Maristela

Maos Sangrentas translates to Bloody Hands in English, and that's just what this gruesome Brazilian melodrama delivers. The story begins when a gang of dangerous convicts escape from a penal colony. With the police in hot pursuit, the escapees cut a gory swath through the countryside. As his comrades are killed off one by one, the leader of the group descends into gibbering madness. In contrast to this, a subplot develops involving the least dangerous of the escapees, who murdered his wife in a peak of self-righteous rage and is now seriously in doubt about the wisdom of his deed. Principal scenes reworked in 1962 to make the film The Violent and the Damned (q.v.).

Seeing his farm in ruins, swindler tries to sell it to the first interested person, who happens to be a man who fakes being a millionaire but in fact cannot pay for the estate.

A one-eyed businessman wants to become rich and retrieve his lost eye at any cost. He tries many schemes, and eventually regains his eye with a vengeance: the power of invisibility. He becomes multi millionaire in the meat market and after entering politics he is elected president of Brazil.

A group of migrants from the drought areas of Northeastern of Brazil gets a truck "pau-de-arara" trying to move to São Paulo and have a better life. Along their travel, one of the women delivers a baby on the road. The driver, indeed, intends to carry them to the slave-work in the fields of a powerful "colonel", but the brave Ana faces the foreman of the farm and the driver, and the truck follows to the hired final destination.

A great mystery surrounds Leonora, and it becomes even more mysterious when a stranger arrives from Buenos Aires looking for her, saying he knows her. In love with her, he is desperate when they say she is dead. Not believing what they say, he continues his search. But upon finding her, he is faced with a cruel and unexpected enigma.

Country girl arriving in a big town falls in love with her boss, without knowing who he was.

In a hospital bed, Eduardo, a married man, remembers his involvement with the young Anita, until their downfall.

The story of Leninha, a young Brazilian woman whose life become a turbulent tragedy in the midst of trades involving lust and power.