Selected by the Writers Branch.

This epic melodrama from director Luchino Visconti helped to make an international star of French actor Alain Delon, cast as one of five sons of a poor rural Italian family whose fortunes fall even farther after a move to Milan. The screenplay was a collaboration between Visconti and four other writers including Suso Cecchi D’Amico—one of the first female screenwriters in Italian cinema and a key figure in the neorealist movement; her remarkable body of work includes such classics as Bicycle Thieves (1948), Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), and The Leopard (1963).

Academy Museum film programming is generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.