The Climax

The framework of writer/director Pietro Germi's earlier Gelosia (1953) had a man confessing his immorality to his priest, with the melodramatic unravelling of his relationships with two women in flashbacks. Here the male protagonist tells his story of being overextended between three women and having in effect three different families to take care of, to an increasingly exasperated priest who at one point breaks down and recommends, shocking for Italy at the time, a divorce.But here , following up on the earlier successes of Germi's black comedies Divorce Italian Style plus Seduced And Abandoned, the overall tone is more that of a mellow comedy, and Ugo Tognazzi as the overstretched man is well cast in the part. A young Stefania Sandrelli stands out as the most recent of Tognazzi's conquests. The best scene is at a merry go round in a park where Tognazzi visualizes the possibility of bringing the different women and their children together in one space. A weakness of the film is that after all the development there is only so much one can expect in terms of payoff, or as the English title of the film has it, climax. Is Tognazzi an "immoral" man, as the original Italian title has it? See the film and judge (taking into consideration the cultural standards of Italy in the late 1960s) for yourself.