Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas (4-DVD)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festivalgoers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of director Raffaello Matarazzo. Though turning to neorealism for character types and settings, these haywire hits about splintered love affairs and broken homes, all starring mustachioed matinee idol Amedeo Nazzari and icon of feminine purity Yvonne Sanson, luxuriate in delirious plot twists and overheated religious symbolism. Four of them are collected here, chronicles of men and women on long and serpentine roads to redemption, each less restrained and more wildly fun than the last.

This box set - the 27th volume of The Criterion Collection's ECLIPSE series of rare and unknown films - turns to four baroque, operatic melodramas helmed by the Italian director Raffaello Matarazzo in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The films featured herein borrowed character types and situations from neorealismo but stood at the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum. The collection begins with CHAINS (1949), about an upstanding Italian housewife whose world is turned upside down by the sudden reappearance of a former lover. Next up is TORMENTO (1953) about a well-meaning young woman who escapes from the clutches of her nasty stepmother and attempts to begin a new life with her impoverished beau - with disastrous consequences. NOBODY'S CHILDREN (1953) follows the tragic romance of a rich count and a poor village girl. Finally, THE WHITE ANGEL (1955) resumes the story of the NOBODY'S CHILDREN couple, following them on an adventure that includes a prison riot and a boating accident.