Critics reviews

The bad-taste story is surprisingly amusing and inoffensive, mainly because Mastroianni is so marvelously, ludicrously louche that no hint of sympathy threatens to attach to him.

Just as frustrating—and entertaining—as the very mores it's satirizing is its maddening trajectory towards a most fatuous conclusion. That is, until the other shoe finally drops in the film's final moments, a sign of an auteur wholly committed to the farce. Enough can't be said of Mastroianni's performance; in one scene, the town rushes to a public screening of Federico Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA, Fernando narrating the excitement with a cool irony that only the star of both films could accomplish.

Germi's hilarious satire jabs at Catholic hypocrisy and male chauvinism, particularly within Sicilian society... Mastroianni has the extraordinary ability to win us over with his familiar charisma and devilish charm. The ease in which he has casually carried his roles as womanizers, antiheroes, and bourgeois misfits is matched only by his instinctive grace, style and elegance.

Germi achieves a comic masterstroke by having us identify with a morally weak and reprehensible man. Rosalia's nauseating neediness is contrasted with Angela's quiet sensuality. The disparity between Fefè's reality and his fantasy is exaggerated, as satire requires, through Rosalia's excessive facial hair, grating voice, and saccharine poses, and the sudden, jarring Felliniesque close-ups of her face that feel like she is not only invading Fefè's space but our own.

The first reel of this 1961 favorite is a marvel that should have prospective filmmakers scurrying to take notes, rushing out to attain the Criterion Collection home version to break down its component parts to get at its confident verve and fluidly channeled cultural menagerie.