Bruce Loeb on Piano. "Francesca Bertini used her face to find endlessly renewed, unexpected, staggering expressions; she had an amazing capacity to express something by just slightly modifying her features." (Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema) The most famous of all the divas, the "Bertini phenomenon," as Vittorio Martinelli notes, is partly defined by her "sensitive and attentive interpretation of the tastes and moods, as well as the ideal, of Italian society in the period of the First World War." If her first famous role was as a woman of the people in Assunta Spina, in the D'Annunzian mood of the moment this image was immediately replaced by the "great roles"-statuesque, classical, rich (if compromised) women such as in Sangue blue, a role created for Bertini, and which she turned into a popular triumph. A newly divorced princess is compromised by her friendship with a mime and loses custody of her child. Forced by the actor to expose herself in the Folies-Bergère, she attempts to take her own life in the film's climactic "tango of death." Preceded by a rare print in the PFA Collection, a fragment of La Tosca (Gustavo Serena, Alfredo De Antoni, Italy, 1918) starring Francesca Bertini, believed to be a lost film. (11.5 mins, B&W, 35mm)