Word: germi
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Seduced and Abandoned Pietro Germi Germi's lunar eclipse of a dark comedy, which followed his Divorce Italian Style, suggests Preston Sturges run riot in Sicily. In this lunatic 1964 retooling of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (unwanted pregnancy, frantic attempt to get the girl married, small town in an uproar), Botticelli-beautiful Stefania Sandrelli is Agnese, a lamb led to the slaughter of her ideals by a father, a family and a society that values honor (status) over honesty. Germi's tireless cinematic inventiveness matches his furious pace in a magnificent satire that leaves the viewer exhausted, angry...
...Mastroianni was also a clown, yelping like a hyena in heat when Sophia Loren (his partner in 13 films) strips for him in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963). As the Sicilian aristocrat in Pietro Germi's wonderfully malicious Divorce Italian Style (1962), he is a creature of tics and slouches, plotting his wife's death and stalking the seraphic Stefania Sandrelli with the gait of a mopey Groucho. He made informed fun not only of these familiar Italian comic figures but also of his own star machismo. At the end of a guest stint on Laugh-In, TV's vaudeville...
After that, forget it. The plot, based on a true story, has a vengeful wife (Tracey Ullman) determined to knock off her philandering husband (Kline), but the fellow proves strangely indestructible. This sort of homicidal fable demands the stiletto of satire -- the very weapon flourished by Italian director Pietro Germi in his brilliant '60s comedies Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned. But what played in Sicily for Germi doesn't work in Tacoma, Wash., for Lawrence Kasdan. This crime does not spring from the polluted mores of a medieval society; it is the private whim of an exasperated woman...
Noiret also shows up in MY FRIENDS, a film begun by the witty, raucous Pietro Germi (Divorce-Italian Style), who collaborated on the script but died after hardly a week of filming in 1974, at the age of 60. Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street) completed the movie, which, unfortunately, does little credit to anyone. My Friends concerns the infrequently amusing forays of a group of five stalwarts (Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Gastone Moshin, Duilio Del Prete, Adolfo Celi) who break out of their conventional, half-failing lives to have a little fun. This usually involves playing practical jokes-such...
...Died. Pietro Germi, 60, Italian film director (Divorce-Italian Style; Seduced and Abandoned; Alfredo, Alfredo); of liver disease; in Rome. Germi's Academy Award-winning Divorzio in 1961 was the first of a series of films that marked him as a superb tragicomedian who manufactured social slapstick from the hypocrisies of Italian...