Annibale Ninchi Movies

Fresh off of the international success of La Dolce Vita, master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. Marcello Mastroianni delivers a brilliant performance as Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque." 8 1/2 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival, and was one of the most influential and commercially successful European art movies of the 1960s, inspiring such later films as Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and even Lucio Fulci's Italian splatter film Un Gatto nel Cervello (1990). ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

In one of the most widely seen and acclaimed European movies of the 1960s, Federico Fellini featured Marcello Mastrioanni as gossip columnist Marcello Rubini. Having left his dreary provincial existence behind, Marcello wanders through an ultra-modern, ultra-sophisticated, ultra-decadent Rome. He yearns to write seriously, but his inconsequential newspaper pieces bring in more money, and he's too lazy to argue with this setup. He attaches himself to a bored socialite (Anouk Aimée), whose search for thrills brings them in contact with a bisexual prostitute. The next day, Marcello juggles a personal tragedy (the attempted suicide of his mistress (Yvonne Furneaux)) with the demands of his profession (an interview with none-too-deep film star Anita Ekberg). Throughout his adventures, Marcello's dreams, fantasies, and nightmares are mirrored by the hedonism around him. With a shrug, he concludes that, while his lifestyle is shallow and ultimately pointless, there's nothing he can do to change it and so he might as well enjoy it. Fellini's hallucinatory, circus-like depictions of modern life first earned the adjective "Felliniesque" in this celebrated movie, which also traded on the idea of Rome as a hotbed of sex and decadence. A huge worldwide success, La Dolce Vita won several awards, including a New York Film Critics CIrcle award for Best Foreign Film and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Scipio L'Africano (aka Scipio Africanus) represented the first foray into filmmaking by Vittorio Mussolini, the war-hero son of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. It was originally intended to be an Italian-American co-production, but Hollywood producer Hal Roach pulled out of the project on the advice of his associates. Rumors have it that Vittorio's father, "Il Duce" himself, wrote the screenplay and personally demanded that Italian filmmaker Carmine Gallone return to his homeland to direct the picture. One of the most expensive historical epics in movie history, the film concentrates on Roman consul Scipio's (Annibale Ninchi) Herculean efforts to topple the regime of Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal (Camillo Pilotto). It takes 15 years, but Scipio is finally able to raise a big enough army to defeat Hannibal, first in Africa and finally at the pivotal Battle of Zama. A subplot concerns the political intrigues concocted by the treacherous Numidian Queen Sofonisba (Francesca Braggioti). To bring Scipio L'Africano to fruition, director Gallone was afforded the luxury of a 232-day production schedule. According to official files, 32,848 extras, 1,000 horses and 50 elephants (for Hannibal's journey across the Alps) were used in the film. Even so, this heavily propagandistic paean to the glories of the Roman Empire is often shoddily put together, chock full of such anachronisms as telephone wires stretching over the battlefields. The film was not the enormous flop that many people claim, but its lukewarm box-office showing was enough to convince the Italian film industry to concentrate on musicals and "white telephone" comedies for the duration of the Mussolini regime. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide