Some of the most significant titles in the diva film genre derive from the encounter between Giovanni Pastrone and Pina Menichelli. After the actress became successful, she tried to distance herself from the role of the femme fatale, but she revisited it in La moglie di Claudio, her final collaboration with Pastrone.
At the end of World War I, Itala Film adapted Dumas’ story, keeping the patriotic theme in the background in order to create a stage for the actress’s dramatic, uninhibited ‘Menichelli’ mannerisms.
In the opening sequence, a splendidly dressed Cesarina (Pina Menichelli) provokes her suitors by voluptuously biting a rose in the middle of a salon. It is a gesture that the Countess Natka dared to make in Tigre reale (1916), but from inside a carriage and thus flirting only with the spectator. Claudio’s wife returns home after the failure of her escape with Moncabré and the murky episode of her convalescence (an euphemism for a pregnancy or maybe an abortion). We suddenly and unexpectedly see her through a window: this image of Cesarina, ready to grasp other victims, echoes Menichelli’s owl-woman in Il fuoco (1915).
The protagonist is a woman without feelings or morals – a shamelessly unfaithful wife – surrounded by intrigue, espionage, passion, dishonour, violence and, above all, death. Some sections of the narrative, such as the appearance of a secret society, are difficult to follow because of gaps in the only surviving print; others are obscured by prudent discretion of the intertitles, mentioning ‘the consequences’ of yet another relationship which almost cost Cesarina her life.
After attempting to reconquer her husband, seducing his favourite student and stealing secret documents, Cesarina is betrayed and unmasked by the light of a ‘damned moon’; then Claudio stops her with a gunshot. Menichelli rewards us with a textbook ending: mortally wounded, she grasps the curtains sensuously before falling to the floor enveloped in their folds, as if wrapped in a funeral shroud.

Claudia Gianetto

Cesarina Rupert, a modern day Messalina, is Claudio’s wife, a patriot and a brilliant inventor of war vehicles for France. Be­tween personal drama and spy intrigues, this mismatched couple is destined for a tragic end. Pina Menichelli demonstrates her impressive and expressive range in her role as Dumas’ dark heroine “the evil woman who undermines society, breaks up families, dismembers the mother country, challenges man, dishonors the woman she is impersonating, and destroys those who do not crush her”. The result is a perfor­mance that captures the excesses but also the hypnotic and erotic power of what Dalì defined as “hysterical cinema”. Even if lo­cal critics snubbed the film, not only be­cause of the excesses of the female lead but also the un-original storyline, it is re­markable to see advanced social and politi­cal themes of the times addressed, such as abortion and the aspirations of the Jewish people for a national state.