Lux film

   Production company. Founded as a film distribution company in Turin in 1934 by philanthropic (and anti-Fascist) industrial-ist-entrepreneur Riccardo Gualino, Lux soon became one of Italy's foremost film production companies. In the following two decades, with Gualino as president and musicologist Guido Gatti as director (joined in 1942 by a young Dino De Laurentiis), Lux produced more than 100 features directed by Italy's most significant filmmakers. The long list of films produced by Lux during its golden period includes Goffredo Alessandrini's Don Bosco (1935), Alessandro Blasetti's La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), Mario Camerini's I promessi sposi (The Spirit and the Flesh, 1941), Giuseppe De Santis's Riso amaro (BitterRice, 1949), Alberto Lattuada's Senza Pieta (Without Pity, 1948), and Luchino Visconti's Senso (The Wanton Countess, 1954).

   In the immediate postwar period, between 1945 and 1954, in addition to funding feature films, the company also employed the talents of writers and directors such as Rodolfo Sonego, Luciano Emmer, Michelangelo Antonioni, Valerio Zurlini, and Riccardo Freda to make dozens of high-quality art historical documentaries. From 1956 onward, however, with Riccardo's son Renato now at the helm, the company reduced its activities mostly to distribution and coproduction. Then, in 1964, following the death of its founder and after almost three decades as one of the beacons of the Italian film industry, the company was wound up.