Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder (1959)
Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce - Italian Style 1961)
Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned 1964)
Signore e signori (The Birds, The Bees and the Italians 1965)
L'immorale (Climax 1967)
Serafino (1969)
Le castagne sono buone (1970)
Alfredo, Alfredo (1972)
Divorce, Italian Style (or Divorzio all'italiana) is a 1961 Italian language comedy film directed by Pietro Germi, written by Ennio De Concini, Pietro Germi, Alfredo Giannetti and Agenore Incrocci, and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, Lando Buzzanca and Leopoldo Trieste.
It won the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Marcello Mastroianni) and Best Director.
Divorce, Italian Style tells the story of a Sicilian nobleman who wants to remarry, but, since divorce was illegal in Italy at the time, has to try and make his current wife fall in love with another so that he can catch them together, murder her, and get a light sentence for committing an honour killing.
A young woman dressed in somber clothing named Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli) impassively, but determinedly, navigates her way through a provincial Sicilian town on her way to confession trailed by a lumbering, but accommodating chaperone (Rosetta Urzì). A less than nurturing audience with the attending priest at the confessional soon reveals the reason for her seeming haste to unburden her troubled soul, as a flashback shows members of the Ascalone family taking an afternoon nap as the houseguest, Agnese's older sister Matilde's (Paola Biggio) fiancé, Peppino Califano (Aldo Puglisi), seizes the opportunity to distract Agnese away from her studies through transparent orations of poetry and efficiently whisks her into the kitchen where he promptly - and unrelentingly - begins to seduce the reluctant and unsuspecting young woman. Castigated by the priest for yielding to Peppino's sexual advances and left with little direction beyond an indiscreetly audible order to keep praying, the guilt-ridden Agnese embarks on her own tacit, makeshift penance of self-mortification, incessantly praying the rosary throughout the evening and sleeping with rocks underneath the bedcovers until one day when her mother discovers a torn scrap of paper left from an impulsive, thwarted letter to the timid and cowardly Peppino that had been flushed down the toilet. Fretting over the potential social scandal over his daughter's apparent deflowering by a secret lover, Don Vincenzo (Saro Urzì) scuttles a midwife from a neighboring town after dark in order to perform a discreet (albeit uproariously farcical) examination. With his suspicions confirmed, Don Vincenzo has little recourse but to force the Califano family's hand and demand that Peppino marry Agnese immediately in order to stave off the inevitable town gossip over the young woman's impending motherhood. However, when Peppino refuses to assent to the coerced marriage proposal under the hypocritical claims of being denied the right to marry a virgin wife, Don Vincenzo uses his tangential familial connections with a prominent judge to devise an elaborate (and ridiculously convoluted) plot to save the family's honor.
Pietro Germi creates an incisive and wickedly irreverent satire on manners, duty, honor, and socially cultivated machismo in Seduced and Abandoned. From the extended, nearly wordless opening sequence that juxtaposes Agnese's clerical censure (note the prominent placement of an oversized cross in the town square) against transitional images of the slumbering Ascalone family - and in particular, the comical form of the shirtless, rotund patriarch audibly snoring - as the mustachioed cad awkwardly forces his affection, Germi presents a surreal, grotesque, exaggerated portrait of human behavior that has been distorted through the repressive (and hypocritically biased) prism of prevailing social etiquette and moral values: Don Vincenzo's association with the penniless (and toothless), suicidal Baron Rizieri (Leopoldo Trieste) in order to maintain an appearance of class mobility; the serendipitously timed mine explosion as Don Vincenzo storms off after learning of Peppino's refusal to consent to marriage from the visiting local priest; the extreme close-up shots of people mocking the family outside the courthouse that elliptically transforms into Agnese's haunted nightmare (note Don Vincenzo's corresponding change in wardrobe from light to dark colored suits as his family's honor becomes increasingly at stake). It is through this caricatured exposition of fostered, obsolete elitism and amoral opportunism that the film serves as a relevant, contemporary portrait of Sicily's (then) socio-economic climate: an absurd and insidiously entrenched cultural dichotomy borne of hollow honor, perverted justice, and coercive, irretractable obligation.
(Pietro Germi (right) with Marcello Mastroianni on the set of Divorce Italian Style, 1962)
a funny scene from Divorzio all'Italiana
Biography:
Born: Genoa, Italia; 14 September 1914. Education: Instituto Nautico; studied acting and directing at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome. Career: Directed first film, Il testimone, 1946; retired from Amici miei project because of ill health, 1974. Awards: Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay, with Alfredo Giannetti and Ennio de Concini, for Divorce Italian Style, 1962; Best Film (co-recipient), Cannes Festival, for Signore e signori, 1966. Died: In Rome, 5 December 1974.
Pietro Germi, though often regarded by scholars as fundamentally a neorealist director who made a transition in mid-career to social comedy, never actually considered himself to be an adherent to the style popularized by Roberto Rossellini. Like several other Italian directors achieving prominence in the late 1940s, notably Alberto Lattuada, Alberto De Santis and, of course, Vittorio DeSica, he produced films notable for breaking with prevailing themes that dealt with the immediate aftermath of World War II. His early works addressed themselves instead to the fundamental, even timeless, social issues affecting postwar Italy and in particular, those exemplified in the poverty of the island of Sicily.
Germi's early films, notably In nome della legge and Il cammino della speranza, owe as much, if not more, to the influence of American director John Ford as they do to neorealism. In Germi's work, Sicily easily replaces Ford's Monument Valley and the island's traditional knife duels supplant the American director's classic showdowns. In all other respects, the fundamental issues in Germi's first few films differ little from a typical John Ford production like Stagecoach. Indeed the themes of the aforementioned Germi films (in In nome della legge, a clash between a young judge and the local Mafia over his attempts to enforce the law and, in Il cammino della speranza, the problem of illegal immigration) deal with problems not too far removed from those of the actual post-Civil War American West.
Interestingly, the fact that Germi dared to propose solutions to the problems that he examined in these and in succeeding films effectively removed him from the realm of pure neorealism which, as construed by Rossellini and his immediate followers, must limit itself merely to the exposition of a particular social condition. It cannot suggest solutions. Unfortunately, in a number of cases (Il cammino della speranza, in particular), the director's solutions were overly romanticized, pat, and simplistic.
During the latter part of the 1950s, Germi began to compress the scope of his social concerns to those affecting the individual and his relationship to the family unit, albeit as components of the larger society. In Il ferroviere and L'uomo di Paglia, however, he continued to be plagued by his penchant for simplistic and overly contrived solutions as well as a tendency to let the films run on too long. They are redeemed to some extent by their realistic portrayals of working class characters which. Though considered melodramatic by many reviewers at the time of their release, these characterizations have come to be more highly regarded.
Germi corrected his problems in the 1960s by changing his narrative style to one dominated by satirical devices. Yet he did not compromise his family-centered social vision. Divorzio all'italiana, for which he won an Academy Award for best screenplay, Sedotta e abbandonata, and Signori e signore all magnify social questions all out of proportion to reality and thus, through the chaos that results, reduce the issues to absurdity.
Divorzio all'italiana, in particular, is a craftsmanlike portrayal of the internal upheavals within a family, set in the oppressive atmosphere of a small Sicilian village. It features the deft use of a moving camera that passes swiftly, almost intimately, through endless groups of gawking townspeople. In addition, the director's use of actors, including Marcello Mastroianni and Daniella Rocca, as well as his own latent sense of humor, make the social commentary in this film quite possibly more penetrating than in his early neorealist films.
Though Germi shifted over the length of his career from social dramas to socio-moral satires, his social concerns and his favorite setting for them—Sicily—remained constant. As is not normally the case with many artists of his stature, his most polished and commercially successful efforts also turned out to be the critical equals of his earlier and more solemn ones.
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