Giovanni Verga Movies

It is the 19th century in Italy, and Maria (Angela Bettis) has joined a convent in order to explore her strong feeling that she has a calling to become a nun. She has adapted to live at the convent quite nicely, and is relatively untroubled, but a cholera outbreak sends her back to be with her family for a while, near the steaming peak of Mount Etna. She enjoys her freedom to move around the countryside, and is wooed (unsuccessfully, it seems) by a charming young man named Nico, but returns to the convent when the danger is past. There, she is troubled by the thought that she truly loved Nico, and that her calling may not be as firm as she thought. When she learns that Nico has married her sister, she nearly goes mad with self-recrimination, but eventually weathers the storm. All the dialog in this Italian-made film by Franco Zeffirelli is in English. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

A father and son are offered a good price for their land by a wealthy land baron. they agree to the sale, but are tricked into giving up their property through a bureaucratic maneuver for next to nothing. The son grows up to become a young man and fueled by his hatred for the evil baron, he seeks revenge on all who drove his family from the land. He becomes an outlaw but manages to escape capture while he kills off those responsible for uprooting his family by underhanded means. One by one, the victims fall to the vengeful son as he becomes a legendary hero to the peasants and the oppressed. The color process for the film is not credited. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

La Lupa (The She-Devil) was filmmaker Alberto Lattuada's first film after his classic The Overcoat. Based on a short story by Giovanni Verga, the film stars Kerima as the title character. Aptly named, La Lupa is a predatory female who considers every man she meets a potential conquest. When it seems as though Manni (Ettore Manni) will slip through her clutches, La Lupa arranges for a marriage between Manni and her own daughter Marrichia (May Britt). Eventually she is thrown out of that household, but does this slow her down? Not when there's a whole village full of bachelors, ripe for plucking. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Luchino Visconti's pseudo-documentary look at the exploitation of Sicilian fishermen was based on Giovanni Verga's 1881 novel I Malavoglia. The townspeople of Aci Trezza, Sicily, portrayed themselves, speaking in their native dialects and fretting about economic hardship for over 160 minutes of screen time. As nobly neorealist as such an endeavor must have seemed, it died at the box office upon initial release, leading Visconti to add narration in standard Italian. The truth is that the film wasn't all that realistic to begin with, as Visconti's unshakable attachment to cinematic artifice led him to pretty up the dreary goings-on with camera virtuosity that seems completely misplaced given the events onscreen. More grueling than illuminating, this film was the first of a proposed trilogy (the remaining films were to deal with Sicilian peasants and miners) that Visconti mercifully never got around to making. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide