An adaptation of the same Dostoevsky story filmed by Ivan Pyriev in Russia in 1959, and by Robert Bresson in France in 1971 (as Four Nights Of A Dreamer), White Nights is dreamlike and elegiac, using deliberately artificial settings and soft, grainy photography to gain its effects. Marcello Mastroianni plays Mario, a shy young man who meets a mysterious young girl named Natalia (played by Maria Schell), sobbing on a canal bridge. She tells him she is in love with a sailor who left on a long journey and promised to return in one year. Thus begins one of Visconti's most neglected works. According to Georges Sadoul:

“...its baroque style now seems a direct step towards the development of Rocco and His Brothers and, curiously, more Stendhalian than Dostoevskian in its attempt to capture the ‘emotional crystallization of experience.'”