Jole Fierro	Mariuccia
Claudia Cardinale	Barbara Puglisi
Fulvia Mammì	Elena Ardizzone
Marcello Mastroianni	Antonio Magnano
Tomas Milian	Edoardo
Rina Morelli	Rosaria Magnano
Patrizia Bini	Santuzza
Anna Arena	Mrs. Puglisi
Pierre Brasseur	Alfio Magnano
Gina Mattarola
Anna Glori
Cesarina Gheraldi	aunt Giuseppina
Alice Sandro	Nanda
Guido Celano	the Honourable Calderana
Nino Camarda
Maurizio Conti
Salvatore Fazio
Rino Giusti
Enzo Tiribelli
Ugo Torrente
Nazzareno D'Aquilio
Maria Luisa Crescenzi	Francesca

Antonio Magnano, a young and good looking boy, with fame of ladies’man, but really impotent, after many years of stay in Rome, he returns to the native Catania, where his father Alfio has found him a bride, Barbara Puglisi. Antonio falls in love with the girl and he marries her; but when it is discovered that, after three years of marriage, his wife is still Miss, the shame is inevitable. The marriage is loosended and Barbara marries the duke of Bronte, an old but rich man; Alfio “to ransom the honor of the family” starts over to attend the house used by call girls, but a few later dies. Well soon the widow is consoled; the young house maid is becoming mother and the fatherhood of the forthcoming is attributed to Antonio.

CRITIQUE

“The director (...) has given us back a Sicily now lyric (...), now gossipy and quarrelsome of yearning truth. Certain sequences of “Il bell’Antonio” are destinded to become famous, also because Bolognini, has found in the cameraman Nannuzzi a magic collaborator, and certainly exceptional. The interpreters show up excellent too. (...) It is an interpretation (that of Mastroianni) built in the intelligence, from the inside, without artifices (...)”. (P.Bianchi "Il giorno" 5/3/1969, translated by Alice Castoldi)

Setting the adaptation of Vitaliano Brancati’s homonym novel, signed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gino Visentini, in the Fifties instead that in the fascist period, the film loses a lot of its social-political implications (reduced to the satire of the most Italian of all the parties”, or entrusted to sketches too much affected) and it is centered on the misadventures of the protagonist. In this way, in despite of the beautiful performance of Mastroianni, “the intimist and languid tone in which the story is dressed” delivery the work to a mannerism with taste but after all inactive. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

PRIZES

Gold sail at the Festival of Locarno