Antoni Acqua Movies

To fully appreciate the international box-office bonanza Divorce, Italian Style (Divorzio All'Italiana), one must remember that back in 1962, divorce was illegal in Italy. Ferdinando Cefalú(Marcello Mastroianni) would love to unload his demanding, sex-starved, monumentally unappealing wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), but he can't take the legal means open to his American counterparts. Ferdinando can, however, kill off his wife and receive a light sentence...provided he catches the lady committing adultery. The trick now is to make his plate-of-potatoes spouse attractive enough so that some other man will accommodate Ferdinando by cuckolding him. Divorce, Italian Style not only cleaned up financially, but also won several international film awards, as well as an Oscar nomination for Marcello Mastroianni. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The White Sheik (Lo Sceicco Bianco), Fellini's first solo flight as director, is a gentle lampoon of the idolatry heaped upon movie stars. An impressionable young bride, Wanda (Brunella Bovo) accompanies her husband Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste) on a dull honeymoon, full of meetings with family members and the papal father. Bovo fantasizes over matinee idol Fernando Rivoli, AKA The White Sheik (Alberto Sordi), the hero of a photo strip comic. She repeatedly drifts away from her husband and back, in periodic attempts to find The Sheik, ultimately repairing to the location site where Sordi's latest film, The White Shiek, is in production. Her inevitable disillusionment with the vainglorious Sordi is intercut with her husband's comic (and desperate) attempts to explain his wife's absences at family gatherings to his disgruntled relatives. After a comically inept suicide attempt, Bovo and Trieste are reunited. Featured in the cast is Fellini's wife Giuletta Masina as a prostitute named Cabiria, who'd be given a vehicle of her own, Nights of Cabiria, in 1955. Based on "an idea" by Michelangelo Antonioni, The White Sheik was the main inspiration for Gene Wilder's The World's Greatest Lover (1977). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi