A film in two episodes, Marito e moglie transcends the era’s vogue for episodic comedy by virtue of its strangeness and its cruelty. Bedridden by illness, Don Matteo is oppressed by his mean wife, who even makes use of his immobility to incubate eggs. Gennaro, a middle-aged dreamer, innocently courts the young girl who lives opposite, unleashing his wife’s anger. The first episode, adapted from Maupassant’s Toine and featuring an irresistible Tina Pica, is one of the hidden gems of Italian cinema of the period, an unexpected and grotesque twisting of familiar Eduardian scenes.
“Eduardo walks through streets populated by locals in almost neorealist fashion, in this film that is a cinematic jewel. It is a very mobile film, with the camera always in motion, an enormous chorus of characters, and an explosive vitality of the kind that we can also find in another great film shot in the vicinity of Vesuvius that same year, Renato Castellani’s Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents Worth of Hope).” (Goffredo Fofi, Dove sta Zazà, episode on Marito e moglie, Radio 3, 2016). The film forms an ideal triptych with the episode from the collective film I sette peccati capitali, which was initially conceived to take the place now occupied by the second episode. A wife (Isa Miranda) torments her husband (Paolo Stoppa) over his excessive honesty towards their impoverished tenant (Eduardo), a clarinet teacher. “The set design and atmosphere of pure neorealism serve as a frame for a dramatic tale in which a certain ‘popular and unsophisticated fantasy’ more or less explicitly calls to mind Miracolo a Milano” (Jean-José Richer, “Cahiers du cinéma”, 13 June 1952).

Emiliano Morreale