Divorce Italian Style - Criterion Collection
by Pietro Germi
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DVD details
Actor: Daniela Rocca, Leopoldo Trieste, Marcello Mastroianni, Odoardo Spadaro, Stefania SandrelliDirector: Pietro Germi
Brand: MASTROIANNI,MARCELL
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 104 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-04-26
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of Divorce Italian Style - Criterion Collection
DVD Review: Amazing Marcello
Summary: 5 Stars
Loved this movie. Although, the disk quality could be better, movie is funny, enchanting, full of true details and unpredictable. Gorgeous Marcello and beautiful Sandrelli!DVD Review: A film out of place in its time, but one for the ages
Summary: 5 Stars
This brilliantly-observed dark comedy by director Pietro Germi outstrips anything Fellini ever made and ranks with L'Avventura and Il Gattopardo as one of my favourite Italian films. With one of the best scripts ever written in any language, filled with novelistic detail, the film is beautifully shot and features a wry, starmaking performance by Marcello Mastroianni. Skirting farce without ever falling in, it has this great Sicilian cultural specificity while, at the same time, applying a delicious acidity to universal themes of frustrated lust and soured marriage. The relative obscurity of Divorce Italian Style among modern film fans who lionise films by Fellini made around the same time in the early 1960s is confounding but perhaps rests in the fact that this film belongs to an old school of moviemaking based more on highly-structured narratives and attention to character than on some flashy deconstruction of cinematic rules. In structure, style, tone, and attention to craft, it owes more to Billy Wilder than it does to Michelangelo Antonioni. A must-see film.DVD Review: A brilliant satire - another Italian movie with universal appeal
Summary: 5 Stars
As the other reviewers have commented, the movie centres around a situation in Italy fifty years ago. A baron wants to get rid of his wife, and divorce is not an option. But I'm Indian, and I sensed that we still have some attitudes which are similar to the ones shown in the movie! The movie does a brilliant job of showing - not telling - about the Baron's predicament. The courtroom scenes, in which the lawyer is shown to be a performing actor more than anything else, are among my favourites. The main character puts in a fantastic performance, and the twists in the story will keep you hooked until the very end. This is amovie which will make you chuckle very often and laugh aloud at least a few times.DVD Review: Classic Italian movie
Summary: 3 Stars
This is an old classic Italian movie. Marcello Mastroiani and Stefania Sandrelli performance is not bad but I didn't like the movie in general. I've seen better onesDVD Review: Absolutamente, Si. . .
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased the other version a few years before the Criterion one came out. This is obviously more superior above and beyond the quality. It was cool to re-discover this movie. If you have other versions, you don't have the whole flick. This is worth it.
Description of Divorce Italian Style - Criterion Collection
Baron Ferdinando Cefal? (Marcello Mastroianni) longs to marry his nubile cousin Angela, but one obstacle stands in his way: his fatuous and fawning wife, Rosalia. His solution? Since divorce is illegal, he will devise a scenario wherein he can catch his spouse in the arms of another and murder her to save his honor-a lesser offense. Criterion is proud to present director Pietro Germi's hilarious and cutting satire of Italy's hypocritical judicial system and male-dominated culture, winner of the 1962 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, in a two-disc DVD edition that also features a documentary on the director, new interviews with the actors and screenwriter, screen-test footage, and more.Divorce Italian Style is a comedy milestone--a brilliant, biting satire that was originally conceived as a drama; directed with nonstop inventiveness by a filmmaker who had never done comedy; and featuring an actor who, though not even among the first dozen players considered, cemented his international stardom with this performance. The movie also marked a breakthrough for foreign film in America, winning popular as well art-house success, Academy Award nominations for director Pietro Germi and star Marcello Mastroianni, and--the first of only a few foreign-language films to do so--the Oscar itself for Original Screenplay.
On the sun-blasted island of Sicily, Baron Ferdinand "Fef?" Cefal? (Mastroianni) breaks out of his heat- and boredom-induced stupor long enough to be smitten with mad passion for his 16-year-old cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). But he's married--to Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), she of the unfortunate mustache--and the Italian Penal Code gives him no way out... except, of course, for catching his wife in adultery and availing himself of the patriarchal license to commit a "crime of honor." So Fef? searches for a way to fling Rosalia into the arms of another man.
Mastroianni's Fef? is an indelible masterpiece, visually and behaviorally: a portrait in painterly chiaroscuro, with brilliantined hair, eternally drooping eyelids, a cigarette holder angled in perpetual salute, and a manic, conspiratorial slouch, like Groucho Marx on painkillers. Germi's direction hustles the film along with bold, mobile camerawork, stream-of-consciousness lurches into fantasy and flashback, Fef?'s feverish voiceover commentary, and a wonderfully propulsive music score by the late Carlo Rustichelli. --Richard T. Jameson
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