La montagne de verre

This is really all about the magnificent score from Nino Rota - I remember my mum had it on an LP (sorry if you have to google that) and alongside "the Warsaw Concerto" was regularly heard emanating from our old record player. The story itself is a gentle romance with real-life couple Michael Denison, a would-be composer who joins the RAF in WWII and Dulcie Gray. He is shot down over Italy where he spends much of the rest of the conflict and gradually falls in love with a gorgeous Valentina Cortese. Once the war is over, he is repatriated and finds success with his music but can't quite reconcile his conflicted love life. It's a lovely little story, tinged with tragedy, done on a shoestring budget with some pretty scenic photography. It runs a bit too much to language at times and it could lose 20 minutes, I felt, but very much emblematic of British sentiment immediately after the end of the war.

In the Italian Dolomites a British composer (Michael Denison) loves an Italian girl (Valentina Cortese) who had saved his life during the war. This finely-cast soap opera, which also features the great Italian baritone Tito Gobbi, was an enormous British success, less so in its American release. A great deal of it has to do with its wonderful music including an invented opera by the great film-composer Nino Rota, who provided scores for Fellini's best films. Much of the film was shot on location in the Dolomites and at Venice's La Fenice Opera House, destroyed in recent years by a tragic fire. This is a film that is very much worth re-discovering.

I first saw this movie in 1950 and I fell in love with the music. I still play the themes today. Although I have since visited parts of Switzerland I still yearn to see the Matterhorn and find out if it's true that if you call out the name of your true love, it will echo around the mountain.This was the myth featured in the film and although Richard thought he loved the woman who saved his life up there, when his wife's small aircraft crashed on the mountain and he rushed to be by her side - he called her name and back came the echo - how romantic. Michael Dennison and Dulcie Gray were a married couple in true life and they didn't have any problems playing together. Anne

A nicely shot, scenically attractive, and often moving, powerful and dramatic film. Well worth seeing for its looks alone, but fine score by Nino Rota and the voice of the great baritone Tito Gobbi make it a must for opera lovers. If the main theme sounds familiar it was used years ago for the theme song for a TV show called "Picture for a Sunday Afternoon".

Only in the movies could an Englishman in difficulties in the Dolomites come round to find himself being tended to by Tito Gobbi (who promptly bursts into song), as happens to Michael Denison in this delirious piece of frightfully British hokum enhanced by spectacular Alpine scenery and a sequence in Venice.

Aided by the crashing chords of Fellini's later collaborator Nino Rota on the soundtrack and a charming young Valentina Cortese making her debut, audiences in postwar austerity Britain just lapped it up.