Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Title: The White Sheik
Year: 1952
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, and Ennio Flaiano. Story by Fellini, Pinelli and Michaelangelo Antonioni (!)
Stars: Alberto Sordi, Brunella Bovo, Leopoldo Trieste, Giuletta Masina

The Story: A young couple from the sticks comes into Rome for their honeymoon. The husband has everything planned to the second, culminating in a meeting with the Pope, but his shy young wife disappears at the first chance she gets–it turns out that she is secretly in love with the title character, who is the hero of her favorite comic book.

Why It’s Great: Fellini is beloved for his oddly uplifting movies about existential ennui, but this, his first movie as a solo director, was one of his few straight-up comedies, causing American critics to mostly ignore it. That’s a shame, since it’s a masterful and touching farce. Woody Allen named it as his favorite comedy of all time! It’s a romp, but also very ambitious, in that it manages to be wholly sympathetic to two totally conflicting points of view. We appreciate both the thrill of her liberation and the exquisiteness agony of his suffering, even though one is causing the other. It was this big-hearted munificence that would come to define Fellini’s world-view.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…