Anna Magnani	Maddalena Cecconi
Walter Chiari	Alberto Annovazzi
Tina Apicella	Maria Cecconi
Gastone Renzelli	Spartaco Cecconi
Tecla Scarano	the teacher of recitation
Arturo Bragaglia	the photographer
Lola Braccini	his wife
Liliana Mancini	Iris
Alessandro Blasetti	him same
Mario Chiari	him same

Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani) is a Roman plebeian that dreames for her child (Apicella) a star future, and to get it she is prepared to any sacrifice, also to put in crisis her marriage. The impact with the show world, where a schemer (Chiari), with the excuse of helping her, steals all her saving, will let her change idea. A desperate and grotesque film on the forgery myth of cinema, that ironically uses, as conductor spin, the air of “L’elisir d’amore” of Donizetti. But also, if not above all, a fierce film on the phylosophy of Neorealism: here the people’s representation is full of contrasts and contradictions, realized with the pitiless eye of who knows that the dreams are destined to break down in front of the reality’s ferocity. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

Before realizing Bellissima (1951) Visconti will have to attend over three yers. the work marks his meeting, with almost ten years of delay, with Anna Magnani (that he would like to have in the part of Giovanna in Ossessione) and with Cesare Zavattini, and above all, it allows the director to return to an idea of cinema and of direction more adherent to his poetic, based on the exaltation of the professionalism and on the maximum reduction of the improvisation. Behind Anna Magnani, Visconti prepares a whole choir of popular voices that continously move and interlace, allowing shiny look on the chronic conditions of poverty and hunger of Italy, just gone out of the reconstructions’ phase and ready to look beyond the horizon of the immediate needs. To this popular Italian, cinema offers itself in all its charmer ability of dreams’factory, but of previleged place within which the desire of a sudden change of the social status can be realized. Visconti gets off with cruelty the cinema camera, tries to gaze behind the cine camera showing the absolute ideal and ethic insubstantiality of the cinema world. Once again Anna Magnani, whose daughter has been selected to become the protagonist of the film, show the sense of defeat in front of the refusal of the big director (Alessandro Blasetti), that is the refusal of the big life’s occasion. And nevertheless this defeat is not so much and only of the character that represents a class, but an utopia that has seen in the Italian cinema of the postwar period a real instrument of modification and of knowledge of the world. While Visconti is finishing to film Bellissima, the cord that still link him to the neorealism culture is definitely cut off. (From “Il cinema” vol. 3, De Agostini 1981, translated by Alice Castoldi)