Divorce Italian Style

Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961) is the sharpest of all Italian satirical comedies, a black farce that won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the comedy prize at Cannes. Aimed squarely at Sicily's archaic honour codes and Italy's then-ban on divorce, it skewered a whole social order with gleeful precision.

Marcello Mastroianni, in a performance of magnificent comic vanity, plays the decaying baron plotting to murder his wife under cover of wounded honour so he can marry his young cousin. Germi shoots the sun-baked Sicilian town with a documentary eye even as the plot grows ever more outrageous, and Mastroianni's facial tic and oily charm anchor the satire in human absurdity. The film's title entered the language as a phrase.

A huge international success, it helped cement the commedia all'italiana on the world stage and influenced the dark social comedy that followed across Europe. Its mockery of legalised hypocrisy contributed to a real national conversation; Italy would legalise divorce a decade later. Wickedly funny and pointed, Divorce Italian Style remains a model of how comedy can lacerate a society while keeping an audience laughing throughout. Mastroianni's performance and the film's mordant wit secured its place as a model of the satirical comedy, imitated across European cinema for years. Italy would legalise divorce within the decade, and the film's mockery of legalised hypocrisy is often credited as part of the shift in attitudes.