Directed by: Ugo Tognazzi
Stars: Ugo Tognazzi, Edwige Fenech, Paolo Bonacelli, Yanti Somer, Laura Bonaparte, Veruschka von Lehndorff
Language: English
Country: Italy | Imdb Info

Also known as: Cattivi Pensieri, Who Mislaid My Wife?

Description: Mario Marani is a successful Milanese lawyer married to the beautiful Francesca. Their comfortable life should leave little room for anxiety, but Mario is consumed by jealousy and permanently convinced that his desirable wife is surrounded by potential lovers.

When fog cancels a flight and sends Mario unexpectedly home, he becomes certain that someone is hiding inside the apartment. Rather than confronting Francesca directly, he allows suspicion to take control, turning every friend, acquaintance, and innocent conversation into possible evidence of betrayal.

Francesca, played by Edwige Fenech at the height of her 1970s screen allure, becomes the center of Mario’s increasingly feverish imagination. Elegant clothes, revealing situations, flirtatious encounters, and the couple’s glamorous social circle only give his “evil thoughts” more fuel.

The irony is that Mario is hardly a model husband himself. While obsessing over Francesca’s fidelity, he pursues his own temptations, exposing the comic double standard beneath his masculine paranoia.

Evil Thoughts blends sophisticated marital comedy with the sensual energy of commedia sexy all’italiana. Rather than building around simple bedroom farce, it turns jealousy itself into the joke: Mario’s imagination is often more erotic, outrageous, and dangerous than anything Francesca is actually doing.

Legacy Note: Ugo Tognazzi directs and stars, giving the film a sharper satirical edge than a routine sex comedy. Mario is ridiculous but recognizably human—a wealthy, sophisticated man reduced to a nervous wreck by the thought that other men might desire his wife.

Edwige Fenech is the film’s undeniable visual centerpiece, combining glamour, sensual confidence, and comic timing. Yanti Somer, Mara Venier, Veruschka, and Laura Bonaparte further strengthen the female cast, while Luc Merenda and Paolo Bonacelli add to Mario’s ever-expanding gallery of suspected rivals.

Stylish, sexy, cynical, and driven by marital paranoia, Evil Thoughts captures the more sophisticated side of 1970s Italian erotic comedy—where beautiful women, bourgeois hypocrisy, wandering eyes, and masculine insecurity can turn one locked closet into a complete psychological disaster.