Among the Italian filmmakers who achieved international prominence in the decades after World War II, Luchino Visconti possessed perhaps the sharpest historical insight and the keenest literary appetite. The 14 features he directed between 1942 and his death, in 1976, included adaptations of books by Dostoyevsky, Camus and Mann, a biopic about King Ludwig II of Bavaria and several forays into the political upheavals of mid-19th-century Italy and early-20th-century Germany.

Visconti, a longtime member of the Italian Communist Party, was also one of the founders of neorealism, dramatizing the struggles of working-class Romans, Sicilian fisherman and migrants from the southern countryside to the factories of the north.