Il Bidone

Il Bidone (aka "The Swindle") (Federico Fellini, 1955) The Italian maestro in his hey-dey.  This 1955 film follows a trio of grifters—Augusto (Broderick Crawford), Picasso (Richard Basehart), and Roberto (Franco Fabrizi)—who are low-level con-artists in search of the Big Score—even a Ponzi scheme would do.  They drive into a small village, all pomp and circumstance, with as much respectability as a disguise or a decent suit can buy, and with guile and a healthy disrespect for people's own need for "easy riches" or a "too-good-to-be-true" deal, bilk the citizenry out of as much cash as they can find lying around.  As priests (using the respectability of the Church), they convince simple farm-folk of "buried treasure."  On a grander scale, they're developers collecting down-payments on rooms to a vapor—hotel that will never materialize ("The economy's bad and we've suffered some set-backs"). 

For Picasso, there are dreams of becoming a famous painter (but in the mean-time he can forge a few masterpieces to get by, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife, played by the wonderful Giulietta Masina).  Roberto, their chauffeur/get-away driver, is young to the game and is always looking for new angles so he can set off on his own crime-spree, free of "the losers" he thinks might be holding him back.  

But, the leader of the group, Augusto, is feeling the advance of age and getting a little desperate; he hasn't achieved any real fortune, just what can be piffled away on a falsley high lifestyle and an evening of prospecting at the clubs (he's not a high-roller, but he has to play one and that can get "spendy").  He is torn.  He wants the respectability that a really big perpetual con (like the kind found in government circles and among the constabulary can provide) can bring.  In essence, what he wants to do is be for real what he only play-acts as his work.  A man of respect, a high roller...an adult, or his version—his imagining—of what that is, this overlarge, over-age boy in big pants.  For Augusto, he hits "the brick-wall of Reality," in the presence of his very real daughter, for whom he wants most to be seen as a man of respect, a man of accomplishment, instead of the fraud he pretends to be.

I started out this review saying "the Italian maestro in his hey-dey" and have come to this point wondering if that is true.  I've often dismissed his latter films as inferior if more complicated and less grounded in reality to his 1950's films, which are more asprirational in nature.  They're about wishing and hoping for success which eludes their protagonists—the street-performers of La Strada, the drifting men of I Vitelloni...Cabiria.   When Federico Fellini became "Fellini," international artist, he seemed to lose that touch of "becoming," to make observations of his new life of "having made it," and finding it difficult to maintain and empty, finding it wanting, and in a sense, was compiling an autobiography of his journey to success and beyond.  Even his wife (Messina) complained that his Juliet of the Spirits wasn't about a woman's issues, but about his own.  His movies about the glitzerati felt hollow and self-absorbed (appropriately). 

But, the director still aspired, although he struggled for subject matter (see 8½) or funding, especially in his later years, despite his reputation.  He retreated to fantasies and circuses, reality being not enough—and maybe not sure anymore about what reality was, surrounded as he was by reputation, the expectations of fame, and the glare of the spotlight.  Simple virtues and humble origins cannot be found on the soundstages of Cinecitta, or the boardrooms of Titanus. 

But, the aspirations continued.  As if documenting Shakespeare's seven stages of life, Fellini's vision, aimed ever inward, began looking back, became nostalgic for those early times of "wanting" dreams, trying to reclaim them, make them real again.  Not so much aprirational anymore, but seeking the times and memories of aspiration, when the world was full of possibilities, when wonder was more than klieg-lights and grease-piant, a fraud wanting to be real.

I've had a review of Amarcord in the drafting stage for almost a year. I think I can write that now.

Juliet of the Spirits

"Juliet of the Spirits" aka "Giulietta degli spiriti" (Federico Fellini, 1965) Any director's first forays into color from black and white are worthy of attention. John Ford filled his palette with startling reds. Stanley Kubrick set his first color film in the black and white world of space-travel and suffused interior spaces with hot red's, pale greens and cool blues. Fellini you'd expect to go somewhat crazy right off the bat.* But then, how colorful can priests and dirty beaches be? Oh, and the circuses. The circuses must be splendente with color.

But, the great Italian director starts conservatively with its dimension of other-worldliness and earthy matters with a natural palette and muted colors. But as the world of Giulietta (played by Fellini's wife and muse, Giulietta Masina) starts to crush inside and explode outwards, the colors within her reach become more vibrant and exotic, approaching the phantasmagorical as she explores the phantasmic.

On her fifteenth anniversary to roguish businessman Giorgio (Mario Pisu), Giulietta has a romantic dinner planned, only to have to share it with the clutch of hangers-on and sycophants he drags home with him. She begins to suspect that she's sharing him in other ways as well, and she seeks guidance from the spirit-world and evidence from a detective agency (of priests!) to get the goods on her no-good husband. At the same time, she begins...slowly, reluctantly to move on from her past life to a new one.

Fellini has famously said "All of my movies are really about me."** Of course. He's making them and writing them—creating them—so they'd naturally reflect his thoughts and obsessions. But the Fellini who earlier collaborated with his wife-star on empathetic films like "Nights of Cabiria" and "La Strada" was now an internationally known and renowned film-maker. His previous films—"La dolce vita" and "8½ "—were international hits, as well as being particularly autobiographical Pilgrim's progresses through the glitterati of a new Italian dynamic. He's still working in that mode in "Giulietta," but he's inserting Masina into the scenario as an outsider looking in on the decadent adventures of the journeying artist and exploiting the pain of the taken-for-granted wife in the story. One could be gossipy and say that Giorgio is Fellini and the entire movie is an invitation to Giulietta into his dream-life of passions, or a cinematic separation telling the world what a stick-in-the-mud his wife is, but given his past empathetic films with Masina, "Giulietta" is a bit dispassionate and curiously cold. And cruel; He's inserted his wife into his collection of grotesques and nubile concubines and finds her wanting.

Masina, too, is a little off-put in her performance. Where, in her previous roles with Fellini, she is passionate and eccentric, even effervescent, here she is withdrawn, and 1/4 into the film, after seeing the constant tight smile that she has on her face—pensive, patient (but only so far), repeated again and again in a medium close-up, you get the impression that she's holding back her frustration. One can hardly blame her; "Giulietta" is caught between two worlds, neither one to her comfort or liking. As she expressed the pain and hope of her characters in the past, one feels her pain with this film.

But you can't argue with a dream. The colors are eye-popping. The images are by turns, challenging and inviting. The film has the same fascination that a corner holds—what's coming up? What lies beyond? But somewhere, in turning the corner, the journey becomes all-important. The lead character becomes lost in the landscape; lost, or left behind.

* Fellini first experimented with color in his segment of the Omnibus film "Boccaccio '70"—one of the director's "half"-films.

** I've avoided using the exact quote as it comes in two different flavors, depending on which translation you use (and which bumbling entertainment "journalist" translated it): "If I were to make a film about the life of a soul, it would end up being about me," or "Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me." Cosa?

Olde Review: The Nights of Cabiria

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

"The Nights of Cabiria" (Frederico Fellini, 1956) Both times that I previously saw "The Nights of Cabiria" I was in the projection room showing it, and that is not the best place to try and appreciate any movie, believe me. But even filtered between dirty glass, and the change-overs,* and the re-windings, it was easy to see that it was an exceptionally fine film.

Cabiria, when we first see her, is in the process of being robbed and shoved into the river by her lover of one month, and after going down for the third time and being fished out by some nearby kids, she is pronounced "dead" (albeit by one of the kids) and then revived and indignantly stalks back to her house. "She's got nine lives, like a cat," one of Fellini's nosey neighbors says as she disappears down the road.

That first scene is symbolically representative of the entire film, for it has an episodic structure in which Cabiria, "a well-known night-bird," is continually finding herself putting herself into situations that, for a while, make her think she might improve her current state as a street-walker, only to be "shoved" and "drowned" by having those hopes dashed. She is usually rescued by something else which also provides hope and also explodes in her face, providing more humiliation, Not coincidentally, most of these hopes entail people: an actor who momentarily uses Cabiria, is momentarily charmed by her, and in a moment, drops her; a hypnotist who exposes her fantasies to a cruelly amused audience. By the end of the film, Cabiria has come full circle--she is miles away from her home, which was her only previous certainty of retreat and recovery, she is without money for she has been robbed and betrayed by her fiancee, who only out of sheer cowardice refrained from pushing her off a cliff. When we last see her, she is presumably walking home in the dark, when a group of young people, revelling and celebrating, catch up with her and gradually her spirits are lifted by them. She begins to nod and smile at the revellers, and then, finally she nods at us, as if to say, "Yeah...well, it's alright" and she continues to move on.

I can just hear the feminists in the audience hiss this film** because Cabiria is prey, just asking to be taken advantage of. She smirks and sneers on the outside, but inside, she is quite susceptible to being suckered into anything. How could she constantly take such abuse? Why does she allow herself into such situations? I'm not sure I can put what I feel on that into this review, but I can safely say that that final few feet of film, when she turns to the audience and nods with a slight, battered smile--that final few feet of film is charged with a life-renewing energy, and I see it as a personal challenge, just as surely as I see "The Nights of Cabiria" as Fellini's finest film.

One note: "Nights of Cabiria" is subtitled, so you might want to get in line early, since it's tough to read them from the top row of 130 Kane.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM , Oct. 7th and 8th, 1976

Nothing to add, really. I still love "The Nights of Cabiria," and although Fellini went many marvelous and torturous routes during his film-career, I still think it's his finest film (Although I also have a deep love for "Toby Dammit: Or, Never Bet the Devil Your Head"--which has just been restored, I've heard. Reason to celebrate. And I neglected to mention the performance of Giulietta Masina, putting her in the category of Chaplin as one of the great screen-faces and personas)

Tomorrow: the second half of the double-bill (remember those?): "Diary of a Mad Housewife"

*In college (when this was written), I was a film projectionist showing movies all around the UW campus. There were no DVD's back then, just massive reels of celluloid encased in metal, each feature made up of a few reels. The projectionist's job was to switch from reel to reel (and projector to projector) without missing a beat, and certainly without distracting the viewer's attention. Two film-blips, ten seconds apart at the end of reels was the signal to "switch-over" from one reel to the next. Then the projectionist would rewind the previous reel (for the next projectionist), and set up the next one, and wait for the blips. A nice job, that. And you got to see a lot of movies.

** Yeah, that's a little harsh, but I can certainly see the argument. Cabiria is a victim, led astray by her hope for something better. If that was all she was, if she was accepting of this victim-hood, and gave in to it, she might be warranting some bad attitude. But she's also a fighter, who keeps picking herself up, throwing off self-pity, and accepting the joy that life has to offer. I really love this character. I want her to "make" it.

Who wouldn't?

La Strada

"La Srada" (Frederico Fellini, 1954) Before his imagination took surrealistic flight, Fellini was still grounded in the Italian neo-realist school, and his "La Strada" takes place in the still existent ruins from the second World War--the villages and hovels where roving bands of merchants and entertainers try to eke out a living on the road. Strongman Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who breaks chains for a living returns to the family where his first assistant (now deceased) was acquired. Next in line is dim, but sweet Gelsomina (played by Mrs. Fellini, Giulietta Masina), and she hops on board Zampano's makeshift motorcycle/carnival tent/camper-trailer ("It's American!") and learns the tricks of the trade, which she takes to quickly. Eventually, they hook up with a larger circus, where they meet The Fool (Richard Basehart), who is sweet to her, but pushes all of Zampano's buttons, making the frustrated performer ever more enraged. Quinn is terrific, a bull with steam constantly coming out of his nose, Basehart shows his lighter irresponsible side rather than the stalwart authority figure he became used to playing, and Masina's performance is one of such force of personality that you can only call it "Chaplinesque," so much of it is tied to wordless expression and acting with the face. It's a melancholy circus Fellini liked to paint, supported by Nino Rota's ebullient/lyrical score but in the end shows how some chains can never be broken. Like any good fable or morality play, it saddens but doesn't disappoint.

(A week after watching "La Strada," Nino Rota's score still capers in my head.)