Unwed Father

By Stefan Canfer

A burned-out pop singer, Valeria Billi (Sophia Loren) has enough troubles for a group. One more cataclysm cannot matter--so she falls in love with a priest, Don Mario (Marcello Mastroianni). These are the '70s, and married priests are not unheard of. But this is also provincial Padua, and the residue of two millenniums bows the Father's shoulders. Should he yield to his passions or to tradition? In The Priest's Wife he accommodates both, thereby demonstrating that sin beloved by Italian film makers: hypocrisy within the cloth.

Doubtless, Director Dino Risi wished to reveal the two faces of the church as well, but the sober editorial is out of keeping with the film's farcical style. The jests are painfully arch (says a prelate to a Vatican telephone operator: "I'd like to speak to St. Paul. Minnesota, that is"). But the jesters--ah, that is another story. It always is when Mastroianni and Loren combine.

On the church's home turf, The Priest's Wife is a minor' variation on a national obsession: the clericalism that many adherents cannot take in a religion they do not want to leave. In the U.S., the film's taste may be suspect, its humor questionable. Its stars, however, remain the screen's greatest sex comedians. Sophia and Marcello have been through half a dozen films together, and perhaps it is unwise for them to attack what is vulnerable in revered institutions. They are becoming one themselves.

Stefan Kanfer

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