Carlos Cotrim

A drama about double personality

Barber's jeep crash against crazy scientist's house, where the latter was building a time-machine. The crash triggers the machine, taking them to Gaza kingdom, circa 1153 B.C., where they get involved in many funny situations. Spoof of Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah

Arlindo works delivering the clothes that his wife washes. During a working day, he finds a customer's cat, who offers a reward to whoever returns it. To deliver the animal, he ends up going through a lot of confusion.

When chain gang prisoners attack their guards, some of the hardened criminals escape Brazil's infamous Anchieta Prison amidst all the pick-ax carnage. The government dispatches a machine-gun squad to round up the fugitives.

A poor girl must find the money to pay for her blind sister's eyesight operation.

Camillo Mastrocinque was one of many foreigners who came to Brazil in the 1950s to make films. The director of melodramas during the Italian fascist era directed this film, Areião (Inca Film, 1952), which could have spared Maria Della Costa. The film was renamed La priggione di sabbia to compete at the Venice Film Festival, but was rejected.

Maos Sangrentas translates to Bloody Hands in English, and that's just what this gruesome Brazilian melodrama delivers. The story begins when a gang of dangerous convicts escape from a penal colony. With the police in hot pursuit, the escapees cut a gory swath through the countryside. As his comrades are killed off one by one, the leader of the group descends into gibbering madness. In contrast to this, a subplot develops involving the least dangerous of the escapees, who murdered his wife in a peak of self-righteous rage and is now seriously in doubt about the wisdom of his deed. Principal scenes reworked in 1962 to make the film The Violent and the Damned (q.v.).