The Italian Straw Hat

I have to confess that I was left bemused by the warm, not to say rapturous, audience comments I overheard when leaving the cinema. I can easily credit that it benefits from a live accompaniment rather than whatever music was applied to the soundtrack on a home video release -- but I found the pacing of the film slow and verging on funereal, the plot a strained farce revolving around a comedy of 19th-century manners already outdated in the 1920s, and the characters so unsympathetic that I caught myself feeling gratified when it looked as if the seething husband was about to blow the deception wide open. There were times when I was in sympathy with the gentleman sitting at the end of my row, who intermittently let out choked snores before jerking awake.

The film has its moments, but overall I found it disconcertingly tedious -- shots seem to be repeated and lingered upon beyond humour, and for no clear reason. The opening scenes are a pretty fair sample of the pacing and style throughout, as the various members of the bridal party experience problems in dressing, in a sequence that feels as if it extends a good five minutes: it's mildly amusing, but it's mainly 'situation' comedy in which the characterisations themselves are supposed to be funny rather than anything they actually do, and it goes on and on. Similarly, in the finale, after the plot is unravelled in what seems intended to be the end, a series of half a dozen impressionistic epilogues follow one after another, with no sign of when the film is ever going to stop...

The mechanics of the farce depend on stock characters: the endlessly-fainting lady, the insanely insistent lover, the stone-deaf old man. Gags that are eventually funny -- e.g. the mass adjustment of ties during the civil ceremony -- are built up to via enormous layering and labouring of detail. The idiom is, I suspect, to me a basically alien one; but it's the timing that really hurts as far as entertainment goes. I don't care for slapstick, but this film goes to the opposite extreme -- clearly too sophisticated for my uncultured taste to handle.