Adua and Her Friends (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960)

Cast: Simone Signoret, Sandra Milo, Emmanuelle Riva, Gina Rovere, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudio Gora, Ivo Garrani, Gianrico Tedeschi, Antonio Rais, Duilio D'Amore. Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Tullio Pinelli, Ettore Scola, Antonio Pietrangeli. Cinematography: Armando Nannuzzi. Production design: Luigi Scaccianoce. Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma. Music: Piero Piccioni.

A 1958 law passed in Italy shut down all the houses of prostitution, putting many of the women on the streets. But Adua (Simone Signoret) and three of her fellow sex workers decide to go semi-legit: They find a rundown property on the edge of Roman and with their savings and the help of Ercoli (Claudio Gora), one of Adua's wealthy former clients, they open a restaurant which they plan to use as a front for an illegal brothel. But the restaurant proves to be so popular that they decide they can get out of the sex trade entirely. Adua even strikes up a promising relationship with the slick car salesman Pietro (Marcello Mastroianni). But tension between Adua and Ercoli eventually undoes the whole plan. Adua and Her Friends is a well-made, mostly comic film with a downer ending.

Il Bidone (Federico Fellini, 1955)

Il Bidone (Federico Fellini, 1955)

Cast: Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart, Franco Fabrizi, Giulietta Masina, Sue Ellen Blake, Irene Cefaro, Alberto De Amicis, Lorella De Luca. Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Production design: Dario Cecchi. Film editing: Mario Serandrei, Giuseppe Vari. Music: Nino Rota.

Ginger and Fred (Federico Fellini, 1986)

Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina in Ginger and Fred

Amelia Bonetti / Ginger: Giulietta Masina
Pippo Botticella / Fred: Marcello Mastroianni
Host: Franco Fabrizi
Admiral Aulenti: Friedrich von Ledebur
Transvestite: Augusto Poderosi
Assistant Director: Martin Maria Blau
Brother Gerolamo: Jacques Henri Lartigue
Totò: Totò Mignone

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Toninio Delli Colli, Ennio Guarnerini
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Nino Baragli, Ugo De Rossi, Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nicola Piovani
Costume design: Danilo Donati

The two actors most associated with the films of Federico Fellini had never worked together before Ginger and Fred, and the movie is enough to make you wonder why not. To be sure, the waifish Masina of La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) seems worlds apart from the worldly, jaded Mastroianni of La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), but both transcend those stereotypes in this film, one of the director's last. They also manage to soften and sweeten a hard and sour film that expresses Fellini's distaste for the vulgarity of modern entertainment. Ginger and Fred is an expansion on the satiric impulse that Fellini displayed much earlier in the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), with its nightmarish awards show. Here we have a television extravaganza in which Masina's Amelia Bonetti and Mastroianni's Pippo Botticella have been asked to reunite their old dance team, in which they mimicked the routines of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But they are herded into a phantasmagoric assemblage of headline-grabbing pseudo-celebrities and dubious variety acts. Amelia pluckily maneuvers the fading Pippo through it all. The film gained some notoriety when Rogers decided to sue the producers and distributors for trademark violation and defamation, thereby betraying the fact that she may have been a great dancer and comic actress but lacked a sense of humor. She lost. There is a shrillness to Ginger and Fred that makes it sometimes hard to take, but the two performers shine through.

La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)

Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn in La Strada 

Zampanò: Anthony Quinn
Gelsomina: Giulietta Masina
The Fool: Richard Basehart
Giraffa: Aldo Silvani
Widow: Marcella Rovere
Nun: Livia Venturini

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Production design: Mario Ravasco
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
Music: Nino Rota

Sad clowns have gone out of style, so to many of us today Giulietta Masina's Gelsomina seems more than a little cloying. But when La Strada was released, she was hailed as a master of comic pathos, as if she were the unacknowledged daughter of Charles Chaplin and Lillian Gish. Similarly, Federico Fellini's film now feels like an uneasy attempt to blend neorealistic grime and misery with a kind of moral allegory: Zampanó as Body, Gelsomina as Soul, and The Fool as Mind. So when Body kills Mind, Soul pines away, leaving Body in anguish. But La Strada has retained generations of admirers who are willing to overlook the sentimentality and latter-day mythologizing. It does remain a tremendously accomplished film, made under some difficulties, including constant battles by Fellini with his formidable producers, Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. If it sometimes feels like a throwback to the era of silent movies, it was virtually filmed as one, with its American stars, Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart, speaking their lines in English and the rest of the cast speaking Italian, and everyone later dubbed in the studio -- which leads to that slightly disembodied quality the dialogue of many early postwar films possesses.

I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)

Franco Fabrizi, Franco Interlenghi, Leopoldo Trieste, Riccardo Fellini, and Alberto Sordi in I Vitelloni

Moraldo Rubini: Franco Interlenghi
Alberto: Alberto Sordi
Fausto Moretti: Franco Fabrizi
Leopoldo Vannucci: Leopoldo Trieste
Riccardo: Riccardo Fellini
Sandra Rubini: Leonora Ruffo
Francesco Moretti: Jean Brochard
Sergio Natali: Achille Majeroni
Guido: Guido Martufi

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli, Luciano Trasati
Production design: Mario Chiari
Film editing: Rolando Benedetti
Music: Nino Rota

The international success of I Vitelloni launched Federico Fellini's directing career after the comparative failures of Variety Lights (1951), which he co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, and The White Sheik (1952), his first solo directing effort. It also earned him an Oscar nomination for screenwriting, which he shared with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. It's certainly one of his most endearing early films, made before his familiar mannerisms set in -- though there are glimpses of those in the tawdry theatrical sequence with the grotesque aging actor played by Achille Majeroni (a part that Fellini tried to persuade Vittorio De Sica to play). But somehow it has taken me several viewings over the years to fully appreciate it. I think that's because Fellini's greatest films have a strong central character -- usually played by Giulietta Masini or Marcello Mastroianni -- to hold the narrative together. I Vitelloni is by definition and title an ensemble picture, but it's also the first of Fellini's excursions into himself, concluding with the Fellini surrogate, Moraldo Rubini boarding a train that will take him away from the idlers of his provincial home town -- and presumably to Rome, where he will become the jaded Marcello Rubini of La Dolce Vita (1960) and the blocked director Guido Anselmi of 8 1/2 (1963). The problem is that the character of Moraldo isn't written strongly enough or given enough substance by the actor: Franco Interlenghi, who was discovered by Roberto Rossellini and cast in Shoeshine (1946), had a long career in films and TV in Italy, but the part in I Vitelloni demands someone with more charisma -- a young Mastroianni, in short. Moraldo is overshadowed by the womanizing Fausto and by the comic figures of Alberto and Leopoldo. The scenes that should develop Moraldo as a central figure don't quite work, particularly the early-morning encounters with Guido, a boy on his way to work at the railroad station -- a sharp counterpoint to the idling vitelloni. "Are you happy?" Moraldo asks the boy. "Why not?" he replies. The exchange seems designed to undercut the frenetic strivings and complaints of the vitelloni, who chafe against the boredom and provinciality of the town, but don't seem to be able to muster enough resolve to do something about it, instead continuing to pursue phantoms of creative or sexual success. The trouble with the Moraldo-Guido scenes is that they come out of nowhere narratively -- and even have oddly uncomfortable (and probably unintended) hints of pedophilia on Moraldo's part. Nor do they satisfactorily set up the film's ending: Moraldo departs and we see Guido walking along the train tracks, the former facing up to the uncertain future, the latter heading comfortably back into his routine. Still, it's a film held together by the score by Fellini's great collaborator Nino Rota, and filled with the boundless energy that often rescued Fellini from his worst impulses.

8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)

Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2

Guido Anselmi: Marcello Mastroianni
Claudia: Claudia Cardinale
Louisa Anselmi: Anouk Aimée
Carla: Sandra Milo
Rossella: Rossella Falk
Gloria Morin: Barbara Steele
Madeleine: Madeleine Lebeau
La Saraghina: Eddra Gale
Pace, a Producer: Guido Alberti
Carini Daumier, a Film Critic: Jean Rouguel

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Production design: Piero Gherardi
Music: Nino Rota

At one point in 8 1/2 an actress playing a film critic turns to the camera and brays (in English), "He has nothing to say!", referring to Guido Anselmi, the director Marcello Mastroianni plays and, by extension, to Fellini himself. And that's quite true: Fellini has nothing to say because reducing 8 1/2 to a message would miss the film's point. Guido finds himself creatively blocked because he's trying to say something, except he doesn't know what it is. He has even enlisted a film critic to aid him in clarifying his ideas, but the critic only muddles things by his constant monologue about Guido's failure. Add to this the fact that after a breakdown Guido has retreated to a spa to try to relax and focus, only to be pursued there by a gaggle of producers and crew members and actors, not to mention his mistress and his wife. Guido's consciousness becomes a welter of dreams and memories and fantasies, overlapping with the quotidian demands of making a movie and tending to a failed marriage. He is also pursued by a vision of purity that he embodies in the actress Claudia Cardinale, but when they finally meet he realizes how impossible it is to integrate this vision with the mess of his life. Only at the end, when he abandons the project and confronts the fact that he really does have nothing to say, can he realize that the mess is the message, that his art has to be a way of establishing a pattern out of his own life, embodied by those who have populated it dancing in a circle to Nino Rota's music in the ruins of the colossal set of his abandoned movie. The first time I saw this film it was dubbed into German, which I could understand only if it was spoken slowly and patiently, which it wasn't. Even so, I had no trouble following the story (such as it is) because Fellini is primarily a visual artist. Besides, the movie starred Mastroianni, who would have made a great silent film star, communicating as he did with face and body as much as with voice. It is, I think, one of the great performances of a great career. 8 1/2 is also one of the most beautiful black-and-white movies ever made, thanks to the superb cinematography of Gianni Di Venanzo and the brilliant production design and costumes of Piero Gherardi.

The White Sheik (Federico Fellini, 1952)

This antic comedy was Fellini's first solo feature, based on a story by, believe it or not, Michelangelo Antonioni, collaborating with Fellini and Tullio Pinelli. Ennio Flaiano joined Fellini and Pinelli to write the screenplay, which is about a young couple from the provinces honeymooning in Rome. The husband, Ivan Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste), doesn't know that his new wife, Wanda (Brunella Bovo), is an ardent fan of a fotoromanzo (a magazine serial that tells a story in photographs). When Wanda finds out that the serial, The White Sheik, is produced just around the corner from the hotel where she and Ivan are staying, she sneaks out in hopes of meeting Fernando Rivoli (Alberto Sordi), the actor who stars in the series as the sheik. Meanwhile, Ivan has scheduled their stay in Rome, including an audience with the pope, down to the minute, so when his family gathers to join the newlyweds and Ivan discovers that she has disappeared, madness ensues. Wanda finds herself swept up by the company photographing the next installment of the series and being wooed by the lecherous Rivoli himself. Ivan indulges in frantic attempts to cover up his wife's absence. Eventually he meets up with the prostitute Cabiria (Giulietta Masina), whose story Fellini will tell five years later in Nights of Cabiria (1957). For a first feature on his own, The White Sheik is remarkable, though it was quickly overshadowed by his next one, I Vitelloni (1953), which also featured Trieste in its cast. The White Sheik was only the second film for Trieste, who had appeared in a small role in Shamed (Giovanni Paolucci, 1947), for which he wrote the screenplay. He proved to be such an impressive character actor that he had a long career, with roles in such movies as Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986), and The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974).