Germi's Fine Italian Import

If you want to see the world of cartoonist Charles Addams put onscreen in all its morbid, Victorian splendor, then I recommend you skip the Addams Family movies and instead see Pietro Germi's "Divorce, Italian Style," which begins a two-week run at Film Forum today. It's a blast from the past, shot in 1961, a time when an Italian movie could come to America, be a box-office hit, nab best actor and best director nominations from the Academy, and take home the Oscar for best screenplay. These days, Italian movies run for a week at Cinema Village and are promptly forgotten.

The dark heart of this black comedy, shot in sumptuous black-and-white, is Marcello Mastroianni giving the greatest impersonation of Gomez Addams I've ever seen. Hair pasted to his skull, his face as blank and bored as a whale's backside, with a cigarette holder jutting from his mouth like a harpoon, he floats through his family mansion like a bored ghost.

Fernando Cefalú (Mastroianni) and his family have fallen on hard times. A hated uncle is living in the west wing of the villa, the frescoes are peeling, and the only thing for him to do in a summer as hot as the one blasting the Sicilian town of Agramonte is to hide inside, do crossword puzzles, and moon over the nubile young flesh of his 16-year-old cousin, Angela. But worst of all, Fernando's wife Rosalia (Daniela Rocca) has teeth the size of tombstones, a Frida Kahlo mustache, and one cyclopean eyebrow. The more he despises her, the more she adores him. There's only one answer: She must die.

This being Sicily, where honor killings are given a reduced sentence but divorce is unheard of, Fernando hatches a simple plan: push his wife into an affair, discover the lovers in flagrante delicto, kill his wife in a fit of passion, do three years in prison, and emerge to marry his cousin. Unhappiness makes for great comedy, and "Divorce, Italian Style" is exactly that: a great comedy. Mr. Addams once penned a cartoon of Gomez turning to his wife, Morticia, and cooing, "Are you unhappy, my darling?" Audiences for this film can easily echo her purred answer, "Oh, yes. Completely."

Through November 22 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).