White Nights (1957)

Dostoevsky's short story Белые ночи ("White Nights") has been filmed a half-dozen times in the history of cinema, first and foremost by—wait, Luchino Visconti? In Italy?

It's true. In the Venice-like city of Livorno, about as far as you can get in Europe from nights being white or even ever experiencing snowfall, Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard) tells the intimate story of a man who falls in love with a woman at first sight, only to discover she's in love with another man—a man who vanished and for whom she promised to wait.

Maria Schell learned her lines in Italian, so well that they didn't even dub her, removing one of the primary distractions of Italian films for me. Marcello Mastroianni is a young, hopeful loser—a stranger in a strange land for whom the mere sight of Schell is enough to act as a kind of grounding.

The two spend four nights, sharing their backstories and engaging in frivolity in the freezing Italian winter.

Look, it works. Even when there's a little snowfall at the end. In Livorno. It's fine! Stop being so literal-minded!

Schell and Mastroianni are appealing, even as they seem to be hurtling toward their certain doom. (That much of the Russian original is preserved.) The sound, as mentioned, does not have the dubbing, which is as distracting to me as it is traditional. Cinecitta, where this was filmed, has that wonderful fairy-tale feel where everything is intimate and the big city proper is always just over a bridge or across the canal.

Surprise appearance by Bill Haley and the Comets. (On the soundtrack.)

The story is Russian, so expect some sadness. But it's not gratuitously bleak or awful to its characters. Worth a watch.