Cinema: The Baron Takes a Wife

Divorce—Italian Style. In the U.S., when a man wants a divorce, he goes to court; in Italy, so the wise guys say, he goes to a gunsmith. Why? For two reasons: 1) divorce is illegal in Catholic Italy; 2) the penalty for a “crime of honor” (the murder of a mate discovered in adultery) is light—with plenty of time-off for good behavior. The situation horrifies modern-minded Italians, but what can they do about it? Director Pietro Germi has done something wildly, wickedly, wonderfully funny about it. In one of the cleverest comedies ever made in Italy, he has applied a cunning hotfoot to the world’s biggest boot.

The story is set in Sicily, where honor is traditionally worth more than life—or wife. The villain of the piece is a mousy impoverished nobleman (Marcello Mastroianni), living on heirlooms in the last unrented rooms of the family palace. He spends most of his time wearily dodging his wife, diligently troweling pomatum on his girlish Sicilian ringlets, meticulously adjusting his hair net, nervously encouraging a limp black mustache that seems to be made of dyed spaghetti. At every opportunity he examines his mirror with watery eyes and murmurs to himself contentedly, “No doubt about it, I am an impressive type.”

One day, unhappily, the baron stops looking at himself just long enough to notice his luscious young cousin (Stefania Sandrelli). His mustache bristles. From that moment he is a man with a mono mania: off with the old wife (Daniella Rocca), on with the new. Furtively he riffles through a lawbook, evilly he smiles at what he finds, cunningly he recruits a lover for his wife. It isn’t easy. For one thing, she has a mustache almost as fluffy as his own. For another, she is pugnaciously, insultingly faithful to him.

Finally he turns up one of her old boy friends, a shy and impecunious painter (Leopoldo Trieste). The baron lures the fellow to his house, hires him to restore some murals, asks his wife to supervise the work, rigs a tape recorder to take down what they say, sits down in the next room, loudspeaker on and automatic oiled, to see what happens. Well, what happens is hilarious, and keeps right on being hilarious until the lovers are dead and the baron, his time served, comes home a hero and weds the woman of his heart. As the film ends he has everything he wants—and, oh yes, one thing he deserves. A pair of horns.

Actor Mastroianni is uniformly marvelous, a perfect parody of a small-town smoothie. And Director Germi, who at 44 is one of the least known but one of the most talented (The Straw Man, An Ugly Mess) of the major Italian directors, shows a flair for deadly fun that few of his rivals can rival. Sicilian customs, Latin lovers, political priests, legal shenanigans—his targets are whale-sized and he sinks a keen lampoon.