Mambo

Giovanna Masetti is a poor Italian shopgirl who dreams of becoming a dancer. She feels trapped by her job and her boyfriend Mario Rossi, a small-time crook and gambler. Hope arrives in the form of an invitation to a masquerade ball hosted by the wealthy Count Enrico Marisoni. A tipsy Giovanna dances the mambo with Enrico, attracting the attention of the director of a famous dance company. After months of training, she becomes the company's star performer and the toast of Venice. Her love life, too, improves when she accepts the Count's marriage proposal. But a jealous Mario, unable to let Giovanna go, threatens to shatter all her hopes and dreams…

Robert Rossen, the acclaimed director of All the King's Men (1949), was blacklisted in Hollywood after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. After going without work for two years, he appeared before the HUAC again, this time naming 57 Hollywood professionals as members of the Communist Party. Rossen's blacklisting was over, but his finances and reputation were in ruins. The desperate director accepted an offer from legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis to make a movie in Italy capitalizing on the-then current mambo craze. His leading lady was De Laurentiis' wife, Silvana Mangano, who had become an international sensation for her curvaceous figure after appearing in the producer's Bitter Rice (1949). Co-stars included Michael Rennie, best known for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), as well as Oscar winner Shelley Winters and celebrated Italian actor Vittorio Gassman (who were at the time husband and wife.) Mangano was taught how to dance by famed dancer Katherine Dunham, who also served as choreographer and appeared as an actress in the production. Despite all the talent involved, Mambo met with mixed reviews when it premiered in Rome in September of 1954. By the time it made its U.S. debut next year, the film had been shorn of 16 minutes. Regardless, it restored Rossen's reputation in the United States. His 1961 film The Hustler, starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason, would be nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning two.