Northwest Film Forum

Many critics consider this follow-up to DIVORCE--ITALIAN STYLE to be even better--blacker, funnier, and more sharply satirical in its skewering of macho attitudes. The story starts with fifteen-year-old Agnese and her family problems. The comic spotlight shifts to the girl’s furious father (a role for which portly Saro Urzì won the Best Actor award at Cannes), who resorts to a series of ever more desperate schemes in an attempt to restore family honor. Seeing the film again ten years after its release, Roger Ebert wrote, “At the time, I thought it was hilarious. . . my reaction the second time around is more complicated. SEDUCED AND ABANDONED has a lot of laughs in it, all right, but it’s not so much hilarious as painfully funny.”

"A lusty, vital satire of Sicilian mores—and a glory of Italian movie comedy! The movie is a masterpiece of mock verismo; everything accelerates into high-octane opera buffa. Pietro Germi directs with such deftness that he gets mileage from small laughs and can afford to tread lightly on big ones." -THE NEW YORKER