Claudia Cardinale Once Upon a Time

June 9–July 22, 2023

Coproduced by Cinecittà, Rome, and featuring new restorations, Claudia Cardinale Once Upon a Time focuses on her great performances from the late 1950s through the 1960s in films imbued with an intelligence and depth that surpass the confines of the scripted characters.

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  • 8 1/2

  • The Leopard

  • Once Upon a Time in the West

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Bebo’s Girl

    Luigi Comencini
    Italy, 1963
    Friday, June 9 7 PM
    Prerecorded Introduction by Claudia Squitieri

    In the ruins of postwar Italy, two young lovers find their union halted by the political hatred that still divides their country. Starring Claudia Cardinale, who earned her first major acting award for her performance, and George Chakiris (West Side Story).

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  • The Leopard

    Luchino Visconti
    Italy, 1963
    Sunday, June 11 7 PM

    A compelling Claudia Cardinale anchors Luchino Visconti’s effortless integration of family history into a panoramic account of the Risorgimento. “Perhaps no film captures the Proustian aesthetic more firmly” (Warren Sonbert).

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  • The Facts of Murder

    Pietro Germi
    Italy, 1959
    Thursday, June 15 7 PM

    A police detective encounters a cross section of Italian society as he investigates two crimes in the same Rome apartment building in Pietro Germi’s combination of neorealism, film noir, and even comedy.

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  • Rocco and His Brothers

    Luchino Visconti
    Italy, 1960
    Saturday, June 17 7 PM

    A southern Italian family seeking a better life in Milan mirrors the transformation of postwar Italian society in Luchino Visconti’s masterwork starring Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in an early role. “The emotional sweep of a Verdi opera and the narrative density of a nineteenth-century novel” (New York Times).

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  • Senilità

    Mauro Bolognini
    Italy, 1962
    Thursday, June 22 7 PM

    A melancholy, well-off clerk (Antony Franciosa) hopes to finally find love in the arms of a sensuous, high-spirited flapper (Claudia Cardinale), with predictably doomed results, in Mauro Bolognini’s fog-drenched adaptation of a novel by James Joyce favorite Italo Svevo.

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  • La viaccia

    Mauro Bolognini
    Italy, 1961
    Sunday, June 25 7 PM

    A headstrong peasant (Jean-Paul Belmondo) abandons the politics and doom of his family farm for the arms of a beautiful prostitute (Claudia Cardinale) in a rain-soaked nineteenth-century Florence. Directed by Mauro Bolognini, one of Cardinale’s favorite collaborators.

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  • Girl with a Suitcase

    Valerio Zurlini
    Italy, 1961
    Sunday, July 2 4:30 PM

    Abandoned by a playboy aristocrat, a showgirl (Claudia Cardinale) makes do with his teenage brother in this moving study of adolescence and class filmed in Parma and Rimini.

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  • The Magnificent Cuckold

    Antonio Pietrangeli
    Italy/France, 1964
    Saturday, July 8 4:30 PM

    Claudia Cardinale lends a becalmed radiance in this giddy tale of a middle-aged businessman (Ugo Tognazzi) who’ll stop at nothing to prove his young wife is cheating on him, even though he’s the one who’s been unfaithful.

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  • 8 1/2

    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1963
    Thursday, July 13 7 PM

    A traffic jam nightmare, a literal flight of fancy, nuns and whores and more: 8 1/2 follows the dreams and visions of a jaded director (Marcello Mastroianni) as he bemusedly attempts his next great film, which may or may not take precedence over his own sexual desires. Followed by Un Cardinale Donna.

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  • Sandra

    Luchino Visconti
    Italy, 1965
    Saturday, July 15 7 PM

    Luchino Visconti’s somber mood piece is an Elektra story of madness and incestuous passions in a family haunted by secrets and the shadow of the Holocaust. Claudia Cardinale stars with Jean Sorel and Marie Bell.

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  • Once Upon a Time in the West

    Sergio Leone
    Italy, United States, 1968
    Saturday, July 22 3:30 PM

    Sergio Leone goes to the heartland of the Western—Monument Valley—for this monumental revision of American myth, starring Henry Fonda as a ruthless killer up against Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, and Claudia Cardinale.

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