Antonio Pietrangeli’s IL MAGNIFICO CORNUTO is a marital comedy that plays kind of like a sixties Italian EYES WIDE SHUT — it’s all about fidelity, there’s an exchange of fantasies/affairs, the complacent male is thrown into a whirlpool of angst, there are scenes in a hotel and a big country house… Ugo Tognazzi (you remember the child-catcher in BARBARELLA who takes off his big fur coat to reveal an even bigger, furrier chest?) cheats on his impossibly gorgeous wife, Claudia Cardinale, and is tormented, not by conventional guilt, but by impotent fantasies of her cheating back.
The climactic, is I may use the word, fantasy, is a prolonged and luminously atmospheric striptease, with Cardinale stripping away her seven or so veils according to the results of an erotic tombola. Yes.
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