Amoral Familialism at Its Most Absurd and Hypocritical: Pietro Germi's "Seduced and Abandoned"

I was going to say that I don't find the Italian comedies of the 1960s very funny, but reminded myself that I don't find a lot of Hollywood comedies of the 00s very funny either (Napoleon Dynamite, Talladega Nights) and that the ones I do (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, You Kill Me, The Matador, Nurse Betty) have not done very well at the box office. The 1960s' Italian comedies that have come to be considered "classics" are mostly tragicomedies with considerable pain caused by traditional mores (in particular, the "honor code" and the double standard for male and female infidelities).

I can laugh at some of the absurdities of Pietro Germi's 1961 "Divorce, Italian Style," which made a particularly big splash in America, but both the first time when I saw it decades ago and again last month when I viewed the Criterion DVD, I disliked being put in the position of identifying with Marcello Mastroianni planning to dishonor and slay his wife. In Germi's 1964 "Seduced and Abandoned" (Sedotta e abbandonata)--which I had not seen before, though I've borrowed its title numerous times--what Americans would call a "shotgun marriage" is a disastrous affront to both the seducer and the seduced. Although the woman is far more victim than the man, the extreme punishment for a few moments' indiscretion is visited on both of them.

Part of the gallows humor is that the man, Peppino Califano (Aldo Puglisi) who has impregnated his fiancée's underage sister, Agnese Ascalone (Stefania Sandrelli), refuses to marry a non-virgin, though he made her that. "Men can't be blamed for trying, women can't be blamed for refusing": that's how it's 'spozed to be in the traditional macho viewpoint.

The cluelessness of Matilde (Paola Biggio), the plump fiancée, is a fairly vicious running gag. (She was asleep when the deed was done, and borders on narcolepsy, though it seems more the stupor following overeating). The wish of the brother of the doubly or triply dishonored family, Antonio (Lando Buzzanca) not to do his duty of killing the seducer is funnier. And the elaborate face-saving games of the father (Saro Uzi) are fun because of their ludicrousness.

Still, there is the tragedy that the young man and younger woman are going to be yoked together if he is not killed or jailed.

Aiace Parolin's black and white cinematography of the Sicilian town of Sciascia(, Agrigento, southern Sicily) and the faces of its inhabitants (who are panned several times following performances aimed to impress them) is outstanding. (Parolin also filmed Sandrelli in "Alfredo, Alfredo.")

The Criterion DVD includes a thoughtful 25-minute documentary on the "Commedia all'italiana" In it I learned that the producer had wanted Spencer Tracy for the part of the father, and if not Tracy, Ernest Borgnine. Borgnine is at least conceivable in the part, but Petri insisted on Uzi. Mario Setsi provides information on the context and impact of the movie, screenwriters Furio Scarpelli and Luciano Vincenzoni stories about the making of the movie and moving beyond neorealism to satire on Italian laws and mores. There are also a six-minute 2002 interview of Sandrelli (and her 2-minute silent screen test made before playing the maiden in "Divorce, Italian Style," with Sandrelli commenting). Lando Buzzanca adds some more retrospects in a seven-minute interview, and a theatrical trailer is included.

The impossibility of divorce was central to the satirical murder plot in "Divorce, Italian Style." That charges of rape and corruption of a minor are erased by marrying her is central to "Seduced and Abandoned." The machismo posturing and double standard are central to both. And the males are comically ineffectual (Leopoldo Trieste as the painter and designated cuckolder in "Divorce," Buzzanca and as the literally toothless baron in "Seduced") or cads of a high order (Mastroianni in "Divorce," Uzi and Puglisi in "Seduced"). Germi was none too subtle

(BTW, "amoral familism" was Edward Banfield's characterization of the ethos of Calabrian social structure (the village of Montegrano) in his 1967 book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society ; the rule of law tended to be regarded in Sicily as an imposition from the north; I think the magistrate in "Seduced" is from elsewhere, though the frustrated police sergeant seems to be local. Banfield's notion has been criticized for "blaming the victim" and "culturalism," but seems to me to have been shared by Germi (even whouth Germi was from the north, having been born in Genoa.)