The White Sheik

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Overview

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 ...
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Overview

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.
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Editorial Reviews

All Movie Guide - Wheeler Winston Dixon
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.
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Product Details

  • Release Date: 2/26/2002
  • UPC: 000799750230
  • Original Release: 1952

    • Rating:

  • Source: XENON
  • Presentation: Subtitled
  • Format: VHS

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits
Brunella Bovo Vanda Giardino, Wanda
Alberto Sordi Fernando Rivoli
Leopoldo Trieste Ivan Cavalli
Giulietta Masina Cabiria
Lilia Landi Felga
Ernesto Almirante Director of "White Sheik" Strip
Antoni Acqua
Ugo Attanasio
Mimo Billi
Enzo Maggio Hotel Concierge
Fanny Marchio Marilena Vellardi
Ettore Maria Margadonna Ivan's Uncle
Gina Mascetti "White Sheik's" Wife
Carlo Mazzone
Jole Silvani
Technical Credits
Federico Fellini Director, Screenwriter
Michelangelo Antonioni Screenwriter
Ennio Flaiano Screenwriter
Tullio Pinelli Screenwriter
Nino Rota Score Composer
Luigi Rovere Producer
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