The White Sheik

Fellini's first solo feature, a delightful satirical comedy about a young honeymoon couple (Bovo and Trieste) who arrive in Rome with the wife yearning after her romantic ideal, The White Sheik, star of one of the fumetti (the photographic comic strips so popular in Italy). While she dashes off for a glimpse of her hero (Sordi), incarnated by a bedraggled hack actor who vainly tries to preen himself to meet her expectations, the disconsolate husband spends a lonely night wandering the streets until he meets a friendly prostitute. Agreeably abrasive in its attitude to illusions and the self-delusions that fuel them, vitriolically funny in evoking the world of the fumetti, Fellini lapses only briefly into his later mystico-sentimentality in the character of the prostitute (played, of course, by Masina). (From a story by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Michelangelo Antonioni.