The Priest's Wife Reviews

Loren plays a rock 'n' roll singer who learns that her lover of four years has been married all along. She tries to commit suicide by swallowing sleeping pills, and at one point before losing consciousness she calls a crisis hotline and gets priest Mastroianni. When she regains consciousness in the hospital the next day, she asks for the priest to whom she talked, and immediately falls in love with him. His first love is the church, though, although he feels that in the more liberal times of the movie's setting, he might get a special dispensation to violate his vow of celibacy. At night the priest is tortured by thoughts of Loren's ample charms. He asks other priests for advice, some telling him to resign, others to go ahead and have an affair; still others recommend castration as the only final foolproof way to stave off the temptations of the flesh. Meanwhile the case makes the news and Loren's singing career is revived when she performs as "The Priest's Wife." Eventually Mastroianni is summoned to Rome where he is given a cushy Monsignorship and a swell Vatican office to woo him back under the church's spell. Loren learns that she is pregnant (just how and by whom is never explained, at least not in the miserable dubbed version). When she sees Mastroianni during a papal procession, his eyes stay on the pontiff. She realizes that he will never leave the church for her and sadly goes away. There is no doubt that the two stars have a pleasant chemistry for comedy, but the script here is so abysmal and the direction so flaccid, that it just doens't come off. The film was universally savaged by critics when released and failed miserably at the box office. A nearly concurrent picture, IL PRETE SPOSATO (The Married Priest) with Rosanna Podesta dealt with the same subject in much steamier fashion, but never premiered in the U.S.