La Dolce Vita

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A movie for every day of the year – a good one

29 September

Anita Ekberg born, 1931

On this day in 1931, Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg was born, in Malmö, Sweden. A model in her teens, Ekberg was Miss Sweden by the age of 19 and had a contract with Universal studios shortly afterwards. Howard Hughes, a keen student of the female form (or lecher, according to your viewpoint), and then owner of the RKO studio, was also keen on exploiting her talents, but Ekberg preferred to go horse-riding and take part in the sort of stunts that starlets in the 1950s got up to. More often seen in a bikini, or falling out of one, in a publicity shot than in an actual film studio, Ekberg was linked to a string of big showbiz names (Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power), but only managed to star in a series of lacklustre films, including Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s last film together, Hollywood or Bust, in which she played the Bust. She was the latest, and in some ways purest, of the blonde bombshells, who gained the appellation not because of their explosive figures – though that helps – but because bomb casings have a distinctive bustlike shape (in the minds of comicbook artists at least). Reductive though it is, it is entirely appropriate for Ekberg’s appearance in her most famous film, La Dolce Vita, a last hurrah made when her career was already on the slide. After which… The Alphabet Murders, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, and a string of even less memorable films.

La Dolce Vita (1960, dir: Federico Fellini)

Though you’d never have guessed it listening to the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, the 1960s belonged, in terms of cool and cultural impact, to music. Even so, there is some claim to be made that it was La Dolce Vita that ushered the decade in. Fellini’s film about the move from high to low culture, the arrival of the attention-deficit mindset, the abandonment of the avant-garde in favour of genre, it’s all here in La Dolce Vita, which tracks a week in the life of an intellectual who has forsworn the writing of his novel to grub an existence as a partying showbiz reporter. Marcello Mastroianni plays the man to a T and Anita Ekberg is there as everything that’s wrong with his world of sex, booze and wanton behaviour – the scene where she frolics in the 17th-century baroque Trevi fountain clad in a dress that emphasises her va-va-voom is essentially the film reduced to an image. If it were being remade now, you’d want someone like Lindsay Lohan in the role. The Catholic Church took a dim view of Fellini’s film, though it’s a deeply moral work at its core – Mastroianni hardly looks like a man who is buoyed up by his decisions – and the critics at Cannes gave it a standing ovation at its famous opening shot (a statue of Jesus Christ being airlifted out of the city) and again at the end.

Why Watch?

  • Anita Ekberg’s most famous performance
  • The film that gave the language the word “paparazzo”, after an intrusive showbiz photographer
  • The non-linear narrative – common now, unusual then
  • One of the most widely referenced films –


La Dolce Vita – at Amazon

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© Steve Morrissey 2013


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