Nobody's Children

Guido, the owner of a marble quarry, falls in love with Luisa, the daughter of one of his workers, and they have a son. His mother is against the match: she first sends her son abroad, then has the baby taken and lets Luisa believe the boy died in a fire. The rest of the story is about how that single lie shapes everyone’s life for years afterwards. Melodrama is not a genre here so much as the subject itself, with class difference, family pressure and the consolation of religion all working at once. Raffaello Matarazzo directed, and it is among the best known of the melodramas pairing Amedeo Nazzari with Yvonne Sanson that were enormous box office hits in Italy, the run that earned him the title of king of Italian melodrama. Françoise Rosay appears alongside them, and a sequel followed in 1955.