It’s not surprising that the culture that produced some of the world’s greatest operas applies an operatic style to much of its filmmaking, and Italian film noir is no exception: beautiful people yearn for each other to a criminal extent as seen in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Story of a Love Affair (1950), and Pietro Germi’s stunning Gelosia (US: Jealousy). A noir tale wrapped in romantic melodrama (let’s call it a melo-noir), Jealousy stars Erno Crisa as Marchese Antonio di Roccaverdina, a lonely nobleman whose obsessive love for a servant girl named Agrippina (Marisa Belli) jeopardizes his wealth, his reputation, and his sanity. The marchese’s mental dissolution escalates when Agrippina’s young husband Rocco (Vincenzo Musolino) is murdered on their wedding day, prompting a hasty conviction and incarceration of the father of one of his many female conquests; the convict will later escape. Liliana Gerace plays the devoted Zosima, the marchese’s cousin and later wife who emerges as the film’s most redeeming character. Germi’s film is a series of sumptuous compositions, each shot more beautiful than the last, using the vast Sicilian countryside and capacious Roccaverdina estate to emphasize the marchese’s alienation and  emotional solitude; at one point, he even has Christ literally removed from the house.