1961 dark comedy
Rating: 16/20
Plot: A guy wants his wife gone so that he can marry a first-cousin.
Marcello Mastroianni plays charming villain so well in this breezy dark comedy that would probably double-feature well with my favorite Sturges' movie, Unfaithfully Yours. Mastroianni plays the character so straight, enabling those fantasy death sequences to be grounded and somehow making the whole scenario even funnier. There's this fragile coolness to the character, and watching him try to keep it all together when he's at his most flustered is delightful. I thought his facial tic, a kind of exaggerated twitch that I kept trying to replicate, would grow tiresome, but it never did, even when I could predict exactly when it would happen.
Shame on Pietro Germi for making us side with this villain, a man who wants one human being dead so that he can sleep with the much-younger first-cousin he's desperately in lust with. As a superficial male, I felt tricked into siding with the husband over the wife mostly because she's got a unibrow and a hint of a mustache. So shame on you, Germi!
I really enjoyed this one, my favorite scenes being the ones where the protagonist (and others) are leering at the cousin, those fantasy death scenarios, and a lawyer's closing arguments.
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