Main Cast: Brunella Bovo, Alberto Sordi, Leopoldo Trieste, Giulietta Masina, Lilia Landi
Release Year: 1952
Country: IT/FR
Run Time: 86 minutes
Plot
The White Sheik (Lo Sceicco Bianco), Fellini's first solo flight as director, is a gentle lampoon of the idolatry heaped upon movie stars. An impressionable young bride, Wanda (Brunella Bovo) accompanies her husband Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste) on a dull honeymoon, full of meetings with family members and the papal father. Bovo fantasizes over matinee idol Fernando Rivoli, AKA The White Sheik (Alberto Sordi), the hero of a photo strip comic. She repeatedly drifts away from her husband and back, in periodic attempts to find The Sheik, ultimately repairing to the location site where Sordi's latest film, The White Shiek, is in production. Her inevitable disillusionment with the vainglorious Sordi is intercut with her husband's comic (and desperate) attempts to explain his wife's absences at family gatherings to his disgruntled relatives. After a comically inept suicide attempt, Bovo and Trieste are reunited. Featured in the cast is Fellini's wife Giuletta Masina as a prostitute named Cabiria, who'd be given a vehicle of her own, Nights of Cabiria, in 1955. Based on "an idea" by Michelangelo Antonioni, The White Sheik was the main inspiration for Gene Wilder's The World's Greatest Lover (1977). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
With a script principally written by Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, The White Sheik is a rather light and somewhat inconsequential comedy, chronicling the romantic misadventures of Ivan Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste) and his bride, Wanda (Brunella Bovo), who have come to Rome for their honeymoon. Ivan has drawn up a minute-by-minute schedule for their stay in the Eternal City, including an audience with the Pope. Wanda is more distracted, however, and dreams of meeting Fernando Rivoli (the great comic actor Alberto Sordi), the leading man in the well-known fumetti "The White Sheik" (fumetti being the popular Italian comic strips that substitute photos of real-life actors for drawings). This leads to a series of clashes between the couple, as Wanda has been carrying on a secret correspondence with Rivoli, and is soon whisked away to the set of his latest comic-strip adventure, where the "star" makes romantic advances on her. In the meantime, Ivan is left to make clumsy explanations to his relatives, and drowns his sorrows with a visit to a prostitute. All of this leads to an eventual reconciliation of the couple, their illusions now vanished, as they start their lives together. This early Fellini film is a modest and gentle satire, though some count it among the director's finest works. Fellini's comedies always seem to have tragic threads waiting to be teased out, which the films then shy away from at a crucial juncture; Fellini is best as a social essayist when he plays his material straight rather than attempting to send it up. All in all, The White Sheik is minor Fellini, but completists will certainly want to see it, if only to get a better idea of how the director's genius eventually developed. ~ Wheeler Winston Dixon, All Movie Guide
Ernesto Almirante - Director of "White Sheik" Strip; Antoni Acqua; Mimo Billi; Enzo Maggio - Hotel Concierge; Fanny Marchio - Marilena Vellardi; Gina Mascetti - "White Sheik's" Wife; Ettore Maria Margadonna - Ivan's Uncle; Ugo Attanasio; Carlo Mazzone; Jole Silvani
Two young newlyweds from a provincial town, Wanda (Brunella Bovo) and Ivan Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste), arrive in Rome for their honeymoon. Wanda is obsessed with the "White Sheik" (Alberto Sordi), the hero of a soap operaphoto strip and sneaks off to find him, leaving her conventional, petit bourgeois husband in hysterics as he tries to hide his wife's disappearance from his strait-laced relatives who are waiting to go with them to visit the Pope.
Production history
The White Sheik was Fellini's first solo effort as a director. He had previously co-directed Variety Lights in 1950 with Alberto Lattuada.
Originally the treatment for The White Sheik was written by Michelangelo Antonioni. Carlo Ponti commissioned Fellini and Tullio Pinelli to develop the treatment. It was satirical in nature, targeting the trashy fotoromanzi comic strips that were extremely popular in Italy when the film was made.[citation needed]
The male lead, Leopoldo Trieste, a playwright who did not consider himself an actor, reluctantly auditioned for Fellini. During the audition Fellini asked him to compose a sonnet that the lead character would have written to his wife. The poem which begins "She is graceful, sweet and teeny..." was included in the film.[citation needed]
Appearing briefly as the prostitute Cabiria, Giulietta Masina would later return to this role in Nights of Cabiria. Her short scene inspired Fellini to write the screenplay and also convinced producers that Guilietta was ready for the leading role.[citation needed]
Critical reception
Italian film critic Giulio Cesare Castello, writing for Cinema V, argued that Fellini's past as a successful gag writer made him a natural choice as the film's director: "Fellini was undoubtedly the best qualified and for two reasons: firstly, his experience as a gag writer and consequently his familiarity with the secrets and intrigues of the world he was about to bring to the screen; secondly, his gift for sarcastic comment and delight in satirizing tradition... The result is unusual and stimulating but derives more from the failure to establish a basic mood or tone rather than from any direct intention. Fellini should find this tone in future works if he is to avoid the discontinuity we found here." [1]
^ Castello's review first published in Cinema V (Milan) December 15, 1952. Cited in Claudio Fava and Aldo Vigano, The Films of Federico Fellini, New York: Citadel Press (1985), p. 65.
