Two young newlyweds from a provincial town, Wanda (Brunella Bovo) and Ivan Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste), arrive in Rome for their honeymoon. Wanda is obsessed with the "White Sheik" (Alberto Sordi), the Rudolph Valentino-like hero of a soap operaphoto strip and sneaks off to find him, leaving her conventional, petit bourgeois husband in a quandary as he tries to hide his wife's disappearance from his strait-laced relatives who are waiting to go with them to visit the Pope.
The White Sheik was Fellini's first solo effort as a director. He had previously co-directed Variety Lights in 1950 with Alberto Lattuada.
Originally the treatment for The White Sheik was written by Michelangelo Antonioni.[6]Carlo Ponti commissioned Fellini and Tullio Pinelli to develop the treatment. It was satirical in nature, targeting the trashy fotoromanzi comic strips that were extremely popular in Italy when the film was made.[7]
The male lead, Leopoldo Trieste, a playwright who did not consider himself an actor, reluctantly auditioned for Fellini. During the audition Fellini asked him to compose a sonnet that the lead character would have written to his wife. The poem which begins "She is graceful, sweet and teeny..." was included in the film.[8]
Appearing briefly as the prostitute Cabiria, Giulietta Masina would later return to this role in Nights of Cabiria. Her short scene inspired Fellini to write the screenplay and also convinced producers that Giulietta was ready for the leading role.[9]
Reception
Italian film critic Giulio Cesare Castello, writing for Cinema V, argued that Fellini's past as a successful strip cartoonist made him a natural choice as the film's director: "Fellini was undoubtedly the best qualified and for two reasons: firstly, his experience as a strip cartoonist and consequently his familiarity with the secrets and intrigues of the world he was about to bring to the screen; secondly, his gift for sarcastic comment and delight in satirizing tradition... The result is unusual and stimulating but derives more from the failure to establish a basic mood or tone rather than from any direct intention. Fellini should find this tone in future works if he is to avoid the discontinuity we found here."[10]
^Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (1996). The Companion to Italian Cinema. London: Cassell. p. 79. ISBN0304341975.
^Castello's review first published in Cinema V (Milan) December 15, 1952. Cited in Claudio Fava and Aldo Vigano, The Films of Federico Fellini, New York: Citadel Press (1985), p. 65.
Further reading
Aristarco, Guido. Lo sceicco bianco, in: "Cinema Nuovo", n° 1, Novembre 1952. (in Italian)
Burke, Frank M. "Variety Lights, The White Sheik, and Italian Neorealism". In Film Criticism, Winter 1978, Volume 3, no. 2, p. 53-66.