User reviews

This is commedia all'italiana at its best. Solid script, excellent acting (not only by Tognazzi but quite surprisingly also by the young and beautiful Ornella Muti), professional direction. The depiction of a union activist entangled with politically incorrect jelousy for his teenager wife is hilarious but also quite poignant. The setting in proletarian working class Milan is credible and realistic. A little gem of a movie. Something might get lost in translation/dubbing but definitively a must see also for non Italian viewers!

One of the big problems with 1970's Italian comedies is that they are either available only in Italian and thus difficult to understand if you're not too fluent in that language, or they are VERY badly dubbed into English which to my mind is much worse. Inept dubbing doesn't necessarily hurt your silliest sex comedies (i.e. the ones featuring the likes of Lino Banfi, Gloria Guida, etc.), but it is death to the ones that are halfway serious like this one.

A factory foreman, influential union leader, and all-around working-class hero (who claims to have bedded 3000 women!) decides to get married at the age of 51 to his 17-year-old goddaughter. (This may sound pretty perverse, but since she is played by Ornella Muti I'm sure no one would hold it against him). He believes he has progressive modern attitudes about sex, but these attitudes are severely tested when he starts to suspect his young wife is cheating on him with a handsome military officer (Michele Placido). And he becomes downright crazed when he realizes his suspicions may very well be justified.

This is a very Italian movie given that the hero is basically a philandering communist and his wife is about half a traditional Italian working-class woman and about half a modern "free love" 70's chick. Unfortunately, the guy is dubbed with an accent that sounds more like Queens than Italy, and Muti for some reason talks like Scarlet O'Hara! The bad dubbing distracts greatly from any serious gravitas the movie might have or any comment it might be making about modern-day amore all'italia and the relation between the sexes. As a sex comedy, on the other hand, it isn't as funny as some, nor does it seem to aim to be particularly titillating (despite several nice nude scenes by Muti).

NoShame or somebody like that might someday release a subtitled version that would no doubt make it much easier to appreciate. But whether this movie is any good or not--well, it's hard to tell when it's dubbed by a bunch of clowns like this.