Best movies like Variety Lights
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Variety Lights Starring Peppino De Filippo, Carla Del Poggio, Giulietta Masina, John Kitzmiller, and more. If you liked Variety Lights then you may also like: Upstage, The Ring, Kansas City Princess, The Bride Comes Home, Before You Say 'I Do' and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
In Italy, Checco Dal Monte manages a troupe of traveling performers with plenty of heart but minimal talent. At a small town engagement, he encounters the starry-eyed, gorgeous Lily Antonelli, and hires her as a dancer on the show. Vivacious Lily quickly sells out crowds and earns the resentment of Checco's mistress, Melina Amour, but the fledgling performer has far bigger ambitions and soon sets her sights on a higher-profile role.
Variety Lights
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Kansas City Princess
Rosie and Marie are wisecracking Kansas City manicurists. Marie is an unabashed golddigger but Rosie would like to marry her gangster boyfriend Dynamite, who's given her an expensive ring. When she loses the ring, both friends have to flee Dynamite's wrath; their adventures include masquerading as girl scouts and taking an ocean voyage to Paris.
The Bride Comes Home
A penniless socialite is hired by two young men as a front in their plan to start a magazine. Soon, however, they find themselves more interested in her than in their publishing venture.
Before You Say 'I Do'
George Murray's fiancée Jane Gardner gets cold feet after accepting his ring, terrorized by her first wedding with Doug, who cheated that very day with their wedding coordinator. After a car crash, George finds himself 10 years in the past, just days before Doug's day.
A Face in the Crowd
The rise of a raucous hayseed named Lonesome Rhodes from itinerant Ozark guitar picker to local media rabble-rouser to TV superstar and political king-maker. Marcia Jeffries is the innocent Sarah Lawrence girl who discovers the great man in a back-country jail and is the first to fall under his spell.
I Vitelloni
Five young men dream of success as they drift lazily through life in a small Italian village. Fausto, the group's leader, is a womanizer; Riccardo craves fame; Alberto is a hopeless dreamer; Moraldo fantasizes about life in the city; and Leopoldo is an aspiring playwright. As Fausto chases a string of women, to the horror of his pregnant wife, the other four blunder their way from one uneventful experience to the next.
Man on a Tightrope
Elia Kazan's 1953 film stars Fredric March as the owner of an impoverished circus in Communist-ruled Czechoslovokia who plots to flee across the border to freedom, taking his entire troupe of performers and wild animals with him. The cast also includes Gloria Grahame, Terry Moore, Cameron Mitchell, Richard Boone and Adolphe Menjou.
The Pleasure Garden
Patsy Brand is a chorus girl at the Pleasure Garden music hall. She meets Jill Cheyne who is down on her luck and gets her a job as a dancer. Jill meets adventurer Hugh Fielding and they get engaged, but when Hugh travels out of the country, she begins to play around.
Shakespeare-Wallah
The story of a family troupe of English actors who travel around the towns and villages in India giving performances of Shakespearean plays. Through their travels we see the changing face of India as the old is replaced by the new, Maharajas become hotel owners, sports become more important than culture and the theater is replaced by Bollywood movies. Based on the travels of Geoffrey Kendal with his daughter Felicity Kendal.
Two Weeks in Another Town
After spending three years in an asylum, a washed-up actor views a minor assignment from his old director in Rome as a chance for personal and professional redemption.
Walking, Walking
Italian maestro Ermanno Olmi tells the tale of the journey of the Magi in this lyrical odyssey. The film focuses on a wise man who interprets his sighting of a comet streaking through the sky as a spiritual message. Joined by two associates, soldiers, villagers and others, the Magi sets out on a journey that tests his beliefs and strength.
The Girl with a Pistol
A Sicilian woman is dishonored by her lover, then goes to London with a pistol intending to murder him.
Love Is Better Than Ever
The dancing teacher Anastasia falls in love with the smart theatre agent Jud. He likes her, too, but does not want to give up his solo life at all. Thus she plans a trap for him...
Our Modern Maidens
Young vivacious Billie uses her charms on influential businessman Glenn Abbott in hopes of getting her secret fiancée Gil a diplomatic appointment. Meanwhile Gil's affections meander to beautiful ingenue Kentucky, Billie's best friend.
The Matinee Idol
The famous matinee idol and blackface comedian, Don Wilson, heads out of town to escape adulation. There, calling himself Harry Mann, he accidentally joins a traveling acting troupe, and falls in love with Ginger Bolivar, who runs the troupe and stars in their Civil War melodrama. Don's producer sees the play, and thinks it's a comic masterpiece, and just what Don's Broadway show needs. But when Ginger finds out she's been played for a fool, will she forgive Don?
Corruption
Stefano is a shy and sensitive teenager who has just completed his studies in Switzerland and is considering becoming a monk. But his father, a rich Milanese publisher, who had the ambition to see his son succeed him, refuses and takes him on a cruise with a young woman to take this idea out of his mind...
Smart Politics
The growth of juvenile crime in a small town starts a movement for the building of a youth center.
Lily in Love
Insulted when his screenwriter wife writes a leading role for a younger man, aging Broadway idol Fitz Wynn disguises himself as a handsome young Italian.
James Dean: Race with Destiny
Casper Van Dien of Starship Troopers stars as James Dean, whose remarkable talent and rebel attitude took Hollywood by storm. But as Dean's star begins to rise, his passionate affair with Italian ingenue Pier Angeli (Carrie Mitchum of The Bold and the Beautiful) angers her disapproving mother (Academy Award nominee Diane Ladd) and studio chief Jack Warner (Mike Connors). How did a broken heart, reckless behavior and his relationships with Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and director George Stevens (the legendary Robert Mitchum in his final screen role) lead to Dean's ultimate race with destiny? Connie Stevens, Joseph Campanella and Casey Kasem co-star in this revealing biopic that goes behind the myth to tell the true story of the superstar who lived fast, died young and left a legacy that changed movies forever.
Funny Money
Fulbert is a sidewalk artist who is duped into working for a counterfeiter. He accompanies a woman posing as a grieving widow on a trip to Spain in a hearse. Unaware she is the mistress of a notorious gangster, Fulbert is chased by thugs.
Captain Fracasse
A ruined Baron Philippe de baron, meets one day a troupe of traveling actors led by Herod. Attracted by the one who plays the role of the ingenue: Isabella, and by the dynamism and enthusiasm of his companions, he takes the place of the deceased poet of the troupe. And during performances, Philippe became the captain Sunder. For his part, Isabelle loves Philip, but does not consider marriage, nobility him missing, she refuses to harm the career of Baron. And one day, the Duke of Vallombrosa, seduced by Isabella, finds himself challenged to a duel by Philippe for touching the girl. Defeated, he launched his men against Sunder, then removes Isabelle. The actors throw themselves then to storm the castle where she is being held. This time Vallombrosa was seriously injured, and the duke's own father, rushed to the scene, Isabelle discovers the girl he had once been an actress. Nothing stands now the union of Sunder and Isabella, under the tender gaze of the actors Herod and Scapin.
Smoky River Serenade
The ramshackle Smoky River Ranch is all that stands in the way of a developer and a big real-estate deal, but the old man who owns the ranch won't sell it, because he has to take care of some down-and-out theater people to honor his dead son's memory. Frustrated, the developer sends in a pretty young girl to try to trick the old man into selling the ranch.
The Young in Heart
A family of confidence tricksters sets their sights on a very rich, very lonely old lady named Miss Fortune.
High Pressure
Gar Evans is a con artist, who pretends to be the owner of a "Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Company", and he is looking for investors. Finding them is relatively easy, but it becomes difficult when those want to see the inventor of the synthetic rubber...
Love, Honor and Goodbye
A lawyer's wife walks out on him, then poses as a French nurse to spy on him.
Woman Trouble
Driven by the constant quarrels with his wife and humiliated by a rich Milanese industrialist after asking him for a job, an unemployed person decides to steal a car from a garage guarded by a friend.
The Lady Without Camelias
By a twist of fate, the photogenic Milanese shop assistant, Clara Manni, gets the leading role in Italian movie producer Gianni Franchi's romantic drama, "Addio Signora", and becomes an overnight sensation in Rome.
At the First Breath of Wind
Using few words and gorgeous imagery, this is a poetic painting of a family, each in their own space on an August afternoon.
Crashing Broadway
When Tad Wallace's act flops on Broadway, he joins a troop heading west. In a small town, they run into Jeffries who has just burned down the theater. When Jeffries kills Griswold, Tad has a plan to trap him by using the talents of Shakespearian actor Thorndyke.
Hay Fever
A group of Roman misfits spend the fall minding a vintage shop called Twinkled, a business that is failing in every way but in spirit. The owner strives to keep the store afloat, even as his wife insists that he sell the place and get a real job. One day a beautiful young woman named Camilla takes a job cleaning the store, and her presence has a profound effect on the lives of everyone, including Stefano, the well-meaning but unorganized shopkeeper, and Gigio, Camilla's loving younger brother who has Down's syndrome.
Mother's Heart
An unworthy nephew, with the help of a girl who seduces the young guardian, robs the aunt of the family jewels. He also manages to put the blame for the theft on the caretaker, engaged to a young woman who is actually the woman's natural daughter. The thief also tries to blackmail his aunt by threatening to reveal the truth after so many years, but a commissioner manages to prove the innocence of the suspect and the guilt of his nephew.
Upstage
Dolly Havens, a small-town girl with big-town ambitions that are larger than her talents, hooks up with Johnny Storm, a vaudeville performer, whose talents make the act a success. Dolly, thinking she is the reason, meets a handsome leading man and joins up with him but, before long, he discovers 'she ain't a trouper' and she is soon performing with 4th-class acts in Tank Town America