Ore 9: lezione di chimica (1941)

The young Alida Valli starred in the highschool drama Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941). She is in love with her young chemistry teacher, played by the handsome Andrea Checchi. Out of jealousy and revenge, she denounces him and her classmate, when she sees them embraced in the college kitchen. But she is mistaken.


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 1. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli as Anna in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 2. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli and Irasema Dilian in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 3. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli (middle) in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).

Enterprising and unruly

The location for Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941) is the prestigious female college of Villafiorita. Alida Valli plays the enterprising and unruly Anna. Like all the other students, she is in love with Professor Marini (Andrea Checchi), the young chemistry teacher.

She is convinced that her classmate Maria (Irasema Dillian), who is instead educated and studious, is a spy for the director (Giuditta Rissone). When Anna is punished for her diary, she believes in Maria's delation and decides to take revenge.

The occasion comes one night when Anna and some other students wander around the college kitchen, where they see Maria embraced by a man. The girls think they have seen Professor Marini in that man. Anna, therefore, out of jealousy and revenge, denounces the two as lovers.

Maria escapes from boarding school, making her tracks lose on a stormy night. When Maria is found wounded, Anna, repentant, offers herself for a blood transfusion that will save her classmate's life.

Meanwhile, it emerged that the man glimpsed that night was actually Maria's father (Sandro Ruffini), who lives hidden because he was wrongly accused of a crime and who is thus collecting evidence of his innocence.

During the theatrical essay at the end of the course year, the girls, finally united, ask and obtain that Maria can stay in the college. Anna will be able to fulfill her dream of love with the beautiful Professor Marini.


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 4. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli and Andrea Checchi in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 5. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli (right) in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 6. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli (left) in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).

A little risque for the times

Ore 9: lezione di chimica was part of a series of high school dramas of the early 1940s, initiated by Vittorio De Sica's Maddalena... zero in condotta/Maddalena, Zero for Conduct (1940), starring Carlo Del Poggio.

The shooting of Ore 9: lezione di chimica was done in the Summer of 1941 at Cinecittà. For the exteriors, a horse manege, a park in Frascati, and a private villa were used.

The press thought that Alida Valli was miscast. She just had been very successful with the period drama Piccolo mondo antico/Old-Fashioned World (Mario Soldati, 1941), for which she won a special Best Actress award at Venice Film Festival.


It was a difficult period for Valli. She had just lost her fiancé, Carlo Cugnasca, a famous Italian aerobatic pilot. He served as a fighter pilot with the Regia Aeronautica and was killed during a mission over British-held Tobruk on 14 April 1941. His best friend had also succumbed during the war. Valli had a crisis and stayed away from the sets for six months.

The press instead lauded the other main actress, Irasema Dilian, who was then still called Eva Dilian. For some of the other girls like Bianca Della Corte, Giuliana Pitti, and Tatiana Farnese, the film meant their debut. Their careers, however, would mostly exist out of supporting parts.

Ore 9: lezione di chimica was shown among the Italian films at the Venice Film festival of 1941, where Mattoli and Valli were applauded. While Italian critics initially condemned this light entertainment film in wartime, over the years judgments have become milder.

The Mereghetti film dictionary defined it as "a pleasant and polite comedy, a little risque for the times, all revolving within a college between order, transgression and (moderately) sexual drives".


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 7. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. publicity still for Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 8. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 9. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli and Irasema Dilian in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Italbore, Milano, no. 10. Photo: Vaselli / Manenti Film. Alida Valli, Irasema Dilian and Sandro Ruffini in Ore 9: lezione di chimica/Schoolgirl Diary (Mario Mattoli, 1941).

Sources: Wikipedia (Italian and English), and IMDb.

Noi vivi (1942)

Alida Valli, Rossano Brazzi and Fosco Giachetti were the stars of the Italian film Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942). The film - in two parts - was one of the biggest box office hits in Italy during the Second World War. It was an adaptation of We the Living, the debut novel of the Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand, published in 1936. The anti-authoritarian film was soon banned by the Fascist government and pulled from theatres. More than forty years later, Rand found, restored and released the forgotten film. It received rave reviews.


Alida Valli. Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).


Rossano Brazzi. Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Sent by mail in 1942. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).


Fosco Giachetti. Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).

A fanatic student denounces her to the police

Ayn Rand's novel We the Living had been published in an Italian translation in 1937. When director Goffredo Alessandrini read the book, he immediately thought it would make an excellent screen epic. He never secured the film rights from Ayn Rand. Italy was at war with the United States and acquiring rights to the novel would be a major obstacle. The Fascist Ministry of Culture had set up special laws with regards to negotiations for rights and copyrights with enemy countries. So the film was made without the novelist's consent or knowledge, and no attempt was later made to compensate her.

Goffredo Alessandrini was a very successful director during Benito Mussolini's regime. His films are noted for their extreme realism, and have been lauded as anticipating the Neo-Realist movement that was to follow the end of the war. Taking advantage of the laisser-faire policy of the time, Alessandrini and his young associate director and screenwriter Anton Majano simply decided to use Rand's novel and base their screenplay on it.

They knew that We the Living touched on volatile political issues in Fascist Italy, but they hoped they would be safe from repercussions because of the story's negative portrayal of the Soviet Union, Italy's wartime enemy. It was approved for filming due to the intervention of dictator Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio.

We the living is a tale of doomed love within a corrupt political world. In 1922, after the Soviet Revolution, 18-years old Kira Argounova (Alida Valli), the beautiful and smart daughter of impoverished traders, settles in St Petersburg to study engineering.

Kira rebuffs a cousin who rises in the Communist Party and may remember the slight. She has an affair with a mysterious young man, Leo Kovalenski (Rossano Brazzi), son of an executed czarist admiral. He gets into political trouble and flees. A fanatic student, Pavel Sjerov (Emilio Cigoli), denounces Kira to the police. Politic commissioner Andrei (Fosco Giachetti) falls in love with Kira during her arrest and tries to liberate her, raising suspicions.

Freed, Kira tries to flee abroad with Leo, but their boat is intercepted and sinks. They survive but Leo catches typhoid and needs to go to a sanatorium in Crimea. Kira goes to Andrei to ask for help and becomes Andrei's lover in return. But can Leo forgive her being Andrei's mistress?


Italian postcard by ASER, no. 224. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi.


Italian postcard by ASER, no. 234. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Rossano Brazzi and Alida Valli.


Italian postcard. Photo: publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Rossano Brazzi and Alida Valli.

As much against fascism as against communism

Goffredo Alessandrini and screenwriter Anton Majano went with the screenplay to Scalera Films in Rome. The production company asked several other writers to rewrite scenes and alter the dialogue from the existing screenplay. The final draft ended up being so different from the screenplay produced by Alessandrini and Majano that they both decided to start shooting without a script and just follow the book. The pair wrote scenes at night and handed them to the actors in the morning. The result is an adaptation that is more faithful to the novel than is typical in film adaptations of the time.

The film starred Alida Valli, already a major star in Italy, as Kira, top box-office attraction Fosco Giachetti as Andrei, and the incredible handsome Rossano Brazzi as Leo. Many of the extras were White Russian emigres living in Rome. The production designers were also born in Russia. The whole film, even its exteriors, were shot at the studio lot of Scalera. Though the films were little censored by the fascist government as the delicate scenes were not shown to the censors, they were still permitted as the story itself was set in Soviet Russia and was directly critical of that regime.

As weeks went by, it soon became clear to Alessandrini and Majano that it would take longer than the customary three weeks of shooting to finish this film. They also realised that there was enough material for two films, but they chose not to share this information with the actors for fear they would demand to be paid double.

In September 1942, after nearly five months of shooting, the film was completed and presented at the Venice Film Festival where it was awarded the Volpi Cup. The film had a lukewarm reception among the press. Critics thought it to be too dark, long, and talkative. It went on general release in November of the same year as two separate films, Noi Vivi/We the Living and Addio Kira!/Goodbye Kira!. Audiences loved it and turned it into a huge commercial success. This not in the least because of the - then controversial - portrayal of an intelligent, sexually independent heroine.

The Italian public realised that the two films were as much against communism as against the Mussolini regime. Though some pro-Fascist lines had been added to the film, the story is as much an indictment of Fascism as it is of Communism. The Italian newspapers began objecting to it and saying that it was anti-Fascist, which it was, essentially. The authorities got wind of this and the film was banned. Though the film should have been destroyed, Massimo Ferrara, the studio chief for Scalera Films, hid the negative and offered the authorities a negative of another film to be demolished.

After the war, Scalera Film approached Ayn Rand to secure the literary rights to the film(s) so it could be re-released but she refused. Though Rand liked and was impressed by the film(s), she highly resented the distortion of her message with the addition of a few pro-Fascist additions to the film adaptation. A few years later, Scalera Films went into receivership and as part of the inventory of Scalera, both Noi Vivi and Addio Kira! were turned over to a holding company. The company relegated them to a vault where they remained for over twenty-five years.

The film was lost and forgotten for decades, until the late 1960s when Ayn Rand was able to locate the original nitrate negatives, still in good condition in the vault in Rome. Both films were restored, combined into one, and released (with English subtitles) in 1986 as We the Living at the Telluride Film festival in Colorado. There the film received rave reviews, over 44 years after its original release.


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 224. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942) with Fosco Giachetti.


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Ballerini & Fratini, Firenze (B.F.F. Edit.), no. 4397. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Rossano Brazzi and Alida Valli


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 4400. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942) with Fosco Giachetti.


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 4423. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942) with Fosco Giachetti.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

Alida Valli

This week, we're in Bologna at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Our favourite venue is the giant screen in Piazza Maggiore where we will experience tonight "the extravagant cinematic inventions of The Third Man" - according to the Festival website. Just like her co-stars Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard, the female Italian star of this British classic is unforgettable... Strikingly beautiful Alida Valli (1921-2006) started as Italy’s sweetheart of the early 1940s. She fascinated audiences with her flawless porcelain face, her dark, voluptuous hair and her green, expressive eyes, but also with her ability to simultaneously hide and reveal a character's thoughts and emotions. In a career that spanned seven decades, she appeared in more than 110 films including such classics as Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954), Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957) and Bernardo Bertolucci's Strategia del ragno (1970). And The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).


Italian postcard by Ballerini & Fratini, Firenze (B.F.F. Edit.), no. 4240. Photo: I.C.I. / Vaselli.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 210, 1941-1944. Photo: Difu.


Italian postcard by Aser, Roma, no. 250. Photo: Pesce.


Still from The Third Man (1949) with Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten. Source: Dr. Macro's.


Dutch postcard by Takken, Utrecht, no. 1683. Photo: publicity still for Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954).


Italian postcard by Alterocca, Terni, no. 49474.

Cinécitta

Alida Valli was born as Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger in Pola, a town located in Italy’s Istria region (now Pula, the town currently is part of Croatia) in 1921. Her father, Baron Gino Altenburger, was a philosophy professor and part-time music critic of aristocratic Austrian descent (Alida’s title was Baroness of Marckenstein and Frauenberg) and her mother, Silvia Oberecker della Martina, was a piano teacher of mixed German-Italian parentage (some sources state that she was of Slovenian-Italian descent). Not long after Alida's birth, the family moved to Como, where Alida attended a local school.

Following her father’s death, she and her mother went to Rome where Alida studied acting at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), the film academy set up by Benito Mussolini. In 1936, at the age of 15, Alida Altenburger made her first film appearance in the Cinecittà studios with a bit part in I Due sergenti/The Two Sergeants (Enrico Guazzoni, 1936) starring Gino Cervi.

Her surname was changed to the more Italian-sounding Valli (supposedly found by chance in the phone book). In the following years, she often starred in the escapist Telefoni Bianchi productions – the ‘white telephone’ comedies and melodramas always set in very luxurious and wealthy environments.

In 1937, she appeared in the comedy L'amor mio non muore.../A Night in May (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1937), in which she played opposite the Neapolitan acting family Eduardo, Peppino, and Titina DeFilippo.

Her first big success came with the comedies Mille lire al mese/One Thousand Lire per Month (Max Neufeld, 1939) as a beauty with too many worshippers including Osvaldo Valenti, and Assenza ingiustificata/Absence Without Leave (Max Neufeld, 1939), as a young woman who decides to go back to school without the knowledge of her doctor husband (Amedeo Nazzari).

She proved her versatility with the costume drama Manon Lescaut (1940, Carmine Gallone), based on a novel by Abbé Prevost, in which she played the title role opposite matinee idol Vittorio De Sica. Valli’s popularity in the Italian film industry was now near its peak. A poll in the late 1930s had placed her behind only Assia Noris as the most popular female star in the country.


Italian postcard by Rizzoli, Milano, 1939.


Italian postcard by Rizzoli, Milano, 1941. Photo: Venturini.


Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).


Italian postcard. With Fosco Giachetti.


Italian postcard by ASER (A. Scaramaglia Ed. Roma), no. 109.


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 20750. Photo: Bragaglia.

Italy's Sweetheart

By the early 1940s, Alida Valli was top of the bill and became known as ‘Italy’s Sweetheart’. Italcine signed her to a five-year contract. She won an acting award at the Venice Film Festival for Piccolo mondo antico/Old-Fashioned World (Mario Soldati, 1941) with Massimo Serato, about a woman traumatized by her child's death.

During the Second World War, another major success followed with Stasera niente di nuovo/Nothing New This Evening (Mario Mattoli, 1942), the story of a prostitute who refuses help from the reporter (Carlo Ninchi) who loves her. In the film Valli gets to sing Giovanno D’Anzi’s massive hit Ma l’amore no.

For the 19-year-old star, fame and adulation brought both riches and difficulties. Next she played a counter-revolutionary opposite Fosco Giachetti and Rossano Brazzi in Noi Vivi - Addio Kira/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), based on Ayn Rand's anti-Communist novel. The films were successful, and the public easily realized that they were as much against Fascism as Communism. After several weeks, however, the films were pulled from theatres as the German and Italian governments, which abhorred communism, found out the story also carried an anti-fascist message.

With the Nazi push into Italy, she briefly left film making and hid in a friend's apartment to avoid recruitment into propaganda efforts. Others who joined her there were the jazz composer and surrealist painter Oscar De Mejo, who became her husband in 1944, and jazz pianist Piero Piccioni, who would much later become her lover.

After the war it was the title role in Eugenia Grandet/Eugenie Grandet (Mario Soldati, 1947), an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel, that marked her return to form. As the suffering Eugenia, she won a best actress Nastro d’Argento award from the Union of Italian Film Journalists, and caught the eye of independent Hollywood producer David O. Selznick.

Selznick signed her to a contract, and groomed her for a major English-language career. She was given a screen billing with just her surname - Valli - to recall the European glamour of ‘Garbo’. However, she was plunked in mediocre fare and, with a language barrier, had a catatonic presence that did not showcase the emotion she brought to her earlier Italian period. American audiences yawned at Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), in which she was murder suspect Maddalena Paradine defended by Gregory Peck, and The Miracle of the Bells (Irving Pichel, 1948) with Frank Sinatra, in which she played a dead actress whose story is told in flashback.


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 22820. Photo: I.C.I. / Pesce.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3783/1, 1941-1944. Photo: DIFU.


Italian postcard. Photo: RKO.


Dutch postcard. Photo: RKO Radio Films.


Dutch postcard.


Vintage postcard by IBIS, no. 137.

A Classic Of Unremitting Political Cynicism

With Selznick's approval, Alida Valli left for England where she was cast as a mysterious Czech refugee Anna Schmidt wanted by the Russians in post-war Vienna in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). Anna is the devoted lover of Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a racketeer in the black-market world.

The Third Man has since become a classic of unremitting political cynicism, aided by an unexpected zither soundtrack and unforgettable, powerful scenes. One of the best is the final shot in a cemetery, which shows her walking directly past the bumbling American hero (Joseph Cotten), a pulp novelist who, despite all evidence to the contrary, wants to view her character as a damsel in distress.

Valli returned permanently to Europe in 1951 to star opposite Jean Marais in Les Miracles n’ont lieu qu’une fois/Miracles Only Happen Once (Yves Allégret, 1951). It is the story of two enamoured students who, after being separated by the war, are reunited ten years later only to discover that they have changed.

Luchino Visconti offered her the lead role in Senso/Livia (Luchino Visconti, 1954), a beautiful period piece of romance and betrayal based on a novel by Camillo Boito. Set in mid-1800s Venice during the Risorgimento, the film revolves around a Venetian countess torn between nationalistic feelings and an adulterous love for an officer (Farley Granger) of the occupying Austrian forces. Her passionate performance is considered by some the apex of her career, and won her a Best Actress Crystal Star from the French Film Academy. (Senso’s loss at the 1954 Venice Film Festival - the Golden Lion for Best Film went to Renato Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet - caused a furore).


Italian postcard. Ballerini & Fratini, Firenze (B.F.F. Edit.), no 2220. Photo: RKO Radio.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W 503. Photo: R.K.O. Radio.


German postcard by Wilhelm Schulze-Witteburg Graphischer Betrieb (WS-Druck), Wanne Eickel. Photo: Deutsche Commerz Film GmbH. Publicity still of Jean Marais and Alida Valli in Les Miracles n'ont lieu qu'une fois/Miracles Only Happen Once (Yves Allégret, 1951).


Vintage Postcard, no. 952. Publicity still for Ultimo incontro/Last Meeting (Gianni Franciolini, 1951) with Jean-Pierre Aumont.


Italian postcard by Rotocalco Dagnino, Torino. Photo: Lux Film. Alida Valli and Farley Granger as countess Livia Serpieri and Lt. Franz Mahler in Luchino Visconti's historical film Senso (1954).


Italian postcard by Ballerini & Fratini, Firenze (B.F.F. Edit.), no. 2925. Photo: Titanus.

Sex and Drugs Scandal

As her career was beginning to pick up steam again, Alida Valli became involved in a sex and drugs scandal following the mysterious death of a 20-year-old fashion model named Wilma Montesi, whose body was found on a beach near Rome. Prolonged investigations resulted, involving sensational allegations of drugs and sex orgies in Roman society. Among the accused – all of whom were acquitted, leaving the case unsolved – was Valli's lover, jazz musician Piero Piccioni (son of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs). Alida Valli was divorced from Oscar De Mejo in 1952, and she claimed that she and Piccioni were staying at a villa in Capri at the time of the death of Montesi. This was a factor in his acquittal at the trial.

The scandal inspired Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita/The Sweet Life (1960). In 1957 Valli once again made a glorious come-back with her role in another classic of the European cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido/The Cry (1957) with Steve Cochran. She played a weary and impoverished woman who rejects her working-class lover.

In Italy, she was also well-known for her stage appearances. She had easily moved from ingénue to vivid character roles. In 1956, she made her stage début, starring under the direction of her future husband Giancarlo Zagni at Palermo’s Teatro Biondo in Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, William Archibald’s The Innocents, and Luigi Pirandello’s L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù/The Man, the Beast and Virtue. She was to appear in more than thirty plays in the next four decades.

Among her later films were La Grande strada azzurra/The Wide Blue Road (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1957) starring Yves Montand, the horror masterpiece Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960), Une Aussi longue absence/The Long Absence (Henri Colpi, 1962), Ophelia (Claude Chabrol, 1963) with Juliette Mayniel, El hombre de papel/The Paper Man (Ismael Rodriguez, 1963), Edipo re/Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967) with Silvana Mangano, La prima notte di quiete/The Professor (Valerio Zurlini, 1972), starring Alain Delon, and La Chair de l'orchidée/Flesh of the Orchid (Patrice Chéreau, 1975), starring Charlotte Rampling.

She worked three times with Bernardo Bertolucci, in La strategia del ragno/The Spider's Stratagem (1970), Novecento/1900 (1976), and La Luna/Luna (1979). She also worked with such horror masters as Mario Bava in La Casa dell'esorcismo/The House of Exorcism (1973) and Dario Argento in Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).

More recent were her roles in Il Lungo silenzio/The Long Silence (1993, Margaretha von Trotta) and A Month by the Lake (John Irvin, 1995). Her final film role was in Semana Santa/Angel of Death (Pepe Danquart, 2002), with Mira Sorvino.

In 2006, Alida Valli died in Rome at the age of 84. She had two sons with Oscar De Mejo, Carlo De Mejo and Lorenzo 'Larry' De Mejo. Her grandson Pierpaolo De Mejo is an actor and director, who made the documentary Come diventai Alida Valli/How I Became Alida Valli (2008) about his grandmother.


Trailer for The Third Man (1949). Source: Britmovies (YouTube).


Trailer for Senso (1954). Source: The Criterion Collection (YouTube).


Trailer for Il Grido/The Cry (1957). Source: Danios 12345 (YouTube).


Trailer for Suspiria (1977). Source: Oliver Gašpar (YouTube).

Sources: Michael Plass (Alida Valli Net) (German), Adam Bernstein (Washington Post), Andre Soares (Alternative Film Guide), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia, Reel Classics, and IMDb.