In Venezia Classici, the restored version by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Compass Film of Pietrangeli’s 1964 masterpiece The Magnificent Cuckold. A biting portrait of Italian provincial life, where male obsession mirrors the fragility of a society caught between modernity and moral conventions.
An entrepreneur, owner of a hat factory, plunges into a “drama of jealousy” despite being unfaithful himself: a clandestine encounter with a free-spirited bride plants the suspicion that his own young and sensual wife, played by Claudia Cardinale, might be just as promiscuous. From that moment on, he spirals into a vortex of obsessions and hallucinations which, thanks to Ugo Tognazzi’s masterful performance, take on both grotesque and hilarious tones. The result is a portrait of the Brescia bourgeoisie with surreal overtones (two years later Pietro Germi would raise the stakes with The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, set in the province of Treviso), a film that entertains while also reflecting on the fragile boundaries between morality and modesty.
Antonio Pietrangeli adapts Fernand Crommelynck’s 1921 play Le cocu magnifique, relocating the action from Flanders to the Italian province of Brescia in the 1960s. At the heart of the story is Andrea (Ugo Tognazzi), a wealthy hat manufacturer consumed by the suspici...
The cast is further enriched by a restrained Gian Maria Volonté as the councilor, Lando Buzzanca’s cameo as a scheming servant, and the great Salvo Randone as a clumsy investigator hired to follow the wife: comic brushstrokes in a merry-go-round where men appear as puppets manipulated by women. Among the screenwriters was a young Ettore Scola, at the very beginning of his career. Antonio Pietrangeli, a key figure in the history of Italian cinema, who died prematurely in 1968 during a location scout for Come, quando, perché, left behind works that remain contemporary and worth rediscovering, in which female characters are always at the heart of the narrative.
