Divorce, Italian Style (1961)

Original title

Divorzio all'italiana

Directed by

Pietro Germi

Genre

comedy film

Country

Italy

Runtime

1h 45m

Rated

T

Rating

7.9 of 10 from 535 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A poor Sicilian nobleman wants out of his unhappy marriage, but divorce is illegal. He hatches a plan to push his wife into an affair so he can kill her and claim a light sentence for an honor crime. His scheme leads to a series of unexpected problems.

darkly comicsatiricalcynicalwryslow-burntenseuncomfortablecampy

What happens

Divorce Italian Style (Italian: Divorzio all'italiana) is a 1961 Italian black comedy film directed by Pietro Germi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Alfredo Giannetti, Ennio De Concini, and Agenore Incrocci, based on Giovanni Arpino's 1960 novel Un delitto d'onore (English title: A Crime of Honor). It stars Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, and Leopoldo Trieste. In the film, an impoverished Sicilian nobleman is trapped in a loveless marriage. Divorce is illegal, so he starts fantasizing about uxoricide. In the belief that honor killings involving adultery result in light sentences for the killers, he schemes to find a lover for his wife in order to have an excuse for an honor killing. His plan meets with a number of unexpected complications. The film won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, two Golden Globe Awards and numerous other international film prizes. In 2008, it was included in the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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