Rating: NR
Genre:
Comedy Drama
Theatrical Release: 09/20/1952(Italy)
Release Date: 04/29/2003
SubTitles: English
Dubbed: Italian
Sound: DD1
Run Time: 86 Minutes
Flags: Questionable for Children
Distributor/Studio: Criterion
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
;)
