LE NOTTE BIANCHI, Luchino Visconti, director Radiance

A much-needed Blu-ray release for a key Italian classic, Le Notte Bianchi (White Nights), based on a Dostoyevsky novella. Luchino Visconti, a key contributor to the neorealist movement, produced his greatest work of personal cinema in The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963), a massive, elegiac masterpiece (much mutilated in its day by its distributors). Much less well-known but h sought after by admirers of Visconti is Le Notte Bianchi. The plot features the saturnine Mario (played by perhaps the most significant actor in Italian Cinema, Marcello Mastroianni) running into a suicidal woman, Natalia (played by Maria Schell) with significant consequences for both. Lacking the visual sumptuousness of other Visconti films such as Senso (also available from Radiance), this is nevertheless a rigorous and intelligent take on Dostoyevsky’s novella, and the 4K restoration is quite stunning – as are the extras on the disc.