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. Its targets were Sicily's archaic honour codes and Italy's ban on divorce, then still in force, and it took a whole social order apart with gleeful precision.

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

It was a huge international success and helped establish the commedia all'italiana on the world stage, and the dark social comedy that followed across Europe learned from it; imitators kept coming for years. Its mockery of legalised hypocrisy fed a real national conversation, and Italy legalised divorce within the decade, a shift in attitudes the film is often credited with helping along. Wickedly funny and pointed throughout, Divorce Italian Style shows how comedy can lacerate a society and keep its audience laughing the whole time, and Mastroianni's mordant performance holds every bit of it together.