Sex Comedy Italian Style

Sex Comedy Italian Style

APRIL 24 - MAY 1, 2008

After Neorealism failed to make a significant impact on the Italy's cinema-going public, a type of Italian film emerged that lasted from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s: Comedy - Italian Style. With elements of post-war social critique combined with comedy, one director in particular managed to satirize Italy in a highly popular way: Pietro Germi. Practically forgotten since his death in 1974, NWFF is extremely excited to present two recently restored prints in order to re-introduce audiences to this eclectic, visionary and fearless director.

 

Seduced and Abandoned

Apr 25 - May 01, 2008

Pietro Germi, Italy, 1963, 35mm, 117 min

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

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Divorce- Italian Style

Apr 25 - May 01, 2008

Pietro Germi, Italy, 1961, 35mm, 104 min)

Germi's most famous and successful film, DIVORCE – ITALIAN STYLE became the first foreign-language film to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (it was also nominated for Best Actor and Best Director). Mastroianni gives one of his most brilliant performances as a smug and scheming Sicilian aristocrat who has to dispose of his unpleasant wife in order marry another. Divorce is frowned upon by Italian courts, but crimes of passion are winked at, so if the inconvenient missus could be maneuvered into taking a lover… Longtime Germi admirer Martin Scorsese called this beautifully photographed black comedy "one of the greatest films about Sicily...a film that truly haunts me."

"One of the most perfect comedies ever filmed!" –A. O. Scott, NY TIMES

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