189 The Magnificent Cuckold

[Finch]

A happily married businessman (Ugo Tognazzi, Weak Spot) succumbs to the advances of one of his less square, more open-minded female friends. His eyes now open to the rampant adultery among his high-society acquaintances, he is amazed at the ease with which they lie to their loved ones. Soon, he begins to suspect his loving wife (Claudia Cardinale, Girl with a Suitcase) of infidelity – even as she guesses nothing of his own extramarital affair. Antonio Pietrangeli’s luscious adaptation of Fernand Crommelynck’s tale of obsession and delusion skewers the changing mores and tenacious prejudices of 1960s Italian society with style. As the troubled husband’s paranoia takes him ever further away from reality, his fantasies come to life in sumptuous dream sequences, each one a dashing tribute to the radiant charm of Claudia Cardinale.

BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION SPECIAL FEATURES

4K restoration of the film from the original camera negative by the Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Compass Film and Studio Cine
Uncompressed mono PCM audio
New interview with Italian film expert Richard Dyer (2026)
New visual essay by Italian cinema professor Rémi Fournier Lanzoni (2026)
Alternative colour sequences
Newly improved English subtitle translation
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by film critic Phuong Le and archival writing
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[TMDaines]

A welcome guessed title. Lovely stuff. Great film!

[ellipsis7]

An excellent presentation of a great Pietrangeli film!... The alternative colour sequence fascinating in the context of the whole structure... A multilayered comedy drama exploring complex modern morality during Italy's economic boom of the 1960s...

[Criterion Nitrile]

The Magnificent Beaver

[domino harvey]

And the middle sliver of the Venn diagram between me and Radiance gets a little slimmer with yet another total failure. The film is shot and (slowly) paced like a drama but it’s a comedy where we can never for one second buy the premise, even within the world of the film, because Ugo Tagnazzi’s character is repellent in ways which no woman has ever found attractive: lacking confidence, anxious, ill-humored, and with no signs of charisma. And this is clearly a conscious choice on either the part of the director or the actor or both, but it stops an already tired premise from ever getting off the ground because no way does this guy with these traits attract these two women, no, absolutely not. It’s just garden variety male audience wish fulfillment. And because the movie is completely gutless, it makes Cardinale so impossibly untouched that there is no possible evidence or justification for the outsized jealousy this character fosters (underlined via saying out loud lots of helpful, Netflix-esque spellings out of every plot movement and motivation). This film is also not really critical of “men” for these tendencies, it’s critical of this man for being a total cuck loser. No film with two extended cheesecake sequences for a barely clothed Cardinale has any progressive aims— do modern viewers really just accept claims/quips like “Toxic Masculinity: The Film” without actually first thinking about if that’s an accurate description of the movie they just watched? The film also has an unbelievably cheap, utterly predictable ironic ending that is up there with La mort de belle in the “Oh, well I guess I’ll just go fuck myself for taking any of this seriously” style. Seeing this mess really makes one appreciate how well and deft Chabrol played this kind of material a few decades later.

[Lowry_Sam]

I haven't seen this one yet, but I did see the 4K restoration of Lo so che tu sai che io so or I Know That You Know That I Know (1982) which treads some of the same territory but with Monica Vitti & Alberto Sordi, who also directed. This one also straddles the line between comedy and drama without ever committing to either genre. Alberto Sordi plays a bank clerk that's notified by a private investigator (who he did not hire him) that he has the details of what his wife has been up to behind his back but he tells the p.i. that he didn't hire him & that he doesn't want to know. He initially tries to play that he's above playing the role of jealous husband, but curiosity & jealousy starts to creep in. While not a masterpiece, I found it both refreshing and enjoyable, if not completely plausible. Hopefully Radiance picks it up too.

[olmo]

And the middle sliver of the Venn diagram between me and Radiance gets a little slimmer with yet another total failure. The film is shot and (slowly) paced like a drama but it’s a comedy where we can never for one second buy the premise, even within the world of the film, because Ugo Tagnazzi’s character is repellent in ways which no woman has ever found attractive: lacking confidence, anxious, ill-humored, and with no signs of charisma. And this is clearly a conscious choice on either the part of the director or the actor or both, but it stops an already tired premise from ever getting off the ground because no way does this guy with these traits attract these two women, no, absolutely not. It’s just garden variety male audience wish fulfillment. And because the movie is completely gutless, it makes Cardinale so impossibly untouched that there is no possible evidence or justification for the outsized jealousy this character fosters (underlined via saying out loud lots of helpful, Netflix-esque spellings out of every plot movement and motivation). This film is also not really critical of “men” for these tendencies, it’s critical of this man for being a total cuck loser. No film with two extended cheesecake sequences for a barely clothed Cardinale has any progressive aims— do modern viewers really just accept claims/quips like “Toxic Masculinity: The Film” without actually first thinking about if that’s an accurate description of the movie they just watched? The film also has an unbelievably cheap, utterly predictable ironic ending that is up there with La mort de belle in the “Oh, well I guess I’ll just go fuck myself for taking any of this seriously” style. Seeing this mess really makes one appreciate how well and deft Chabrol played this kind of material a few decades later.

Yet you highly recommended the lamentable (IMO) I...for Icarus, here lieth the joy of subjectivity in film.

It seems that the criticism is of an irritating sexism that the film exudes, and it's strange that on reading up on the film, it courted controversy, not from women's groups but pearl clutching, precious male taxi drivers who refused to carry any promotional material on their cabs. I also think that to lambast a film solely on a premise without engaging in a tiny bit of incredulity stretching and an unwillingness to entertain the notion of specific Italian social mores of the time, a tad biased (French cinema of the 50s & 60s is also chockablock with the mari trompé) - cuckold / jealous husband motif), to point out that Cardinale's character/behaviour does not warrant any jealousy from her Husband misses the point entirely on male possesiveness and 'toxic masculinity' - a term you seem to ridicule in this particular context.

[ellipsis7]

I like this film. It works on several levels at the same time.

I can recommend this bilingual book Antonio Pietrangeli, il regista che amava le donne which contains contemporary criticism & reads of the film & indeed of the whole Pietrangeli oeuvre...

[domino harvey]

It seems that the criticism is of an irritating sexism that the film exudes, and it's strange that on reading up on the film, it courted controversy, not from women's groups but pearl clutching, precious male taxi drivers who refused to carry any promotional material on their cabs. I also think that to lambast a film solely on a premise without engaging in a tiny bit of incredulity stretching and an unwillingness to entertain the notion of specific Italian social mores of the time, a tad biased (French cinema of the 50s & 60s is also chockablock with the mari trompé) - cuckold / jealous husband motif), to point out that Cardinale's character/behaviour does not warrant any jealousy from her Husband misses the point entirely on male possesiveness and 'toxic masculinity' - a term you seem to ridicule in this particular context.

The problem is not that his jealousy is unwarranted, it’s that there is zero ambiguity or complexity to his wife or her motivations and actions. Cardinale does not exist in this film in any dimension other than that of the falsely accused hottie wife. The film makes no attempts to present her in any way that could possibly complicate her obvious function for even the stupidest of audience members as a plot device, which manifests as an insult to the intelligence of this viewer. This film has nothing to say about “toxic masculinity” because it is ridiculing Tognazzi’s character from essentially the opposite aims: he specifically is a joke because like Bernard Blier’s character, he’s not a real man who satisfies his wife and knows her secret carnal predilections. There’s nothing fresh about wearing the horns in a comedy, and there’s certainly nothing transgressive or progressive about it just because modern viewers feel flattered by one plot element without considering the disconnect of this reading from the rest of the film