Beautiful: Luchino Visconti masterfully mixes the sweet and the sour; it tells a fundamentally sad tale of a mother holding no barrels to get her young daughter into the movies. This being the still impoverished and demolished post-war Italy, the perspectives of anyone, let alone a woman, are not the greatest. The stroke of genius, however, is in keeping the tone mostly light, due to the entertaining value of Anna Magnani, who plays the unstoppable, lovingly misguided motormouth mother, willing to sacrifice it all in the name of a dream she doesn’t understand fully. As a young and charming rascal trying to gain from her despair, Walter Chiari is effective. Tina Apicella, who plays the young girl, is cute and gets the job done. Editor Mario Serandrei keeps the story moving along, neither overstaying in any particular episode nor undercutting their emotional impact. Directors of photography Piero Portalupi and Paul Ronald’s camerawork beautifully capture both the star’s beauty and the broken city.