistress, child, disguises and enough flippant flamboyancy to waste his stolen riches on whatever pleasure awaited around the corner. Just three months after Lutring’s final capture and subsequent 20 year prison sentence, director Carlo Lizzani went into production on a fly-by-night chronicle of Lutring’s criminal career. The result was Wake Up And Kill, a la nouvelle vague inspired, loose canon crime thriller that thrives on style, but lacks the connective tissues to keep the wily tale together.

With a cinematic background in documentary and neo-realist melodrama, having spent much of the ’50s directing non-fiction and co-wrote the Oscar nominated Giuseppe De Santis picture Bitter Rice, Lizzani was obscenely quick...

The Criterion Collection will begin the new year by welcoming the Coen Brothers into the fold. Inside Llewyn Davis dove into the less glamorous side of the folk music scene, and showcased a sterling performance by Oscar Isaac. The Criterion home video version features an audio commentary by writers Robert Christgau, David Hajdu, and Sean Wilentz. In a new extra Gullermo del Toro sits down with the Coens to talk about their career. Both Lady Snowblood movies are included in The Complete Lady Snowblood; both are new 2K digital restorations. Wim Wenders' terrific The American Friend will also receive the Criterion treatment. I wrote about the movie here. January will also see the release of Giuseppe De Santis' neorealist Bitter Rice and Charles Vidor's spectacular...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

Russian movie star Tatiana Samoilova dead at 80; known as ‘the Russian Audrey Hepburn,’ Samoilova was best remembered for Cannes winner ‘The Cranes Are Flying’ (photo: Tatiana Samoilova in ‘The Cranes Are Flying’) Russian film star Tatiana Samoilova, best remembered for playing the female lead in Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1957 romantic drama The Cranes Are Flying, died of heart complications at Moscow’s Botkin Hospital late night on May 4, 2014 — the day the Leningrad-born (now St. Petersburg) actress turned 80. Samoilova, who had been suffering from coronary heart disease and hypertension, had been hospitalized the previous day. The daughter of iconic stage and film actor Yevgeny Samoilov, among whose credits was the title role in a 1954 production of Hamlet and several leads in highly popular movies made during World War II, Tatiana Samoilova studied ballet at Moscow’s prestigious Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko music theater. Beginning in 1953, she took acting lessons for three years...

Italian neorealist film director and screenwriter who made Last Days of Mussolini, starring Rod Steiger

Carlo Lizzani, who has died aged 91, after falling from a balcony at his home, was a screenwriter and director of Italian neorealist cinema who made more than 40 feature films, as well as documentaries and television series.

His first professional experiences in the film world were as an actor, playing cameos in two powerful neorealist films: Il Sole Sorge Ancora (The Sun Still Rises, 1946), directed by Aldo Vergano; and Caccia Tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947), Giuseppe De Santis's first feature film.

In 1947 Roberto Rossellini summoned Lizzani to Berlin where he was preparing to shoot Germania Anno Zero (Germany Year Zero). Lizzani did research with East German locals which Rossellini would find useful when the film was being made without a definitive shooting script. Lizzani said later: "Rossellini filmed the story of the boy [Edmund] as if growing up...

Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, the man behind Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" and Federico Fellini's "Amarcord," has died at 92. The three-time Oscar nominee had been battling illness for several months in Rimini in central Italy, the Afp reported. Born in 1920, Guerra began writing while imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II. Since penning his first script for Giuseppe De Santis' "Men and Wolves" (1956), Guerra has gone on to write for some of the top Italian filmmakers of all time, including Vittorio De Sica ("Marriage Italian Style"), Mario Monicelli ("Caro Michele") and Francesco Rosi ("Lucky Luciano"). He also collaborated with Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos on the dreamlike "Voyage to Cythera," and with Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky on "Nostalgia." All in all, he's responsible for more than 100 screenplays over the course of...

The legendary Italian scriptwriter and novelist, who died yesterday, worked with a host of Europe's greatest auteurs. Here we pick the highlights of his extraordinary oeuvre

It was Tonino Guerra's fate to become the scriptwriter of choice for a string of master directors whose status as auteurs – "authors" of their films – tended to diminish the status of the writers involved. Nevertheless, Guerra established himself as a major figure in Italian cinema during its golden period in the 1960s and early 70s, as well as venturing further afield to collaborate with the likes of Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos.

But it is the amazing string of films he made with Michelangelo Antonioni for which he will primarily be remembered. After spending time as a schoolteacher in his 20s, he broke into the film industry in his 30s, receiving his first credit aged 37 for Man and Wolves, by Bitter Rice director Giuseppe de Santis.

Screenwriter and poet who co-scripted films with Fellini, Antonioni and Tarkovsky

The Italian poet, novelist and screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who has died aged 92, brought something of his own poetic world to the outstanding films he co-scripted with, among others, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi, but also many non-Italian directors including Theo Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky. Perhaps his most creative contribution was to Fellini's colourful account of life in a small coastal town in the 1930s, Amarcord (1973), of which he was truly co-author, because the film reflected their common experiences growing up in Romagna.

The two were born in the region a couple of months apart – Fellini in Rimini and Guerra in Santarcangelo, in the hills above the Adriatic resort, the son of a street vendor father.

Guerra's own "amarcord" ("I remember" in dialect) is scattered over many books of poetry and short stories. He first started writing...

Tonino Guerra, the screenwriter who collaborated with Italian neorealist greats Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni, has died at the age of 92, reports the Afp. He had been battling illness for several months at his home in the central Italian city of Rimini.

Guerra’s start as a writer was as dramatic as his films themselves: He began working on his earliest screenplays while imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II. After getting his start on Giuseppe De Santis’ 1956 release Men and Wolves, Guerra became a staple of the Italian film industry, co-writing more than 100 screenplays in his 52-year career.

Anna Magnani in (what looks like) Luchino Visconti's Bellissima At the end of Giuseppe Tornatore's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner Cinema Paradiso, small-town projectionist Philippe Noiret has died and the Nuovo Cinema Paradiso has become a pile of rubble. The bratty Italian boy Salvatore Cascio has grown into the classy Frenchman Jacques Perrin (like Noiret, dubbed in Italian), a filmmaker who sits to watch a mysterious reel of film the deceased projectionist had left him. It turns out the reel contains clips from films censored by the prudish local parish priest, whose family values found kisses, embraces, and bare breasts and legs a danger to society. Now, who's doing all that kissing, embracing, and breast/leg-displaying in that film reel? (Please scroll down for the Cinema Paradiso clip.) Here are the ones I recognize: Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman in Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice (1949); Mangano...

Peter Whitehead, via Occupy Cinema

"One of last year's best films, Ken Jacobs's Seeking the Monkey King is showing Saturday at Anthology as part of a program presented in support of Occupy Wall Street," writes J Hoberman in one of the last pieces he'll turn in at the Voice. "Covering 500 years of American history, this furious beatnik analysis makes a people's historian like Howard Zinn seem like a Chamber of Commerce booster, particularly as delivered amid [Jg] Thirlwell's industrial-strength rhapsodic noise drone, against the seething apocalypse of melting glaciers and crystallized lava that soon becomes an ongoing Rorschach test." See, too, David Phelps's essay. Seeking the Monkey King is "showing with several of Jacobs's short works (19th-century stereopticon slides treated as material for a cyclotron) and excerpts from his 3D footage of Zuccotti Park. Other films showing in the series are An Injury to One (2002), Travis Wilkerson's lucid,...

Turner Classic Movies has issued the following press release:

Turner Classic Movies to Pay Tribute to Ernest Borgnine, 47th Recipient of Screen Actors Guild’s Life Achievement Award

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Los Angeles (Jan. 7, 2011) - The evening before Screen Actors Guild® bestows its highest honor – the Life Achievement Award – on Ernest Borgnine, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will pay tribute to the memorable character actor with an evening of great performances. TCM’s tribute to Borgnine will take place Saturday, Jan. 29, beginning at 8 p.m. (Et), less than a week after the Oscar®-winning star’s 94th birthday. The 17th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® http://www.sagawards.org will premiere live on TNT and TBS on Sunday, Jan. 30, at 8 p.m. (Et)/5 p.m. (Pt).

TCM’s tribute to Borgnine will include four outstanding films, along with a special encore of TCM’s Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine (2009), in which TCM host Robert Osborne...

hollywoodnews.com: The evening before Screen Actors Guild® bestows its highest honor – the Life Achievement Award – on Ernest Borgnine, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will pay tribute to the memorable character actor with an evening of great performances. TCM’s tribute to Borgnine will take place Saturday, Jan. 29, beginning at 8 p.m. (Et), less than a week after the Oscar®-winning star’s 94th birthday. The 17th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® will premiere live on TNT and TBS on Sunday, Jan. 30, at 8 p.m. (Et)/5 p.m. (Pt).

TCM’s tribute to Borgnine will include four outstanding films, along with a special encore of TCM’s Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine (2009), in which TCM host Robert Osborne sits down with Borgnine for a one-hour chat about the legendary actor’s life and career. Films in the lineup include Borgnine’s Oscar-winning performance in Marty (1955) and noteworthy work in such films...

Some will remember Dino De Laurentiis, who died in Los Angeles at the age of 91, as the producer of Serpico (1973), King Kong (1976), and Dune (1984). The Sidney Lumet-directed Serpico, which stars Al Pacino as a New York cop battling widespread corruption within the police force, remains one the most important Hollywood productions of the '70s. King Kong, for its part, introduced Jessica Lange to the world of filmmaking, while Dune, though one of the biggest critical and box-office disappointments of the 1980s, featured a bald Silvana Mangano — a sight nearly as disturbing as all the weird stuff that goes on in another De Laurentiis production, David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). But when I think of De Laurentiis, what comes to mind — in addition to Mangano's bald head — are Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice (1949), which sealed Mangano's stardom as the pre-Sophia Loren Earth Mother of [...]...

When I was a kid, I devoured the kitschy fun of producer Dino De Laurentiis' films such as the 1976 "King Kong" remake. His name got branded in my feeble mind. When you see his "Dino De Laurentiis Presents" before a trailer, you know that film would be fun!

So the death of the Oscar-winning Italian film producer saddened me. The Italian media was reporting that Laurentiis, who gave the world nearly 500 films including "La Strada," "Serpico," and "Three Days of the Condor" died in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Here's a lengthy but absolutely wonderful snap shot of Laurentiis' life written by John Gallagher from film reference:

One of the most colorful, prolific, and successful producers in the contemporary motion picture business, Dino De Laurentiis has proven his entrepreneurial skills time and again, growing from an independent Italian producer into an international conglomerate. His product, from low-budget neorealist works to multimillion dollar spectacles,...

Italian movie tycoon whose list of credits featured as many disasters as hits

The Italian-born film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who has died aged 91, will perhaps go down in movie history as the last "transatlantic" tycoon. Over a career spanning more than 60 years, producing films on both sides of the ocean, he had as many flops as hits. But De Laurentiis almost always succeeded in staying afloat.

In Rome, he produced Federico Fellini's Oscar-winning La Strada (1954) and the grandiose spectacular War and Peace (1956), but also made The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) and Waterloo (1970), which never recovered their costs. Relocating to the Us, he enjoyed success with Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Conan the Barbarian (1982), but had financial disasters including Year of the Dragon (1985) and a failed food emporium, which he opened in New York. De Laurentiis was also a starmaker, both in Italy, where...

The prolific Italian movie producer whose name was synonymous with grandiose spectacle, if questionable taste, has died aged 91

The age of the producer extraordinaire, whose name on the opening credits was a guarantee of operatic emotions and grandiose spectacle, looked one step closer to the end today, with the announcement that Dino De Laurentiis has died aged 91.

A man whose diminutive stature (he was 5ft 4in) was no obstacle to his enormous ambition or prodigious output (more than 500 films), De Laurentiis started his career selling his family's pasta. After serving in the Italian army in the second world war, he established himself as a film producer, and swiftly became famous for the 1949 classic Bitter Rice, directed by Giuseppe De Santis, and then a handful of neo-realist hits made in collaboration with Carlo Ponti, including Federico Fellini's La Strada in 1954 and Nights of Cabiria in 1957.

De Laurentiis went solo, and...