Three Italian Classics: Fellini, Fellini … and Monicelli?

I’ve been watching a bunch of classic Italian films recently, focusing especially on some movies by the great Federico Fellini that I’d missed over the years or had not seen in a long time. I’ll discuss and recommend a couple of those here – The Nights of Cabiria from 1957 and Amarcord from 1973, neither of which I was familiar with.  At about the same time, the wife and I along with a couple of friends decided to improve our film literacy by checking out some Academy Award nominated foreign language films that we had never seen. As it turns out, we had not even heard of many of these, including a surprising number of the Oscar winners over time. From the relatively small number of these pictures actually available to us, we selected Big Deal On Madonna Street nominated in 1958. [The winner of that year’s foreign language award was Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle.]

Let’s start with Big Deal On Madonna Street, one of the pictures we knew nothing about, but a big hit in its day. This is one of those movies about a ragtag gang of hapless small-time crooks aiming to pull off the perfect heist. The Italian title is Il Soliti Ignoti, which can be translated as “the usual unknown perpetrators”, probably referencing the famous line from Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects!”, which later inspired the title of the great Kevin Spacey film from 1995. The French title, Le Pigeon (in the sense of “the dupe”), is probably the best one, as you’ll see.

It starts with a guy in jail named Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto). Cosimo just got picked up for a botched purse-snatch, but is a burglar by trade. Another inmate, about to be sent upriver, tells him about a sure thing, a pot-of-gold opportunity - a treasure just sitting in a Roman apartment (on Madonna Street) that would be easy pickings if only Cosimo could find a way out.  In what is apparently a time-honored tradition, he asks a friend on the outside to hire a dupe who will confess to the purse-snatch, and take the rap for him. Ideally this’d be someone likely to get probation, or a light sentence. Turns out it’s not so easy to recruit such a pigeon. That’s not the only problem.  Turns out there’s no such thing as honor among thieves.  One thing leads to another and … did I mention that these guys are hapless?

Big Deal On Madonna Street was directed by Mario Monicelli, who himself was something of a big deal in his day, nominated for the foreign language Oscar six times, and recognized as an originator and one of the masters of the wave of commedia all’Italiana (comedy Italian style) that was all the rage over the next decade – films like Divorce Italian Style (1961), Boccaccio ’70 (1962), Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963), and many others. Still, I had never heard of him before, and I’m guessing most of my readers haven’t either.

The picture is very funny, as Monicelli’s direction plows ahead in a straight ahead, no-time-for-reflection manner. This ensemble piece has several endearingly doltish, humorous characters, among them a young, soon to be internationally famous Marcello Mastroianni, as one of the gang members, who goes around throughout with his broken arm in a plaster cast (much like Jack Nicholson with his broken nose in the otherwise totally dissimilar Chinatown). Other members of the gang, better known at the time, are Vittorio Gassman. Renato Salvatori and the clownish Totò. And for fans of that era’s screen beauties, there’s a young Claudia Cardinale.

It’s nothing deep but highly entertaining.

Big Deal on Madonna Street is available for streaming on Filmstruck and on DVD from Netflix.

Grade: B+

Federico Fellini is not known for comedies, but his films often have a comedic element, usually satiric or sardonic, sometimes fond and appreciative as well. Such is the case with the two films presented here – generally considered among his finest works [the others being La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963) and perhaps I Vitelloni (1953) and/or Juliet of the Spirits (1965).] I’ll start with the earlier of the two: The Nights of Cabiria, winner of the 1957 Oscar for best foreign language film.

Cabiria is a streetwalker. She’s a hard luck woman with a lot of spunk, trying to carve out a life among the pimps, hookers, roustabouts and other marginal types on the outskirts of post-war Rome in the early 1950s. Fellini is frequently attracted to outsiders, people on the edges; and one of the several draws of this film is how frankly yet empathetically Fellini treats the denizens of this demiworld. Then, as now, there was a wide chasm between the haves and the have nots, with Cabiria and her colleagues most definitely in the latter category. That doesn’t mean they don’t have dreams and aspirations, however.

Cabiria herself is one of the great screen characters. She is played by the remarkable Giulietta Masina, who had already turned in a memorable performance for Fellini as the unfortunate yet mesmerizing waif Gelsomina in La Strada (1954). As Cabiria, she is simply brilliant in her physicality and emotional expression, evoking the greatness of Charles Chaplin as The Tramp, stylistically and thematically. This reference was intentional. Not only does Masina carry this off, but it works beautifully. Nights of Cabiria blends comedy and heartbreak, the silly and the sublime.

Cabiria herself starts out getting ripped off and dumped (literally) by her boyfriend, then experiences a series of ups and downs, some funny, some tragic, as she tries to build a better life for herself, seeking redemption through various means on her way to a final epiphany.  Cabiria is both cynical and naïve, gloomy yet hopeful, tough and fragile, resolute one moment and ambivalent the next.  Much of the time she is perky and cute, but a defeat may bring anger, despair or worse. Like all of us (if more expressive), Cabiria just wants some security and happiness. In her circumstance, however, these things are rare commodities.  

All the actors are first rate, especially, Franca Marzi as Cabiria’s only friend, Wanda; Amedeo Nazzarri as movie star Alberto Lazzari, with whom Cabiria has an unexpected liaison; and Francois Périer as her romantic interest, Oscar. There are some great set pieces, such as a scene where thousands throng to what we in the States might call a tent meeting to be blessed by the spirit of the Virgin Mary (a scene repeated in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita a few years later).

It’s a pretty awesome movie in all respects, but especially see The Nights of Cabiria for Giulietta Masina’s bravura performance.  It’s one for the ages.

The Nights of Cabiria is available streaming on Filmstruck and most other streaming services (except Netflix streaming) and on DVD from Netflix.

Grade: A

Finally we come to Fellini’s Amarcord from 1973, generally considered his last masterpiece. In many ways it’s a humble picture, certainly not grandiose: a satirical, mostly rose-colored reminiscence of Fellini’s hometown. It too won the Oscar for best foreign language film, in 1974.

The autobiographical memoir, sometimes called a ”memory-film” is a small but, in the right hands, often satisfying genre with surprisingly diverse directorial approaches. For example, in Truffaut’s first feature film, The 400 Blows (1959), the director tells a coming-of-age tale about fourteen year old Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud, playing the lightly fictionalized Truffaut) as he deals with an unhappy home life, chaffs and rebels at school authorities, turns to petty crime and so on, trying to liberate himself in 1940s Paris; which is to say, he tells his own story by creating a well-etched, likeable yet flawed young protagonist on a story arc much like his own. 

A somewhat different approach was taken by Terence Davies in his autobiographical A Long Day Closes (1992), reviewed here a couple of months ago. That movie, like 400 Blows, focuses on a time in the director’s youth which he understands was a turning point, using a slightly fictionalized stand-in as the protagonist – in 1950s Liverpool in this case. Davies’ picture, however, is not chronological but is instead a highly impressionistic, episodic reverie on a moment in Davies’ life as he was about to move from the innocence of his cozy, cosseted (if lonely) childhood into an emotional wretchedness of adolescence and on into the complications of adulthood. The film is not so much a story, as a lyrical, melancholy, visually evocative cinematic poem.

Amarcord also takes a highly subjective approach to its subject, but the subject is not so much Fellini’s youth or the child being father to the man as it is an evocation of and a paean to a particular place and time, now gone: Fellini’s home town of Rimini - an ancient Northern Italian seaside city – at the time of his adolescence in the early 1930s. This corresponds with the middle period of Italian fascism at the height of Mussolini’s popularity, still well before the disaster of WWII. Fellini is clearly critical of the oppressive regime, but by and large the film steers clear of polemics, preferring to skewer the pompous fascistas with ridicule and poke fun at the citizenry’s childishly blind worship of il Duce.

There is no singular protagonist here; rather, Amarcord, which means “I remember”, is Fellini’s recollection, filtered through his own adolescent perspective, of Rimini’s people. As remembered and reimagined nearly forty years later, they come across as soft caricatures, living in a vibrant, colorful, yet quaint and mostly unthreatening town. While ridicule is largely reserved for the black shirts, his take on the town’s other notable personages is humorous – a lovely blend of nostalgia, light satire, and an adolescent child’s incredulity and attitude – set forth in a carnivalesque series of vignettes which take us through the four seasons of a year, starting with the annual bonfire celebrating the arrival of Spring.

Perhaps the most memorable character is Gradisca (Magali Noël) the redheaded hairdresser – an upbeat, buxom icon of femininity, whom all the boys and many of the men in town desire and revere, and who could have any man she wanted, but for the fact that most assumed she was unattainable. At the other extreme is Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli), the town slut, slinking around in constant, panting sexual heat (or so Fellini chooses to remember her). There’s the Lawyer (Luigi Rossi) the self-appointed town historian, sometimes acting as our guide-narrator, whose proprietary affectation is periodically punctured by young scoundrels pelting him with fruit. Or the blind Accordionist (Momo Pertica) with the indelible, toothless face, holding his own against teasing children. And the voluptuous Tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi) with extravagant breasts stirring the imaginations of awestruck teen boys. (yes, old Federico brings a very testosterone inflected perspective to the proceedings.)

The closest to a Fellini alter ego in Amarcord is thirteen-year-old Titta (Bruno Zanin). Titta and his comically dysfunctional family are the most central group of characters in a film of characters.  Titta, like his friends, has a crush on Gradisca, which in his case results in a tense/funny encounter at a movie theater when he tries to get close to her. He pushes the limits some times, but is basically a good kid. His father, Aurelio (Armando Brancia) is a wonderfully comic character – irascible, bossy, argumentative, and in constant conflict with Titta’s mother, Miranda (Pupella Maggio), whose response to Aurelio’s verbal abuse is to yell right back, then run off threatening to kill herself, but who otherwise is the sensible compassionate one. Then there’s Titta’s freeloading Uncle Lallo, his off-his-rocker uncle Teo, and his frequently tipsy grandfather, all of whom add to the comic sensibility of the movie.

Amarcord is a memory-film in the form of a joyous, somewhat wacky, yet touchingly entertaining burlesque. It is a visual delight, much more than I’ve described here, and what might be called a soulful comedy. I highly recommend it.

Amarcord is available streaming on Filmstruck and most other streaming services (except Netflix streaming) and on DVD from Netflix.

Grade: A