Vittorio De Sica
The story takes place in Sicily at the turn of the century. Story of frustrated love. Adrina has married Antonio, but who she really loves is her brother Césaar. She lives this love frustration with resignation, just until an irreversible evil causes her love to explode and her joy of living begins. The future does not exist, the minutes of the present are lived face to face, on a journey towards death, but also towards happiness.
Peter Glenville
United Kingdom - USA
148 min.
Reconstruction of the conflict of powers between the Anglican Church (Bishop Becket) and the Crown (Henry II). Based on a play by Anouilh. Interpretive duel between Burton and O'Toole in the British theatrical manner, directed at the cinema by the director of the Old Vic Company, Peter Glenville.
Jules Dassin
Burton resignedly played a fifty-something painter who falls in love with a fifteen-year-old girl who gives him new hopes of living.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
USA - United Kingdom - Switzerland
192 min.
A myth in the history of cinema. Hated by some, loved by others. Even rejected with a mixture of love and hate by her director. Cleopatra is part of a myth. The most expensive to date ($44,000,000), the most controversial, the one with adulterous love, the highest grossing that year in the US and Canada, four Oscars, a tracheotomy for Liz, a wedding, the first from Liz and Richard. The story, you already know what it's about: Caesar, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, the Roman Empire, The Egyptian, loves, wars... anyway! Fights for possessions, amorous and territorial, showiness, apraphernalia, theatricality as they corresponded to the grandiloquence of the historical moment.
Henry Koster
Based on the novel by the famous English writer Daphne Du Maurier, it was the writer herself who, when defending the rights to Fox, made the express recommendation that Richard Burton should interpret it. For this performance he gets his first Oscar nomination. "Burton is the most exciting new film since the advent of Gregory Peck eight years ago," commented the Evening News.
Stanley Donen
A homosexual couple, corroded by the passing of the years, and who have become a stable marriage participate in the problems of daily coexistence and growing old together. An acid, corrosive comedy, sometimes sad when underlying the drama of the passage of time in the love relationship and physical decrepitude. An anthological interpretative hand in hand. Scathing, without falling into cynicism, tender without going through the soft. Half comedy and half drama, like life itself, without being a "melo".
John Huston
Based on a Tennessee Williams drama. Burton plays a priest expelled for being an alcoholic, who makes a living as a tour guide in Mexico. There he lives his own particular ordeal. Seduced by a Lolita (Sue Lyon). Emotionally attached to a nymphomaniac (Ava Gardner), the only thing that comforts him is his relationship with a frustrated spinster (Deborah Kerr). "An absorbing film of rare entity and even rarer maturity," the Herald Tribune said at the time.
Jean Negulesco
Remake of the famous film The Rains Came. Burton plays the Indian doctor created by the novelist Louis Bromfield, previously played by Tyrone Power, and lives his love in an exotic setting with Lana Turner.
Henry Koster
"The Robe" was the great blockbuster with which Fox began a new panoramic format. The enormous success of the film, which became one of the highest-grossing films of its time, established cinemascope for at least a decade. And he agreed with Zanuck in casting a relatively inexperienced actor at that time, instead of Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck, candidates for the leading role.
Andrew V. McLaglen
Switzerland - United Kingdom
134 min.