Pietro Germi followed his enormously successful Divorce, Italian Style with another grotesque comedy in the same vein. This one takes off from an antiquated law (known, as a line in the film indicates, to every Sicilian schoolboy) which frees a man from guilt for "forcible seduction" if he marries the woman--thus, from her point of view, adding insult to injury. Stefania Sandrelli is the woman in question here; her father (Saro Urzi) frantically tries to marry her off to the seducer/abandoner even though he is her sister's fiancé. Meanwhile, a bemused townspeople, who know the facts, play along for tradition's sake. "...Pietro Germi, with Sedotta e Abbandonata, turns agains to a story of lusty Sicily, firmly opposed to any issue of progress...where a woman is still subject to males' outrages and strict rule, having in her father, in her brother, later in her husband, a jailer and a defender of the so-called 'family honor.' In this film Germi does not want merely to entertain--he aims at criticizing manners... (But) the film is the work of a satirist, not a moralist" (G. Strazzulla, International Film Guide).