The Return of Cagliostro

In postwar Sicily during the late 1940s, two brother sculptors grow tired of chiseling madonnas for parish churches and decide to try their luck behind the camera. With a local bishop's reluctant blessing they launch a tiny production company that relies on rough sets, imperfect actors, and stubborn optimism. Their projects are misfires from the start, each one more financially disastrous than the last, leaving them buried in debt and barely clinging to hope. Then a flamboyant local nobleman who loves the occult puts his fortune on the line to back a plan about the legendary Cagliostro, aiming for a new kind of sensational cinema. They hire a famous American actor to play Erroll Douglas and begin filming, courting spectacle amid chaos. The budget pressures and creative clashes add tension that fuels the comedy.

Directed by Franco Maresco with Daniele Cipri credited as creator, this 2003 Italian comedy blends local culture with film world satire. It appears to be an original project rather than a direct adaptation, continuing Maresco and Cipri's distinctive, offbeat collaboration that fans expect.

Box office data for The Return of Cagliostro is not provided here. If available, it would help place the film within Maresco's career and postwar Italian cinema's appetite for satirical meta humor. If sources later reveal numbers.

The film works as a self aware look at how low budget productions try to chase stardom in a rugged postwar landscape. It nods to local Sicilian settings and to the lure of magical realism in cinema, appealing to fans of Maresco and Cipri's style. Its humor relies on timing.

Critics who have noted the film describe it as a sharp, sly satire of movie making and the hunger for fame. It examines debt, ambition, and the collision of local superstition with Hollywood style, all delivered with a wry, offbeat humor, and cultural memory lingers.