The best William Berger’s drama movies

Von Ryan's Express stars Frank Sinatra as a POW colonel who leads a daring escape from WWII Italy by taking over a freight train, but he has to win over the British soldiers he finds himself commanding.

In 1938 Berlin, Gudrun Landgrebe, wife of Nazi functionary Kevin McNally, begins taking art lessons. She makes the acquaintance of another student, Japanese ambassador's daughter Mio Takaki. Soon afterwards, the two women begin a passionate lesbian affair. This leads to a chain reaction of disaster and tragedy, culminating with the inevitable intervention of the Gestapo. Despite the film's galloping sexual passions, The Berlin Affair is an exercise in aloofness, keeping the characters at arm's length-surprising, considering that the director was Liliana Cavani, auteur of the erotic classic The Night Porter (1974). The film was based on The Buddhist Cross, a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki.

16-year-old Maria is forced into Serra D'Aires convent, secretly run by Satanists. Her confessor is in collusion with the Mother Superior. Maria is tortured, forced into sex with men, women, and the horned Devil, and told that it's all a bad dream. She writes a letter to God, and a Knight rescues her, only to fall into the hands of the Inquisition, put on the rack, and condemned to death like Joan of Arc.

Fr. Hugh O'Flaherty is a Vatican official in 1943-45 who has been hiding downed pilots, escaped prisoners of war, and Italian resistance families. His diplomatic status in a Catholic country prevents Colonel Kappler from openly arresting him, but O'Flaherty's activities become so large that the Nazi's decide to assassinate him the next time he leaves the Vatican. O'Flaherty continues his work in a variety of disguises. Based on a true story. Written by John Vogel

Since her husband pronounced her frigid on her wedding night, Antonia DeAngelis has been an invalid. When he disappears, she believes him dead: she leaves her bed and takes over his business, traveling to see clients. She discovers her husband's passions, his political writing, mistresses, and his indifference to the peasants on her family's land. She improves their lot, begins an affair with a young foreign doctor, and publishes her husband's writings. All this time, he's hiding from a murder charge in a house across the square. Amazed, he watches her become his sexual and social equal. After the police drop the murder charge, will he disappear, end his life, or rejoin her on new terms?

Israeli attorney Hanna Kaufman has her beliefs challenged when she is appointed to the defense of Selim Bakri. Kaufman, who was born in the United States to survivors of the Holocaust, has always accepted Israel's right to exist. But she bears witness to some of the costs of its sovereignty when she meets Bakri, a dispossessed Palestinian man facing serious criminal charges who wants the same thing as his supposed enemies: to reclaim his family home.

Following the mysterious decapitation of an insurance investigator, Police Inspector Peretti is put onto the case, but all the clues lead to an unsolved case of kidnapping and murder.

A seductive woman pushes three men to the limits toying with their sexual desires and male pride.

This slight skewering of the mindset of the Fascist era when Italy’s “White Telephone” films (conservative minded sophisticated comedy-dramas revolving around the bourgeoisie) were in vogue gives Agostina Belli her best role – an ambitious Venetian girl that goes from chambermaid to prostitute to singer to film-star to mistress of ‘Il Duce’! – for which she received a special David Di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar.

A middle-aged artist (Ben Gazarra) sketching on the beach witnesses a young woman (Ornella Muti) being rescued from drowning. He loans her a blanket. Later she returns the blanket and they have sex several times, but she always leaves right afterward, leaving the man to wonder who she is and where she goes. Things become more complicated as he begins to fall in love with her, and after his regular girlfriend (Mimsy Farmer), with whom he has a curiously open relationship, returns. He eventually begins to realize his mysterious new lover may be very much insane.

An American narcotics agent is murdered in Italy. The head of the department decides to hire Larry Stanziani, 'The Cobra'. Larry, a former agent and now a third-rate private detective, uses the opportunity to get even with an old enemy, but soon he finds out he's facing a relentless organization

Amid the craggy, dusty hills of southern France (or is it northern Spain?), a woman screams in the night. Gorgeous Melissa Comfort (Mona Proust), a wealthy heiress confined to a wheelchair since birth, cries out in her nightmares, terrified of a dream that comes night after night. In this night terror, she's 10-years-old. Running from a man who may or may not be her father.

A filmmaker of committed films, together with his lover, plans to commit suicide within a few days.

Film adaptation by Straub and Huillet of Hölderlin's 1798 tragedy on the symbolic death of Empedoclus, the legislator in Ancient Greece.