Lo sciecco bianco

Lo sciecco bianco (Federico Fellini, 1952) aka The White Knight; Alberto Sordi, Leopoldo Trieste, Brunella Bovo, Giulietta Masina

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 Rudolph Valentino-like hero of a soap opera photo 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. The plotline was appropriated by Woody Allen in his film To Rome with Love.

James Rich: The White Sheik was film #1 1/2 for Federico Fellini, and his first as a solo director. Released in 1952, it didn't exactly set the world on fire, and though it has had a critical re-evaluation since, I still find it to be a mere trifle in the director's early career. This movie seems like a warm-up, with key moments acting as rehearsals for the more realized features to come, including I Vitelloni and Nights of Cabiria.
What Fellini is trying to do here is make a simultaneous homage and satire of early cinema, with the fumetti replacing silent movies. I suppose that choice could be a subtle dig at the state of motion pictures, that their best days are frozen in still images on a page, but The White Sheik doesn't feel that sharp. Criterion Confessions.

References and Links

Wikipedia page.

IMDb page.


Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 15 January, 2021 | Now: 15 January, 2021