Federico Fellini

Without Pity aka Senza Pietà

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Jerry and Angela at a funfair

Matter-of-fact neorealism meets its opposite, torrid melodrama, in Senza Pietà, aka Without Pity. Remarkably, it’s a successful meeting of equals, probably thanks to director Alberto Lattuada’s decision to go at his material at breakneck pace. Whatever else you can accuse this film of, it isn’t slow or lacking in incident. It throws its two main characters together early on. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, displaced Italian Angela (Carla Del Poggio) is hitching a ride when she first bumps into Jerry Jackson (John Kitzmiller), a black US sergeant who jumps onto the goods train Angela is on and winds up taking a bullet for his efforts. Because she’s a good … Read more

La Strada

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Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina

The simple Italian led astray by an egotistical monster. Who could Federico Fellini have had in mind when he was making La Strada in 1954? This, according to all the books, is where Fellini the neorealist ends and Fellini the fantastical begins, in a movie about a strong man “buying” a halfwit daughter off a poor woman and then touring Italy with her as part of his act. It was Pope Francis’s favourite movie and directors as diverse as Peckinpah, Kurosawa, Konchalovsky and David Cronenberg have all sung its praises. Fascinatingly, both Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson have claimed it as an influence on key songs – on Hey, Mr Tambourine Man and … Read more

Amarcord

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Titta putting his hand on Gradisca's leg in the cinema

Zig-zagging between fantasy, comedy and tender reminiscence, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord sets out to be autobiographical, from its title (Amarcord is “I Remember” in his native dialect), though Fellini always denied it was directly, explicitly the story of his life. But it is the story of a year in the life of someone who was born on the coast near Rimini in the 1920s, as Fellini was, and came of age as Mussolini’s fascists were flexing their muscles. Fellini kicks things off, and eventually brings them to a close, with the annual blizzard of a particular sort of pollen drifting through the town – it announces spring, the locals say – and then piles event … Read more

Spirits of the Dead

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Jane Fonda as the cruel Contessa de Metzengerstein

The film equivalent of the collateralised debt obligation, the portmanteau movie generally bundles together stuff of questionable quality then sells it on using a big name or a big star to help it achieve a decent credit rating. In Spirits of the Dead (aka Tales of Mystery and Imagination), three adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe tales, there are plenty of big names – Federico Fellini, Roger Vadim and Louis Malle as directors. Stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Jane Fonda and Terence Stamp. But no matter how glossy the name, or even how polished the product, the rule of the portmanteau movie applies here as everywhere else – the finished product is less … Read more

Juliet of the Spirits

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Giulietta Masina

1965’s Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti) was Federico Fellini’s first film in colour and he goes at it like a child whose Christmases have all come at once. Up comes a screen of opening credits so vividly blue that it’s shocking, followed by an opening scene where the quiet and mousey Juliet (played by Fellini’s own wife Giulietta Masina) is assailed on all sides by people, chatter, action. The quiet romantic evening she’d had planned with her husband Giorgio (Mario Pisu) has been upended. He’s brought home a gaggle of people, party animals who want to have fun. Fellini wants to have fun too, and he wants to fill the screen … Read more

I Vitelloni

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Fausto and friends

Federico Fellini’s 1953 breakthrough I Vitelloni is often translated as The Bullocks. The Young Bucks would be better, since it’s the story of a group of young Italian guys – all of them pretty good looking, all of them with a high opinion of themselves – who do very little with their time apart from drink, smoke, play billiards, bet on the horses, chase women and, coming way down the list, occasionally wonder what the future might bring. Scratch that. It’s actually really the story of one of the group, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), a handsome devil in the Richard Burton mould who, as the film starts, is trying to skip town, having impregnated … Read more

11 November 2013-11-11

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Charlie Hunnam in Pacific Rim

Out in the UK This Week   Pacific Rim (Warner, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Guillermo Del Toro, everybody, which raises expectations – Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos being not too shabby. And Hellboy being a yawn but at least a formidably realised one. Throw a director of that ability at a story about alien creatures rising up out of the Pacific and waging war on humanity – who wage it right back with huge robotic leviathans controlled by human drivers – and the result should be something fairly awesome, shouldn’t it? And Pacific Rim actually is awesome up to a point. We have Charlie Hunnam showing his formidably sculpted abs. We have Idris Elba as the … Read more

La Dolce Vita

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Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita

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 … Read more

La Dolce Vita

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fellini marcello mastroianni and anita ekberg la dolce vita

More than 50 years old yet curiously contemporary, Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece isn’t just a cynical critique by a conflicted Catholic of “the sweet life”, it’s the film that announces the arrival of the world we now inhabit. It starts with one of cinema’s most famous shots, a lingering view of a huge statue of Christ being airlifted, possibly rescued, from a Rome gone to the bad. God, Fellini appears to be saying, has left us, and in his place we have placed the pursuit of carnal pleasure, the joys of the night, drink and the worship of our new deity – the celebrity. This, after all, is the film that introduced the … Read more

Isn’t It Iconic?

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the original poster

La Dolce Vita might not be the best Italian film ever made. Or the cleverest, steamiest or most gripping. But it is the most iconic. Here’s why… Just a touch over 50 years ago the assembled critics at the Cannes film festival gave Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita a standing ovation. Not at the end of the film, or even at the moment when Anita Ekberg gets into the Trevi fountain, its most remembered scene. No, what got them to their feet was the film’s opening shot. It’s of a huge statue of Jesus Christ being airlifted out of Rome, the Eternal City. It doesn’t look like much now but back then this … Read more