IL BIDONE (Federico Fellini, 1955)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

In The Swindle, one of Federico Fellini’s best films, Augusto fleeces peasants. The con man ends up alone on a hillside, beaten in every possible sense, after concealing money from accomplices that he intended to give his teenaged daughter so she could go to college and realize her dream of becoming a teacher. Augusto (Broderick Crawford, wonderful) has no dreams of his own.
     His “original” accomplices, who abandoned him a year or two earlier, include Carlo, who is called Picasso because he paints; Carlo’s wife, Iris, seems to want him to paint more than he wants to, perhaps to bring him back to an original desire of his that reflects the man she fell in love with. But it is principally fear that motivates the boy to quit his criminal connection to Augusto: fear that Iris will leave him, taking with her the light of his life, Silvana, their young daughter. Roberto, the other accomplice, dreams of becoming the Italian Johnnie Ray, the U.S. entertainer popular in the fifties for crybaby wailing intended to overcome deafness when he sang. Roberto’s risking exposure by an application of his light fingers at a New Year’s party suggests another facet of his identification with Ray: Roberto also may be a closeted homosexual.
     Augusto is sufficiently old that these “original” accomplices are themselves replacements.
     Tonally, this is perhaps Fellini’s most agile and complex accomplishment. Whether Augusto is bilking the poor posing as a monsignor or a housing commissioner, Fellini takes pains to aim ridicule at the Church, and the superstitious devotion it encourages, and postwar bureaucracy, not the poor. Fellini’s ambivalence toward Iris (Giulietta Masina, his wife) may reflect pressures on him to hew to neorealismo!
     The film hauntingly crosses its Fellinidom predecessor, La strada (1954), at least thrice.

ROMA (Federico Fellini, 1972)

An inspiration for Woody Allen’s sweepingly nostalgic, hilarious Radio Days (1987), Federico Fellini’s Roma begins objectively, with Fellini’s voiceover intruding on a patently artificial set, and proceeds to vignettes from his childhood in Rimini, which includes his introduction to Rome. Dictator Mussolini still runs Italy when Fellini, now 18, visits Rome, staying at a bizarre boardinghouse in the early 1930s. The film fuses, then, objectivity and subjectivity, Rome and the Rome of Fellini’s mind, reality and reverie.
     At night a teeming outdoor eatery finds the boy experiencing—an older Fellini remembering—a profusion of sights and sounds (and smells) that puts one in mind of the explosive portrait of London, likewise including grotesque elements, during the St. Bartholomew’s Fair in William Wordsworth’s autobiographical The Prelude. “In Rome we say,” one of the horde at the same table says to the stranger, “everything you eat turns to shit.” Later, in long-shot, a flock of sheep is led across an otherwise deserted city square. The camera approaches a solitary streetside prostitute anxiously waiting for a trick to appear. We jump ahead to present-day Rome in rainy daylight, where a pair of prostitutes—actors—are being filmed. Of course, the previous lone prostitute also was an actress in a film—the one we’re watching. It’s night and still raining, and the film crew is still at work. The traffic stall in front of the Coliseum: Is it real or staged? Next day, young people ask Fellini about the film he is shooting: Is the interview real or staged?
     Extraordinary passages follow, including a haunting journey through corridors of the Rome subways suggesting an archaeological descent into the unconscious. An uproariously funny ecclesiastical fashion show brings to fruition the gag of Anita Ekberg’s priestly attire in La dolce vita (1959).