The Most Beautiful Wife (1970) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Sean Baker 4

  Twilight Time Blu-ray

  Love this film.

• Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 6

  TW: rape, pedophilia

  The Years of Lead – Book Out Now!

  THIS MOVIE IS A WORK OF FICTION. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO REAL PEOPLE OR INCIDENTS IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

  More than any other Italian director, Damiano Damiani loves to put the "all persons fictitious" disclaimer in front of his movies, a gesture used by boring filmmakers to make their films appear interesting and by transgressive filmmakers to cover their asses, and Damiani is in full ass-cover mode here: the film is based on a true story, and not on some obscure headline but a front-page national news story that involved the Italian president and the Pope. He's not fooling anyone by saying that it's fictitious, but the story is too raw,…

• Review by Slig001 ★★★★ 1

  A Cosa Nostra love story from the Mafia's biggest critic Damiano Damiani. Vito Juvara is a young Mafioso who selects an underage girl to marry from the working class on the advice of his soon to be incarcerated uncle. However, she's not quite the doormat he was expecting and after insulting him one too many times, he takes it upon himself to ruin her and her family. This is a strong drama. The trajectory of the narrative is rather simple, leaving the characters and their motivations to do all the heavy lifting. The film explores the strength of the wealthy mafia families; the authorities are largelly impotent, outsmarted by the mafia at every turn. The mafia, in turn, exert their…

• Review by pirateneckbeard ★★★★½ 5

  Wow this thing goes in directions you wouldn't expect. Planting a seed and blooming something smartly changing the narrative while keeping a sharp through line in the material. Honestly this film lives and dies with Ornella Muti's (Fransesca) performance. She truly is excellent in this giving such a wide range of emotions and turning them with just a look. Wow! I am starting to realize that Damiano Damiani might be one of the greatest underrated directors for I have greatly enjoyed and now need to check out more. It is an awkward narrative but I think it's challenging nature indentures you to see this material through whilst giving you so many angles to the material... good or not. So ugly:)

• Review by Mos Co ★★★★

  There’s much to despise in this story. Attitudes, personalities, traditions, and laws all combine to create crazy misogynistic circumstances, all based on true events.
  The film is expertly made though, and Ornella Muti put in a performance and a half as the young girl who should never have been subjected to any of this.

• Review by matt lynch ★★★½

  Being a Damiani picture I think this is typically understylized, but it's also probably his most perfect engine for that patented social concern and focus on procedure. Muti's refusal to accept the fuitima marriage forces a confrontation not just with patriarchy but practically any other level of hypocrisy, corruption, and complacency you care to name. And that barn-burning scene, holy shit.

• Review by laird ★★★★½ 2

  A woman endures...

  To be honest, I selected this to watch because of the outrageous Morricone score, not realizing it was directed by Damiano Damiani and starring Ornella Muti (who I loved in Dirty Pictures which I watched for the first time towards the beginning of the year). Damiani (A Bullet for the General, Confessions of a Police Captain) does what he does best, infusing a genre story--here a gangster drama--with social realism and leftist bullet points. Earthquake ravaged and impoverished Sicily is the background for the based-on-a-true-story tale of a teenage farm girl who, unlike pop gangster wives from Public Enemy to The Sopranos, rejects misogyny, abuse and patriarchy and wages a one-woman war on the mafia, her father, and the whole damn system. Reborn in flames.

• Review by ItsMeShubham ★★★★

  A young man in a powerful position tries to find a wife the wrong way, and the old customs of Italy are also very strange, due to which the girl suffers.

• Review by RanchoTuVu ★★★★

  A senior Mafia boss advises his nephew about the importance of family and marrying a poor woman with high morals. Then the nephew played by Alessio Orano sees Francesca played by Ornela Muti, who was only fifteen at the time they made the movie, portraying the daughter from a family of poor farmers, milking her goat, who instead of being compliant, perhaps because she's fifteen (in the movie and real life) and social indoctrination hasn't set in yet, never misses an opportunity to stand up to his arrogance as he tries to break her self esteem to the point of kidnapping and raping her and Damiano Damiani, political auteur extraordinaire, is there to capture the story and its dramatic social framework with one of Ennio Morricone's better soundtracks to add to it. It doesn't always move along so fast, but it feels very real.

• Review by 𝔸ℕℕ𝔸 ★★★★

  What am I?

  Ornella Muti in her film debut at 15 plays a fictionalised version of Franca Viola, a young woman who refused to marry her previous boyfriend/current rapist to pay for her supposed sin of carnal pleasure. And what a strong debut!

  Alessio Orano (evil Bill Hader) is Muti's mafia-linked boyfriend who has been told by his respected uncle to find himself a respectable wife, one with "high morals", and "the poorer, the better." Start a family, stay out of trouble, yada yada yada. Orano mistakes Muti's innocence at 15 for braindead and submissive bride material and proceeds to treat her like trash. Muti fights back, wounding Orano's pride, and what evolves is a battle between gender dynamics/expectations with…

• Review by Adrian 🥐☕ ★★★★

  D. Damiani #4 --- Ornella Muti stars in this Mafia drama about a poor girl that doesn't bow to the will of a young mobster who wants to marry her. Naturally, it is set in Sicilia which has dozens of beautiful locations. The acting is stellar from everybody, especially from Ornella, Alessio Orano, and Tano Cimarosa. While the first few minutes make it look like your typical organized crime story it quickly becomes something else. They focus then shifts and concentrates on Francesca's (Ornella Muti) character. All of the scenes that involve her and how she fights against Vito's will are quite powerful. Morricone's soundtrack is also one of the best I heard from him.

  Good stuff. It delineates itself from the usual Italian genre fare.

• Review by Rosie Lighters ★★★½

  Very romantic first part. Second half of the movie too much Hollywood. In reality no solutions offer themselves.