Includes bibliographical references (p. 593-645) and index.

Part One: Early Italian Cinema. The silent era -- The coming of sound and the fascist era -- Part Two: Italian Neorealism. Masters of neorealism: Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti -- Exploring the boundaries of neorealism -- The break with neorealism: the cinema of the reconstruction, Fellini's trilogies of character and grace, and the return of melodrama -- Part Three: The Golden Age of Italian Cinema. The Italian "Peplum": the sword and sandal epic -- Commedia all'italiana: comedy and social criticism -- Neorealism's legacy to a new generation, and the Italian political film -- The mateur auteurs: new dimensions in film narrative in Visconti, Antonioni, De Sica, and Fellini -- The spaghetti nightmare: horror films from the 1950s to the present -- A fistful of pasta: Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western -- Mystery, gore, and mayhem: the Italian Giallo -- Myth, Marx, and Freud in Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci -- The Poliziesco: Italian crime films from the 1970s to the present -- Part Four: Generational Change in the Contemporary Italian Cinema. The old guard never surrenders: Italy's prewar auteurs in the 1980s and 1990s -- The third wave: a new generation of auteurs -- Italian cinema enters the third millennium.