Scheidung auf italienisch

This classic Italian film is a comedy that tells the story of Ferdinando Cefalu who is unhappily married for 15 years, but he falls in love with his wife's niece, and he starts a plan to end his marriage and not be criticized by the old and classy Italian society. In the meantime, in order to complete his plan many things happened including funny moments and some dramatic moments. The movie seems to have been very well directed and very well acted and gives us a little hint about the behavior of the Sicilian society. In order to do his plan, Ferdinando chooses a crazy idea, and takes a long time to plan and detail his plan perfectly having a lot of funny interruptions during the process of his plan. Its refreshing to find movies with good sense of humor, and no use of vulgarities or bad language to make the viewers laugh. I really enjoyed it, and i deeply recommend watching it.

This is definitely one of the best Italian comedies ever made, a movie you can watch over and over again... Mastroianni gives an excellent performance as an impoverished Sicilian aristocrat determined to get a divorce from his wife. There is only one complication - divorce is illegal in Italy at the time. However, there is also a law that justifies the killing of a wife if she is caught during an act of adultery. As with most others Germi's films, this one is a unique mix of situational comedy and social drama. Highly recommended.

This movie got an Oscar for the script (among the others, by Pietro Germi, the gifted director). However, the real importance of this movie can be demonstrated by saying that an entire genre, "la commedia all'italiana" (Comedy, Italian style) is named after this movie.

A major issue of this genre is to make fun of our traditions and culture (I am Italian) despite the radical changes our Country was having during those years ('60s, '70s).

The main issue of Neo-realism (Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti) was to describe the tragic reality of miserable lives after the catastrophic WWII. Then the Italian economic boom of the '50s drove Italy into modernity and wellness. Commedia all'italiana wanted to remind us that despite this modernity we are always the same Italians we were before, with all our intelligence but also with all our defects.

"Divorce, Italian Style" is set in the most 'conservative' place of Italy of that time, where traditions like family honor were still predominant despite all modernity. In the first shots of the movie we see an environment suffocated by the heat of the Sicilian climate. People spend part of the day in their apartments waiting for the cool evening. This motionless environment is highly metaphoric, as it shows that nothing really changes in this land, suffocated by the weight of old traditions. Probably this is not so true today, but at that time certainly was.

However, don't be scared by this introduction. The movie is FUN and it turns into a fast-paced rhythm shortly.

The protagonist loves his cousin and wants to marry her, but he is already married. So he plans to murder the wife, pretending to do that for a 'legitimate' defence of honor. What is amazing is that all the village, all the people in the movie support murder for the honor of the family. They even induce him to kill. And what is sad, is that the law at that time was really soft for those types of murders.

To summarize this movie has these characteristics: 1) VERY FUN. You can't stop laughing even if the script is tragic (this is a characteristic of masterpieces) 2) WELL ACTED: Marcello Mastroianni gives one of his best performances. Stefania Sandrelli is beautiful as ever, Marcello's wife is ugly and a nuisance as her role imposes, and Leopoldo Trieste is another great actor of Italian cinema.

3) WONDERFUL STORY: the script won the Oscar and it is truly very intelligent 4) SOCIALLY COMMITTED: it is an accusation of a wrong law that supports a wrong tradition (the law was changed shortly after).

I give this masterpiece a 10 out of 10, and I strongly recommend it to everyone.

DIVORCE Italian STYLE is one of the funniest films I've ever seen on the subject of how to dissolve a marriage--Italian style, of course. Seems those Italians have a way of forgiving murder if the spouse has cheated and is found in the act--which must give rise to some pretty unsavory stories in real life as well as here.

But however unpleasant the subject matter may seem, this is the merriest romp of a comedy I've come across in a long time. It's so artful in the way it gets inside the mind of the impoverished aristocrat (MARCELLO MASTROIANNI) living in palatial ruins in Sicily and desperately devising a way to get rid of his boring wife. He devises a plan that goes awry when "La Dolce Vita" comes to town and, with all the men in the village attending it, his wife takes that opportunity to run off with her lover.

It's a masterful job that Mastroianni does here, giving little signs of distress with a twitch of his mustache, a frown, a concentrated gaze--in other words, bewitched, bothered and bewildered as he contemplates how to go about getting rid of his freedom so he can pursue a young girl he's enamored of. All the events leading up to the final act are hilariously Italiano in style--those little devils knew how to take advantage of the judicial system.

Summing up: A sheer delight from beginning to end, thanks to a masterful job by Marcello Mastroianni in his Oscar-nominated role.

There's a moment in Pietro Germi's Divorzio all'italiana (aka: Divorce Italian Style) that pretty much defines everything, that sort of defines what a black comedy is all about: a certain woman murders her husband because he had run away with another woman, that certain woman murdered him while he was out with his new love. And that certain woman had something similar with our main character, Marcello Mastroianni's Baron Ferdinando Cefalù, and actually after the murder she crossed path with Ferdinando. The moment that sort of defines everything is when these two, the certain woman and our main character, are together since is Mastroianni delivering a really great laugh, is Ferninando being like "" ...certainly and certainly is the way that Mastroianni delivers the scene that makes it so fantastic and hilarious.