1.
See it if you can: Federico Fellini’s 1953 film Il Vitelloni. This picture was Fellini’s first international hit and a box-office success. Il Vitelloni is about five young men living in a provincial city on the Adriatic sea coast. The young men, who are friends, are not yet grown-up, mostly unemployed, and they hang around town chasing the local girls and mooching off their parents. (The film’s title Il Vitteloni is an untranslatable word that means something like “veal-calves” signifying “mama’s boys” – it’s a term of derogation for twenty-somethings not yet settled into adult life.) In the movie, the lads get drunk, fight with their parents, and dream about escaping town for the big city, Rome. At the end of the movie only one of the boys has the gumption to actually leave town – this is a young man called Moraldo Rubini. In the final scene, we see him on a train departing for Rome; like Federico Fellini, Moraldo dreams of becoming a cartoonist and illustrator in the metropolis. (Il Vitelloni is a reminder as to Fellini’s innovative brilliance: the narrative template devised in this 1953 movie underlies Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) as well as George Lucas’ American Graffiti (also 1973) as well as many other “coming of age” movies.)
Fellini wrote the script for Il Vitelloni with his associates Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. After the film’s success, Fellini with Flaiano and Pinelli wrote a sequel called Moraldo in the City. This picture picked-up the story where Il Vitelloni ended, chronicling the adventures of Moraldo Rubini in Rome. The story is about Moraldo’s love affairs and professional entanglements playing out against the urban landscape of post-war Rome.
At this time in his life, Fellini was very busy. Immediately after directing, Il Vitelloni, Fellini parleyed his success with that film into an opportunity to make a bigger budget and more elaborate picture, La Strada (1954). La Strada features Fellini’s wife, Giuletta Masina playing a waif abused by a circus strong man. Italian films had cachet with American actors in the fifties and sixties – of course, Clint Eastwood profited from the impulse to hire Americans to star in Italian movies designed for international consumption. La Strada, also an internationally acclaimed film, starred Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart. (It won the American Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture). In 1955, Fellini made Il Bidone, a crime picture in which he wished to cast Humphrey Bogart as a small-time crook. Bogart was dying at that time and, so, Fellini hired Broderich Crawford for the role. The picture was a failure and largely regarded as a misstep for Fellini – it wasn’t released in the US until after the success of La Dolce Vita made Fellini a household name in Europe and America. Giuletta Masina starred in Il Bidone and was also the leading lady in Nights of Cabiria (1957). Nights of Cabiria, a neo-realist film about prostitution, was well-received and Masina’s performance highly praised. (The movie also won Fellini a second Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture.)
After the success of Nights of Cabiria, the Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis (who had underwritten La Strada and Nights of Cabiria) expressed interest in financing Moraldo in the City. Fellini and his co-writers Flaiano and Pinelli dusted off the script and began revising it. Beginning in 1958, Cinecitta Studios near Rome was acclaimed as “Hollywood on the Tiber”; Italian movie crews were highly efficient, professional, and much cheaper than similar personnel in Hollywood. As a result many movies were shot at Cinecitta, particularly “sword and sandal” picture involving Greek and Roman mythology and gladiators. Film stars from all around Europe and the United States began congregating in Rome, energizing the night life in that city, particularly in the entertainment district called the Via Veneto. (This is the neighborhood where the American embassy is located close to the famous Trevi Fountain.) People like Kirk Douglas, Orson Welles, Audrey Hepburn, Tennessee Williams, Anita Ekberg, and stars (and celebrities) of similar magnitude could be glimpsed in the bars, restaurants, and gaudy night clubs on the Veneto. The presence of many Hollywood stars in the district created a proto-Warhol culture of fame and celebrity. (One of Warhol’s “stars” appears in the movie, the German singer Nico.) This culture, in turn, attracted hordes of gossip columnists and cameramen, who specialized in stalking stars, taking their pictures, and spreading scandal about their love affairs, drunken brawls, and indiscretions. It is the “Hollywood on the Tiber” aspect of high society along the Via Veneto that Fellini and his scriptwriters inserted into the Bildungsroman scenario for Moraldo in the City – the screenplay was updated to make Moraldo into a gossip columnist haunting the Veneto for material that he could sell to the popular weekly scandal sheets.
Dino de Laurentiis wanted to capitalize on the enormous success of an earlier “Hollywood on the Tiber” romantic comedy, Roman Holiday (1953), starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Roman Holiday was the second biggest box office hit in the United States in 1953 and was successful internationally – as late as 1990, Japanese moviegoers voted Roman Holiday their “favorite foreign film.” Laurentiis told Fellini that he wanted several big American stars in the picture, now dubbed La Dolce Vita. Specifically, Laurentiis wanted to cast Paul Newman in the role of Moraldo Rubini. Fellini opposed this decision and told Laurentiis that he wanted the principal part played by Marcello Mastrioanni, a relatively unknown actor at that time. Laurentiis and Fellini quickly reached an impasse with the producer refusing to finance the picture unless Paul Newman starred in it. (Fellini thought that Newman was “too pretty” for the part and wanted Mastrioanni, a man who had a “normal face,” for the hero; Fellini was not against casting international stars – he wanted Maurice Chevalier to play the part of Marcello’s father in the film; he also tried to cast Greer Gardner, Peter Ustinov, and Barbara Stanwyck in supporting roles.) One night at a hotel on the Via Veneto, Fellini ran into another producer who was willing to finance the movie without interfering with casting. Laurentiis sold his rights in the script Moraldo in the City to new producer and the film was shot beginning in January 1959, mostly on the sets constructed at Cinecitta Studios. Mastroianni was cast as the lead, now named Marcello Rubini. Fellini wanted Henry Fonda to play the part of Steiner in the picture but was unable to hire the actor. Fellini also attempted to film the exterior sequences on the Via Veneto on-location. This proved to be impossible – the street was too busy and couldn’t be closed for filming. The plan was to scrap the street scenes but Fellini argued that this would compromise his vision, which, of course, revolved around scandalous events on Via Veneto. There was a dispute and Fellini ultimately agreed to surrender his percentage of the gross in the film in exchange for the studio constructing a massive, several block set simulating the Veneto. The set was, in fact, built and is featured in several scenes in the movie. Of course, La Dolce Vita turned out to be the most profitable Italian film ever made and Fellini bitterly regretted relinquishing his share of the gross, a revenue source that would have made him fantastically wealthy.
2.
La Dolce Vita was famous even before it was released to general audiences on April 5, 1960 (the premiere in Rome had been on February 2, 1960). Tabloids covered a controversy involving the Austrian movie star Luise Rainer, a two-time Oscar winner for The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth in 1935 and 1936 respectively. Fellini cast Rainer in the role of Dolores, an elderly “nymphomaniac” who has sex with Marcello. Rainer came to Rome but clashed with Fellini, demanding that her scenes be re-written to make her “Marcello’s muse” directing him to finally write his book. Fellini wouldn’t accede to her demands, widely reported in the press, and wrote Dolores out of the script.
La Dolce Vita was shot, almost entirely at Cinecitta Studios near Rome between March 16, 1959 and August 27 1959. The first scene filmed was the ascent to the viewpoint over the St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican – the episode was shot on a set built at Cinecitta imitating the spiral stair that climbs between the inner and outer shell of the dome at St. Peter’s. The vantage from the height shown in the movie is constructed with stock footage and not accurate to the perspective from the top of the stair. (In this scene, Anita Ekberg as Sylvia is indefatigable – she charges up the stairs leaving everyone behind her, including Marcello who has to scramble to catch up.) As she climbs the stairs, Sylvia says that she “must tell Marilyn” (Marilyn Monroe) about running up the stairs as an exercise for weight loss. (In the interview scene, Sylvia alludes to a famous statement by Marilyn Monroe when she was questioned whether she slept in lingerie or pajamas – Monroe said “I sleep only in two drops of Chanel No. 5" which Sylvia paraphrases as “I sleep only in two drops of French perfume”.) The final sequence shot was the beach scene with the sea monster filmed at Passoscuro near Rome.
While the movie was in production, Italian gossip magazines and fashion periodicals covered the movie stars involved in making the picture with almost daily features. Paparazzi (the word originates in La Dolce Vita) haunted the movie stars involved in the picture and photographed them whenever possible. One day before the first day of shooting, an Italian tabloid, Lo Specchio, referred to the film that didn’t yet exist as “almost legendary.” Popular periodicals covered Fellini’s efforts to secure a producer for the film – there were lavish accounts of Dino de Laurentiis storming out of a meeting with the director. Everything Anita Ekberg did in Rome was covered with the sort of savage persistence shown by the paparazzi in the film. Mobs of journalists and photographers swarmed around the Trevi Fountain during Ekberg’s scene at that location. Hundreds of pictures of Ekberg cavorting in the fountain, some of them altered to make her look “more nude”, were published in magazines all around the world.
Fellini changed the script on a daily basis, often re-writing scenes for the afternoon before lunch. (Because the argot of Roman pimps and prostitutes is specialized, Fellini hired Pier Paolo Pasolini to advise as to authentic slang – Pasolini’s contribution is audible in the scene early in the movie in which Marcello and his upper-crust girlfriend Maddalena (played by Anouk Aimee) pick up a middle-aged whore who lives in a flooded basement.) Fellini allowed actors to improvise in many scenes. Lex Barker who plays Sylvia’s boyfriend (and who gets to beat up Marcello) was cast because the actor had appeared in Tarzan movies in the early fifties. But Barker turned out to be well-educated and sophisticated; he was much more than a piece of beef-cake and so Fellini expanded his role and made him more sympathetic and philosophical, altering the script for that purpose. Fellini cast on the basis of appearance; he looked for faces to enliven his movie. When he found someone who appealed to him, he would often re-write parts of the script to accommodate that actor – this was what he did in the scene with the aristocrats at the haunted palace in Fregene. One of the actors named Ferdinando “Wa-Wa” Brofferio impressed Fellini to the extent that has the man make love to Maddalena while she professes her fidelity to Marcello. Fellini changed the end of the movie, making it more bleak than it was in the script: in the script, Marcello sees beautiful young girls cavorting in the sea and his face is illumined with joy at the sight. Much of the orgy scene at Fregene near the end of the movie was improvised. Sequences featuring musical performers were developed on the basis of artists available at the time of the filming.
Fellini wanted to use Kurt Weill’s tune with the Brecht words Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) for the movie but couldn’t secure the rights. So he instructed Nino Rota, the great movie composer, to write a theme as close as possible to the famous music by Weill. Rota always orchestrated some scenes to themes from Ottorino Respighi’s The Pines of Room, particularly a sepulchral piece of music depicting figure emerging from underground burial places (“Pines near a Catacomb”). Fellini clashed on-set with his cameraman, Martelli. Fellini wanted to use very long focal length lenses (75 mm, 100 mm and 150 mm) for the photography. (“Scope” format normally uses 50 mm lenses; the film is shot in Totalscope, the European equivalent to Cinemascope.) Martelli objected that these long lenses would flatten out the image and make it flutter when the camera was moved. Notwithstanding this objection, Fellini prevailed. The use of these long lenses gives the film a quality of “depthlessness” that some critics have commented on. Fellini worked very efficiently. He shot 260 to 280 minutes of film that he edited to about 180 minutes, a very high ratio of on-screen film to film not used and discarded in editing. Fellini continued to tinker with the movie even as it was being dubbed. (Italian and most other European movies were not shot with live sound in the fifties; rather, voices were dubbed in post-production). Fellini changed a number of lines from what he had filmed (with actors speaking their lines on-location but not being recorded) is the dubbing process, substituting new dialogue for what he had shot.
The film refers to a number of events covered by tabloids during the several years and months before the movie was shot. Between 1956 and 1959, Anita Ekberg was married to Anthony Steel, a British actor. In August 1958, the tabloids published pictures of Steel slapping Ekberg in a nightclub, ostensibly because she was drunk. Later, Steel got into a brawl with the paparazzi who had snapped the shot. This scandal rhymes with the scenes with Ekberg and Les Barker in the picture. One of the big celebrities in Italy in 1959 was Andriano Celentano, nicknamed “Italy’s Elvis Presley”. Celentano performs Little Richard’s “Ready, Teddy” at Caracalla’s. (Elvis Presley had also covered that tune.) Celentano plays himself at Caracalla’s. (Incidentally, there was no nightclub called “Caracalla’s”; Fellini invented the venue, shooting the sequence in the enormous grotto-like ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. It was at these ruins that Edward Gibbon conceived the idea for his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Fellini installs various huge fragments of classical statuary in the archaeological site and uses blazing bonfires to create a bizarre ambience for this scene - the sequence looks very much like some of the remarkable sets designed a decade later when Fellini made his version of the Satyricon.) The figure of Steiner is based on Cesare Pavese, an Italian writer and intellectual who committed suicide in 1950. (Fellini had also seen a French newspaper account of a successful young man who inexplicably killed his three children before taking his own life.) The literati who appear in the scene at Steiner’s flat were all actual figures in the Roman literary and intellectual salon scene. On July 3, 1958, the Virgin Mary appeared to encephalitic child about 100 km from Rome and allegedly cured her. After this event was reported in the news, hundreds of people flocked to the village where the child lived hoping to glimpse the holy apparition. (It was later reported that the children in the village had been manipulated and posed for photographs suggesting that a miracle had occurred.) Roman audiences would have recognized the silent movie star Polidor in the Cha Cha club were Marcello goes with his father, the old wine salesman. Polidor appears as the sad clown with the trumpet. In the scene at the haunted villa, the decadent aristocrats are played by real scions of Italian royal families – these were also figures familiar to Roman audiences from their periodic appearances in tabloid scandal-sheets. One of the women, Princess Doris Pignatelli di Monteroduni was featured on the cover of Life magazine as “one of the best dressed women in Europe.” (The German actress who claims to speak “Eskimo” in this scene is Nico Paeffgen, later one of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls who sang with “The Velvet Underground.”) In the final orgy scene, Fellini refers to a famous incident at private party on November 16, 1958 in the Rugatino restaurant in Rome. In the company of many of the rich and famous (including Anita Ekberg), an Egyptian bellydancer named Aiche Nana did an impromptu striptease – this was filmed by a number of paparazzi and widely reported, to the moral disapprobation of the public, as evidence of the decadence prevailing on the Via Veneto. (A woman named Nadia, in fact, Nadia Grey, an actress well-known for her films from the thirties and forties, performs a striptease for the guests at the film producer’s house at Fregene.) Finally, in 1953, there was a much-reported incident of a dead body washing up on a beach near Rome – the mafia, politicians, and sex parties were said to be implicated in the murder of the young woman whose corpse was fished out of the sea. The public’s interest in the case was revived in 1957 when a lengthy trial ended in an acquittal, providing ample fodder for Italian conspiracy theorists. Photographs showing the woman’s body washed-up on the shore show a location very similar to the beach scene with the monster at the end of the film.
3.
La Dolce Vita’s premiere in Rome was uneventful. Critics generally disliked the picture and, of course, the Catholic Church was appalled. The Church with some Fascist groups orchestrated a more vehement reaction to the movie at the Milan showing on February 5, 1960. People in the audience booed the movie and there were choruses of men shouting “Basta! Basta!” – the expression means “Enough!” and “Get the fuck out!” Someone spit on Fellini and he was called “the Antichrist”, with a few thugs taking punches at him on the street. Of course, this kind of reaction is box-office gold and Fellini was laughing all the way to the bank. The Pope considered ex-communicating Fellini after a private showing at the Vatican – also PR of inestimable value enhanced when there were calls for the Italian parliament to ban showing of the movie. The paper of record, L’ Osservatore Romano, renamed the picture “La schifosa vita”(“the wretched life”) or La sconsia vita (“the mucky life”) – it seems pretty evident that these writers didn’t exactly grasp the heavy irony in Fellini’s title. As everyone with any sense has observed, Fellini is a rather puritanical moralist and the film is obviously intended as a scathing critique of decadence in film and celebrity culture. Some of the more sophisticated Catholic commentators claimed that the movie was based on Dante’s Inferno and that it was an attack on a world that had become a “moral quagmire.” One leading Catholic weekly in Brescia praised the movie for its courage, calling it a heroic “condemnation of the unchallenged state of privilege, or parasitism, the cult of stars, moral decadence, and the economic satiation of some social groups whose immorality is an outrage to the Italian working class.”
From the outset, critics pointed out the film’s essential hypocrisy. Fellini said that La Dolce Vita “was a thermometer to take the temperature of a sick world.” This objective, however, is coupled with a depiction of beautiful people engaged in highly photogenic debauchery. The film’s focus on glamor and style inevitably dilutes its moral effect. The problem is familiar to us from war films – most so-called anti-war pictures end up celebrating the very thing that they intend to denounce. The problem is that, at least, on film, war is a spectacle of mass movement, color, and peril – on screen, war is so pictorially impressive that the anti-war message gets lots in the spectacle. This fundamental contradiction arises in film’s dramatizing scandal and depravity: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments at least in its silent version deplores sin disobedient to the Biblical law – but this sin, usually primarily having to do with lust and adultery, arouses prurient interest; the more lurid the sin, the more attractive it will seem on screen. This is the trap that La Dolce Vita embodies.
Pauline Kael wrote a famous essay on La Dolce Vita pointing out that Fellini’s logic was specious. If the modern world is corrupt, as Fellini argues, then, why (Kael asks) does he employ as his exemplars for depravity the most attractive and, seemingly, enviable people possible? The “apathy and malaise” that Fellini portrays doesn’t affect common people, Kael argued. (It should be noted that she didn’t believe that “modern man” was somehow uniquely alienated and despairing – European films articulating this proposition were relying on a “myth and fad”, she said. In fact, one of her famous essays on Antonioni, a director whose films run parallel to Fellini’s themes, was called “The come-as-the-sick-soul-Europe-Parties (considering La Notte, Last year at Marienbad, and La Dolce Vita). This essay can be read on the internet and I recommend it highly – it was originally published in the Massachusetts Review in 1963. You should read this text on your own, but I will presume to summarize some of Kael’s points in that writing about La Dolce Vita.
Kael was a connoisseur of acting. She decried the misuse of Mastroianni as “a handsome, mindless mask, that actor as a mature juvenile, the experienced, tired, fortyish man of (La Dolce Vita and its progeny).” She goes on to pragmatically ask: “isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity? For whom does love last?” La Dolce Vita treats the end of the world as “a big dull party... but whose experiences are they (films like La Dolce Vita) expressing...the party (is) just a photogenic symbol of modern life...loaded with meanings it can’t carry?”
“Many Americans,” Kael says are likely “attracted by (Fellini’s view of fabulous parties, jaded people, baroque palaces; to any American who works damned hard, old-world decadence doesn’t look so bad...Forgive me if I sound plaintive: I’ve never been to one of those dreadfully decadent big parties (the people I know are more likely to give bring-your-own bottle parties.)” Secretly, Fellini loves the “the spectacle of wealth and idleness,” Kael argues. But “if the malaise is general, why single out the rich for condemnation? If the malaise affects only the rich , is it so very important? As usual, there is a false note in the moralist’s voice.” “La Dolce Vita is like poking your head into a sack of fertilizer and, then, becoming indignant because you’re covered with excrement.” Kael accuses Fellini of “exploiting the incidents and crimes and orgies of modern Rome in the manner of a Hollywood biblical spectacle but La Dolce Vita is a sort of Ben Hur for the more, but not very more, sophisticated... he’s very close to the preachers who describe the orgies of high-life and the punishments of eternal hell fire.” Kael says Fellini is a “country boy who can never take for granted the customs and follies of the big city...but...perhaps, also a showman who knows that these episodes will be juicy fodder for the mass audience...” La Dolce Vita is “an incoherent, message movie.” Kael thinks its ironic that audiences attend a three-hour Marxist-inflected film only to come away with the proposition that “fornication is bad.”
Kael’s essay isn’t completely coherent itself and it violates a cardinal rule of criticism – the critic must concede the artist’s theme or donnee (that is, basic assumptions) and ask whether the film is well-executed given its fundamental premises. (You can’t denounce a Western because it’s not a musical or romantic comedy, that is, the critic should, I think, accept the film for what it wants to be.) Kael’s essay is an apology in part for encouraging people to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, a picture that she describes as a masterpiece but, which, it seems spawned a number of other films with broadly similar existentialist themes that she dislikes as pretentious. Further, in the essay, she abuses La Dolce Vita for not being Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, a film that she thinks develops parallel themes. Kael notes that college girls in America may fantasize about “changing places with a whore”; there are drug addicts on Wall Street, she says, and “Communist and working class girls” likely fantasize about taking their clothes off in public. So why aren’t there any drug-addicted businessmen, sturdy college girls, or hard-working Communist women in La Dolce Vita? Kael’s objection seems to be that she thinks the film’s range is too narrow: “we need to see some intelligent, hardworking, or creative people who nevertheless have the same outlets – or vices, if you will – as these shallow people (on screen).” Fellini “allows the middle-class to cluck with glee and horror at seeing the rich do just what the middle-class secretly wants to do.” This seems wrong-headed to me: Kael regards the cinema as a “trash art”, as a spectacle that is best when trashiest, most exploitative, and raw. Movies are founded on voyeurism. So what’s wrong with Fellini casting his audience as voyeurs to the lives of “the rich and famous?” Ultimately, Kael shows that there is something fundamentally dishonest about La Dolce Vita – but if we are to reject with dismay every work of art that has something of the dishonest about it, what would survive our disapprobation?
After a few years, La Dolce Vita became vaguely disreputable. Critics greatly preferred Fellini’s next film 8 ½, a picture about the plight of a director who can’t get his film made, a surrealist spectacle involving Mastroianni as a surrogate for the filmmaker (he uses a whip to tame a cage full of ravenous women) and an immensely ambitious movie that was pretty much universally acclaimed. La Dolce Vita wasn’t exactly denounced (critics are generally loath to admit making mistakes) but the celebrity associated with it and the film’s fame was thought to be rather embarrassing. For a couple of decades, Pauline Kael’s criticism had traction and people saw the film through the lens that she provided. However, in the last thirty years, filmmakers have re-evaluated the movie and people like Alexander Payne and Martin Scorsese (as well as Roger Ebert who proclaimed the movie his favorite) have restored some of the patina that the film lost when savaged by Pauline Kael.
4.
La Dolce Vita was once the most famous and celebrated movie in the world. So, of course, it has a cast a long shadow influencing later films. The picture is cited in Pietro Germi’s 1964 Divorce Italian Style and, also, alluded to in Cinema Paradiso (1988). Sofia Coppola shows Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson watching the movie on TV in Lost in Translation (2018). The couture depicted in La Dolce Vita spawned dresses and hats inspired by the film by Versace, Valentino, Prada, and accessorized by Gucci. There have ben a number of museum shows documenting the world-wide influence of the clothing shown in the movie, mostly designed by Brioni. Dylan mentions the movie in his 1964 “Motorpsycho Nitemare”. The famous opening sequence is mimicked in Cinemo Paradiso’s Director’s Cut, Steve Martin’s L. A. Story (1991), and the German comedy Goodbye, Lenin in which a statue of the Communist leader stands in for “Christ the Worker”, the figure hauled over Rome in La Dolce Vita. Most notably, Paolo Sorrentino, in effect, remade the movie in The Great Beauty (2013), a film in which a 65-year old intellectual wanders around Rome, distracted from writing his long-promised book by the baroque splendor of the Eternal City. (Sorrentino acknowledges that La Dolce Vita is the model for this picture.)
When Marcello Mastrioanni died in 1996, the City of Rome silenced the Trevi Fountain and draped it in black.
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