The concluding segment of the omnibus production Ways of Love, which included work by French directors Jean Renoir and Marcel Pagnol, The Miracle features a tour de force performance by Anna Magnani as the village idiot in a remote Italian town. Nanni is seduced by a stranger (Fellini, who also authored the story on which the film is based), whom she mistakes for a saint. Based on this belief, she comes to regard her subsequent pregnancy as an immaculate conception, while her cruel neighbors deride her as both a madwoman and a sinner. Before its inclusion in the anthology, the film was denied an exhibition permit by the New York State Board of Censors for “blasphemy”—an act that set in motion a series of ground-breaking court cases dealing with film censorship.

Blending the documentary-like shooting strategies of neorealism with the generic conventions of a biblical biopic, Rossellini succeeded in creating a singular portrait of the thirteenth-century founder of a new monastic order. The Flowers of St. Francis chronicles with great simplicity and a humility worthy of its subject the key moments in the life and work of St. Francis, from his arrival with his monks at Rivo Torto and the building of their chapel to his celebrated sermon to the birds and his tender embrace of a reviled leper—one of the most wrenching passages in all of Rossellini’s work. Aldo Fabrizi, the only professional actor in the film, plays a medieval warlord who is confused by the unstinting devotion and gentleness of this saintly monk.