the great escape
by
Douglas Messerli
Federico
Fellini and Ennio Flaiano (screenplay), Federico Fellini (director) I
Vitelloni / 1953
After
Federico Fellini’s early film Variety Lights, which had weak ratings at
the box-office, and his next The White Sheik bombed, producers and
distributors were understandably hesitant about taking on his new project, I
Vitelloni, in which he had cast no major actors except perhaps for Alberto
Sordi, who’d had a long career, but after his performance in Fellini’s Sheik
was considered to be a wash up.
Fellini attempted to cast Vittorio De Sica
in the role of the aging ham actor, but when he described to the famed diector the
character’s homosexual proclivities, De Sica agreed only if the role were to be
played with “a great deal of humanity,” which sounds much like the character
himself, full-up on humanity but without deep theatrical talent; eventually De
Sica turned the role down in fear that audiences might think he, himself was gay.
And fortunately, the role of Achille Majeroni was performed rather movingly by
Sergio Natali.
Moreover, Fellini’s and his writing
partner Ennio Flaiano’s script was less a unified narrative than it was a
series of related and just as often unconnected episodes featuring the five “vitelloni”
(best translated into English as “the loafers” or “the idlers”) who, sponging off of their
parents well past the years by which they should have established their own lives,
spend their days mostly in cafes, movie houses, and walks along the Adriatic
beach when they aren’t, like the local lothario of their group, Fausto Moretti
(Franco Fabrizi), entertaining women, all previous to their nightly dance off hand-in-hand
down the streets of the small town in which they live, dropping each other off
at the respective hoses. In short, they are a bit like the Pasolini “scroungers’
in his film of 8 years later, Accatone.
Unlike the bright sunshine in which
Pasolini’s characters bathe before one of them daringly drops into the river to
swim across to the other shore, Fellini’s film begins in a later-afternoon
celebration, the annual crowning of one of the town’s female beauties as “Miss
Mermaid.” The winner, Sandra Rubini (Leonora Ruffo), is the sister of the
youngest of these idlers, Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi).
Sandra has evidently been one of Fausto’s
objects of desire, who when she wins the contest is overwhelmed by the sudden
appearance of torrential rains, her appreciative crowds, and the fact, we soon
perceive, that she is pregnant.
Guessing the truth, Fausto makes a fast
retreat from these festivities in order to pack up and leave town—which is,
after all, the desire and endless subject of many of the “vitelloni’s”
conversations. But caught in the act by Moraldo and, more importantly, by
Fausto’s own father (a lovingly gruff Jean Brochard), along with a threatened
belting, Fausto is quickly dissuaded from flight and forced into a kind of “shot-gun”
wedding, a rather desultory affair, which ends, at least, in a pleasant few
weeks in Rome (nicknamed by the town’s residents “the Big Smoke”) before the
couple return to their backwater home with the new-born in arms.
In the meantime, we get to meet some of
the others of these “loafers,” all seemingly bored without the daring Fausto at
their side. Alberto (Sordi) is a mama’s boy (a momoni)
who tries to keep his mother free from the downpour of tears she daily
threatens, both of whom live off the wages brings in from his sister’s nightly
work as an at-home typist. The odd-looking Leopoldo Vannucci (Leopoldo Trieste)
is the group “intellect” who writes poems and plays which, we later discover
are pretty awful.
Moraldo, who has already been introduced,
is the group’s dreamer who can hardly sleep as he paces through the empty night
streets imagining a new life anywhere but where he now is seemingly trapped.
Fausto returns, appearing as the happy
father, but almost immediately picks up again with his womanizing, first
attempting to gain the affections of a good-looking woman at the movie theater
while he is seated between the stranger and his wife. He even dares to leave
the theater in order to track his desired conquest back to her apartment, but
is—at least temporarily—rejected, while with the movie over, Sandra impatiently
waits, astoundingly believing his report that he was attempting to meet someone
for a job.
His wife’s father, with whom the couple
is now living, does actually find Fausto job working with a seller of religious
items—a strange avocation for someone who so totally committed to the profane.
But even here, after seeing the shop owner’s wife in the different setting of
the town’s annual carnival celebration, Fausto attempts to bed the signora, an effort
that ultimately loses him his job and—after Sandra runs away from home for a
long day and a-half—results in his own father actually using the promised belt.
Alberto attends that same carnival party
dressed totally in drag, slowly getting drunk, and ending the evening in one of
the most memorable scenes of the movie as he tangos several times across the
room and later, with wigged removed, attempts to drag a large carnival mask
home with him, while one of his friends attempts to accompany him on his nearly
impossible-to-accomplish trek. Utterly depressed, he observes his sister
running away with a man from another village awaiting her in his car, having brought the promised torrent of tears
to his mother’s eyes.
If Alberto’s cross-dressing debut is a
rather wistful affair, the final tale Fellini tells concerning Leopoldo is
truly sad, although it begins with utter joy as the would-be playwright
excitedly invites his friend to a local performance starring a formerly
well-known actor now teetering on a freak out of burlesque.
If the actor no longer shows much talent,
to Leopoldo he represents the possibility of finally seeing one of his efforts
brought to stage. Oddly, the elderly actor seems impervious to the embarrassingly
bad play of several acts that Leopoldo insists upon reading him.
His friends gradually drift away in
search of women, but Leopoldo and the thespian remain intricately involved in
the endless reading, in part because the playwright has paid for the actor’s
equally grandiose dinner.
Even
after enduring the unbearable torture that Leopoldo forces him to undergo, he
insists upon hearing summaries of later scenes, luring the posturing intellect
out-of-doors and down the narrow streets of the town, before finally suggesting
they visit the beach.
It is only when the formerly esteemed performer
attempts to lure his new friend down onto the pier that Leopoldo—his head still
spinning from the praise with which the elder has heaped upon him—realizes the
fraud’s sexual intent. Terrified with the implications of the invitation,
Leopoldo runs off, his dreams of fame totally dashed.
At lease Fausto seems now temporarily
cured of his loutish behavior. And, in a kind of miracle, Moraldo finally
determines to catch the daily train out of town forever, meeting at the station
the young railroad boy, Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini) who he has earlier in the
film befriended. Obviously, the kid, whom Moraldo nightly meets on the boy’s
way to work, symbolizes his own childish and yet wondrous views of the world,
not unlike those of il babbo Fellini at the same age.
In this scene, Fellini’s set-up might
almost suggest the hundreds of romantic films that portray the one who is left
behind running after the iron monster in hopes of one last look at her or his
lover. Clearly, the boy, when told that Moraldo is leaving forever, seems at
first a bit disappointed in the fact that he will now be without his
early-morning companion, but instead of tearing up he flashes a bright smile,
realizing that at last someone has made good on his determination to start life
anew.
Fellini’s long camera shot of the young
boy, balancing along the rail of the track for a quite long time, says
everything. This youth already has a job and will find a new balance in the
world, whether he stays or goes, that most of “the loafers” can never experience.
Add to this lovely series of tales Nino
Rota’s entrancing score and the startlingly crisp black-and-white images of Carlo
Carlini’s, Otello Martelli’s, and Luciano Trasatti’s cinematography and you
have a film that predicts the director’s future cinematic wonders.
Los
Angeles, August 16, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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