Nights of Cabiria

Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria, 1957) is Federico Fellini's tender drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Giulietta Masina plays Cabiria, a scrappy Roman streetwalker with a sharp tongue and a heart that refuses to harden.

She works the cheapest corners of the city, brawls with the other women, and keeps believing that love is just around the next bend. The film opens with her boyfriend shoving her into a river to steal her purse. She survives, dusts herself off, and goes looking for happiness again — in a marriage proposal, a pilgrimage, a hypnotist's stage. Each time the world takes another swing at her.

Fellini built the picture around his wife, and Masina carries it almost wordlessly, telling whole stories with a glance. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and later became the seed of the Broadway musical Sweet Charity. That last shot, Cabiria walking among street musicians with tears and a flicker of a smile, is one of the most quietly devastating endings ever filmed. Stream Nights of Cabiria (1957) online on iFILM.