This 1972 entry from a respected neo realist veteran never got a US release and has dated already more than anything the director did back in the 40s, because of its then trendy zoom happy camera style and its intrusive imitation Morricone score (which incorporates part of the overused Carmina Burana.) The preposterous and sleazy scenario unfolds in flashes back and forth : A successful lawyer cannot consummate his wedding night with his sexy bride so asks his close friend, a priest,to impregnate her while she is drugged, to satisfy traditional family demands for a child.He trusts in the sanctity of his confession of impotence only to flail in anger when the priest,suddenly turned on to the joys of procreation, abandons his cassock and can no longer be trusted to stay silent. A resulting murder is pinned on an underprivileged character the lawyer had helped, but then a piece of evidence turns up...
In much of the earlier work of De Santis, his powerfully expressed and deeply Marxist sympathy for the downtrodden was challenged by his temptation toward a melodrama of eroticism and romance. Here the pure sleaziness overwhelms any statement he might be trying to make about the decadence of the bourgeoisie,or the hypocrisy of the Church.
But the film is certainly a curiosity and one may well want to wallow in it.
