It's a man's right to ask, it's a woman's duty to refuse.
I don't know what might have changed for Pietro Germi between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. Before he attained worldwide renown for directing the Oscar-winning comedy Divorce Italian Style in 1961, Germi's films hewed closely to the conventions of Italian neorealism: sturdy, serious social dramas that plainly depicted the plights and hardships endured by the subjects of his stories. Typically, he focused on the hard-working people of Sicily, their sacrifices, their heartaches, their gritty perseverance despite the obstacles of corruption, crime, romantic or economic betrayals, poverty, unemployment, family relocation and the forced separations that often come in the pursuit of opportunities for a better life. Beginning his work behind the camera in years following World War II, Germi's film titles, translated into English, leave a solemn impression: The Testimony... Lost Youth... Against the Law... Path of Hope... In The Name of the Law... The City is Defended.
They weren't major films, but they were respectable enough and won their share of awards recognition throughout the 1950s in various European festivals. As an actor, Germi often took the lead role in his own films, especially as he matured in his craft. With the exceptions small supporting roles for a young Gina Lollobrigida in 1951's Four Ways Out and a young Claudia Cardinale in The Facts of Murder from 1959, he didn't employ "movie stars" as actors. But that all changed - both the serious tone and the lack of household names in his cast - with Divorce Italian Style, a sharply-crafted and surprisingly barbed social satire that won acclaim for its ability to provoke laughter and also painful winces of self-recognition from lust-addled men in the audience... and their wives. Like I said, I'm not sure what pushed him into shooting a comedy. Maybe it was just a growing exasperation with the oppressive moral straitjacket of old-fashioned Sicilian values like "honor" and "vengeance" that Germi had been documenting since the end of World War II. Perhaps the only fresh tool he had left to get his point across was unvarnished, only slightly exaggerated exposure of the blatant hypocrisy behind all those old codes that justified brutality, whether toward one's enemies or even one's closest family and friends, when certain transgressions threatened to besmirch one's reputation.
To communicate his message most effectively in Divorce Italian Style, Germi had the good sense to recruit Marcello Mastroianni when he was at the pinnacle of his popularity - right between his appearances in Antonioni's La Notte and Fellini's 8 1/2. Mastroianni's willingness to poke fun at his own urbane sophisticated image gives that film's protagonist Fefe enough sympathetic charm to get viewers chuckling at his desperate and deceptive homicidal schemes. And he's a little more easy to understand and identify with as we recognize just what, besides matrimonial ennui, has him so compelled and distracted: the enticing, virginal beauty of Stefania Sandrelli, at that point a mere teenager, who subsequently became one of the most celebrated female leads in the commedia all'Italiana, a sub-genre named and established by that very film. Sandrelli also appeared in a couple of Bernardo Bertolucci films, The Conformist and 1900, adding a touch of art house distinction to her filmography that features entries right up until 2012, with more presumably to be added going forward.
The success of Divorce Italian Style was certainly enhanced by the charisma of Mastroianni and the allure of Sandrelli, but when it came time to shoot the follow-up, Marcello was already on to other things and perhaps even out of Germi's price range. No matter. Signorina Sandrelli was still young and looking to establish herself. And Germi had an ace up his sleeve, an actor by the name of Saro Urzi, for his companion piece study of masculine restlessness and insecurity. Where Divorce dealt with the foibles of a man settling into his thirties seeking to avoid middle aged marital monotony through an absurd affair with a much younger woman, Seduced and Abandoned focused on the rage of a somewhat older father consumed by insane jealousy and unchecked contempt for the women in his family (and his son doesn't get treated much better either.)
Urzi and Germi had lots of experience working with each other, and it's to Germi's credit as both a friend and as a director that he insisted on casting Urzi in Seduced and Abandoned's leading role, after producers pressed him to employ a recognized Hollywood star, be it Spencer Tracy or Ernest Borgnine. This was in an era when Italian cinema was very eager to get American talent in front of their cameras, e.g. Burt Lancaster in The Leopard and Rod Steiger in Hands Over the City. Clearly, the casting of foreigners in roles portraying archetypal Italian men had proven successful, but I have serious doubts that any of them would have out-performed Urzi in his turn as Don Vincenzo Ascalone. The Don is a man who considers himself a big shot in his town - he owns a nearby mine that established his material fortune, employs a live-in household maid, holds court as an authoritative know-it-all in his daily gatherings with the men of his neighborhood, and is hyper-vigilant about what the villagers might be thinking about him. He knows the populace well, because these folks are fluent in gossip and skilled at casting a mocking beady eye on anyone who's fallen into disgrace. Don Vincenzo's mission in life, it seems, is to satisfy the demands of these fickle on-lookers, even if that requires a brutal heavy hand of authority to keep his familial minions in line.
With such a blatantly vulnerable and insecure masculine ego in mind, Germi worked Luciano Vincenzoni's story of a father's shame and retribution into an informal sequel to Divorce Italian Style. Both films are driven by the difficulties that many men have in managing their response to sensual femininity, and the hideously aggressive behaviors that such struggles provoke. Seduced and Abandoned replaces Divorce's farcical murder fantasies with disturbingly aggressive and realistic depictions (just off camera) of a father beating his teenage daughter Agnes for her alleged sexual indiscretions, even though the truth of the matter is that she was raped in the film's opening scenes by her older sister's fiance while everyone else in the household was asleep during the afternoon siesta. Never once is there any consideration of the trauma that Agnes went through, either by her father, her mother or even the legal system, once things get to that point later in the film - a ghastly oversight that ought to jump out at any viewer today, even though I sadly have to acknowledge that such sexist attitudes are still quite prevalent.
But before I get bogged down in a serious dissection of the rampant misogyny that Seduced and Abandoned portrays with such ruthless candor, I also have to admit that it is outrageously funny - with the key word being "outrageous." I was laughing at the raw caveman mentality that governed Don Vincenzo without any flicker of self-conscious awareness, and shuddering in horror at the same time. His immediate leap into alarm state when he gets the slightest hint that one of his girls has been kissed, or that they've had a feeling of desire, serves as the baseline for all the dark and discomforting comedy that follows. With one of his four daughters' premarital virginity now compromised (and made undeniable, since it resulted in pregnancy), the Don embarks on a mission of damage control, insisting that Peppino, the seducer responsible for this predicament, right this wrong by marrying Agnes, rather than Matilde, the oldest daughter to whom he was already betrothed.
But Peppino defies Signor Ascalone's demands, based upon his own justifiable claims, according to the old ways: as a man, he has the right to marry a virgin, a qualification that Agnes no longer possesses. Never mind that Peppino was the one who robbed her of that status; he digs in his heels and stubbornly refuses to bail the Don out of this jam. Their ethically corrupted stand-off leads to an escalation of hostilities that involve local priests, police and the judicial system in an increasingly confusing knot of conflicted schemes aimed at satisfying the convoluted demands of an arcane honor code. When the conventional remedies of the system don't yield the desired outcome, the aggrieved parties resort to planned assassinations and staged kidnappings in their attempts to settle the score. It's not until Peppino comes to grips with the fact that the law holds him criminally accountable for his transgressions, but also offers him a convenient escape clause from the charges of rape and corruption of a minor if he simply agrees to marry his victim, that his thinking starts to come in line with all the patriarchal pressures inflicted upon him. Even so, Peppino's belated acceptance of responsibility only complicates matters as he fails to concede to Don Vincenzo's mandate quickly enough, adding yet another offense to the Ascalone family's honor. The tensions grow to a frenzied climax in a chaotic montage sequence that offers as good an approximation as any of just how impossible and confusing it is to try and satisfy the demands of a moral code that's intractably biased toward surface appearances and male privilege at the expense of all other considerations.
All in all, Seduced and Abandoned paints a dismal picture of both the Sicilian society that Germi was intent on lampooning and, more generally, the self-absorbed vanity that continues to perpetuate various cultures of male dominance to this day. Germi's sharp satirical edge manages to induce plenty of laughter along the way, but we'd be remiss to just watch this film for its humor, without shedding a few tears for the human misery it portrays, and emerging with a feeling of contempt for chauvinistic attitudes that hold women to impossible standards from which men conveniently exempt themselves.
Next: Pale Flower