Flower of Evil

A nasty Rome police chief circa 1800 forces the lover of a painter, suspected of harboring a political prisoner, to reveal the hiding place and to yield to his power and lust.

An opera company tries to get an engagement.

Thea is a sculptor who is diagnosed with tuberculosis before she marries Filippo. After abandoning him, her health begins to decline. She organizes a final party, inviting along her estranged husband. The film is considered to be lost, with only a fragment surviving in the film archive of the Cineteca Italiana.

Birdaghin is a dancer at La Scala in Milan whose rapid success also quickly goes to her head. Fortunately, everything will be fine.

Bewildered, Don Camillo learns that Peppone intends to stand for parliament. Determined to thwart his ambitions, the good priest, ignoring the recommendations of the Lord, decides to campaign against him.

A taxi driver, with singing ambitions, finds an abandoned baby in his cab and begins to look for his mother. He doesn't find her but succeeds in finding two people who want to adopt the child.

A hotel worker who is really an aristocrat falls for a lady customer but instead of getting married he prefers to stay at work and get what female company he can from the staff.

Director Rosé and his opera company travel to Monte Carlo where they expect an engagément to perform at the opera house. During the boat trip Mario, the cheerful tenor, meets a girl hidden in his cabin. He helps her singing for her passage and soon Nicole is adopted by the whole troupe. Then at Monte Carlo the opera director has no intention to sign them. But he has an eye for beautiful women, so Nicole will try to persuade him to reconsider the offer.

Don Camillo (now bishop) and Peppone (now senator) return to the town of Brescello and rekindle their friendly rivalry.

Goethe's drama and Gounod's opera "Faust" is treated here like a movie rather than the usual photographed-opera from a stage method. Faust is a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for eternal youth, and the latter, with guileful glee, leads Faust to disaster along the paths of pleasure. Marguerite falls in love with Faust, and suffers as a consequence.

When Emir Feofar Khan, leader of the Tartar hordes, takes up arms and invades the steppes of Eastern Siberia, Czar Alexander II of Russia entrusts the brave officer Michael Strogoff with a dangerous mission.

The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.

Early Italian pirate adventure.