rodrig58 It's really a masterpiece but Daniela Rocca is not at all ugly, like another guy wrote, watch her well in the movie. And, she's a great actress. I would have liked to start with Marcello or Stefania, who are more beautiful than ever and do some extraordinary roles. There are no words to express how wonderful they are. Margherita Girelli is really delicious in the role of Sisina. And Angela Cardile, gorgeous in the role of Agnese. Leopoldo Trieste, Lando Buzzanca and everyone else, are not at all inferior. Germi's direction is brilliant. The story is more than captivating. Carlo Rustichelli's music is tremendous. A film worth seeing at any time, is one of the absolute masterpieces of the 7th art. Me, I've seen it so many times that I do not know exactly how many...

jacobs-greenwood This is a very fun film starring Marcello Mastroianni by director Pietro Germi (both received Oscar nominations) which received the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen Oscar in 1963, as well as numerous other awards.Ferdinando Cefalú (Mastroianni) is married to Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), a woman who is suffocating him with her love. They live in a large Italian family villa such that his beautiful 16 year old niece Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), to whom he is irresistibly drawn, lives across the courtyard from him.He witnesses a court case about a woman who has murdered her philandering husband and fantasizes about ridding himself of his own wife. However, he must figure out how to get away with it so that he will only have to serve a short time behind bars ... in order to be young enough to pursue his comely niece. When he learns of his niece's attraction to him, he plots to find a lover for his wife to justify her murder.You can almost watch the entire thing without sound. Of course, it's in Italian with English subtitles. Funny, slapstick humor abounds.

st-shot Writer, director Pietro Germi crafted a comic masterpiece in Divorce Italian Style, a 1961 black comedy that mocked the archaic Italian divorce laws along with the extreme measures one man takes to detach from his spouse. It a mordantly hilarious, as well as every other kind of hilarious, from start to finish as Germi's energetic script pursues a bungling murder plot while making a humorously acerbic commentary on class, family, the justice system The Catholic Church and Sicilian custom, all carried along by the most romantic music score of its day.Baron Cefalu (Marcello Mastroianni)has become bored with his wife (Daniella Rocca) and enamored with his 16 year old niece Angela. When she reciprocates the baron looks for a way out in a country where divorce is illegal. He eyes honor killing as a way out but has to find a way to get her to be unfaithful. The plot now unfolds with one misstep after another by Cefalu that nevertheless pays off.Shot in the sizable town of Catania, Sicily everyone from actor to extra performs exceptionally whether going into operatic outrage, trading glances, hand gestures or even crowd gathering, with wonderful naturalism. Mastroianni gives arguably the finest performance of a superb career with his iconic lothario self parody that only he could carry off in such a sincere manor. In addition he manages to transcend eras by chipping in one of the best silent performances of any era as well. The tragic Daniella Rocca is comically touching, while Leopold Trieste as a sly artist and Pietro Tordi as a lawyer give excellent turns along with all the household figures making the most of their brief scenes as well as the youthful Stephania Sandrelli transitioning from beatific to sensual.With its spirited narration and the determined energized Cefalu's zany plan consolidation Germi hits one target after the next with sharp comic precision as he swiftly covers a lot of ground.Adding enormously to the film's dark vein is the subversive employment of Carlo Ruscitelli's melodically beautiful but syrupy backdrop that may momentarily deceive us into wishing the nefarious Cefalu well.Well paced, beautifully scored, perfectly set and cast but most of all flat out funny Divorce Italian Style clicks on all cylinders from start to finish.

dr_foreman Let me begin by declaring that I liked "Divorce, Italian Style"...sort of. I come to both bury and praise this movie at the same time, if such a thing is possible.It's not a bad film, by any means. In fact, it possesses many of the greatest strengths of foreign cinema - it's got plenty of wit, bite, intelligence, and the kind of cold insight into human nature that is often lacking in glamorized Hollywood films. In short, it's well done.And yet, it annoyed me. Something about the enormously cynical plot - which involves an unhappily married man (Marcello Mastroianni) trying to break free from his clingy wife - bugged me. Perhaps I got just tired of Marcello's world-weary persona after a while; it initially amused me, then started to grate. It's tough to watch such a superficial weed of a character for a whole movie.And perhaps I also got a little tired of the wife, who is depicted as an endlessly cheerful weirdo with a hideous unibrow and a mustache. Cheerful, and fawning. Extremely fawning. In fact, the film contains innumerable close-ups of her fawning face. But here's the problem - how many shots of a fawning woman with a hideous unibrow does any normal viewer want to see? After a while, it just got too ugly for me to look at.Perhaps I'm being frivolous. But I'm trying to suggest, in my own clumsy way, that the movie was a little too grotesque for me. The characters were a little too bizarre, the shouting was a little too loud, and the satire narrowly missed the mark. I wanted to like it, really... but it ended up irritating me. Shame, really - but I'm sure that many Italian movie buffs will love it despite my grumblings.