#0000C/#81: FELLINI, Federico & LATTUADA, Alberto: Variety Lights (1950)
FELLINI, Federico & LATTUADA, Alberto (Italy)
The Film
None.
First episode of the Belgian television show with André Delvaux’s 1960 series of interviews with Fellini.
Variety Lights [1950]
Spine #0000C/Spine #81
DVD/OOP/Blu-ray
2000 synopsis
A beautiful ingenue joins a tawdry music hall troupe and quickly becomes its feature attraction in Fellini's stunning debut film (directed in collaboration with neorealist filmmaker Alberto Lattuada). Featuring Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and frequent leading lady, Variety Lights introduces the director's affection for the carnivalesque characters that frequent the cinematic landscape of such classics as Nights of Cabiria, La Strada, and La Dolce Vita. Criterion is proud to present Variety Lights in a beautiful digital transfer.
2020 synopsis
Made in collaboration with Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini’s directorial debut unfolds amid the colorful backdrop of a traveling vaudeville troupe whose quixotic impresario (Peppino De Flilppo) is tempted away from his faithful mistress (Giulietta Masina) by the charms of an ambitious young dancer (Carla Del Poggio). Though the details of what the division of duties was between the directors are unclear, this lively backstage capriccio is unmistakably Felliniesque in its whimsical fascination with the heightened reality, carnivalesque characters, and exotic allure of the world of show business. In the first of her celebrated collaborations with her director husband, Giulietta Masina displays the spirited vulnerability that would soon become an archetype of cinematic emotiveness.
97 minutes
Black & White
Black & White
Monaural
in Italian
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2000/2020
Director/Writers
Story by Federico Fellini.
Fellini was 30 and Lattuada was 36 when they directed Variety Lights.
The Film
It’s an astonishing coincidence that two films made the same year on opposite sides of the ocean are nearly identical in plot. Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) {Spine #1003} is a slicker, Hollywood production — but this film has all the charm of the postwar Italian cinema.
Checco Dal Monte (Peppino De Filippo) is the perfect fool — falling head over heels for the young newcomer, Liliana Antonelli (Carla Del Poggio, Lattuada’s wife) at the expense of his true companion, Melina Amour (Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife) …
Besides Melina foots the bills, and Checco is beside himself when he’s unable to mount a successful production. Naturally, Melina constantly comes to his rescue.
This truly rises to the level of tragedy in the final scene when the end becomes the beginning.
Film Rating (0-60):
The Booklets
#81 only: Eight-page wraparound featuring an essay by Andrew Sarris
55
The ExtrasThe Booklets
#81 only: Eight-page wraparound featuring an essay by Andrew Sarris
“This bitter narrative is tempered by the warm camaraderie shared by a small community of losers and by the amusement generated with a series of grotesquely amateurish’acts’ performed with the utmost gravity and self-importance. Fellini and Lattuada are among the most eminent inheritors of the Italian cinema’s glorious tradition of expressing compassion for the inhabitants of the underside of bourgeois society. It is through their love for their rumpled characters that Fellini and Lattuada can make us smile and identify with their endless travails. In this respect, at least, they remain faithful to the humanist precepts of neorealism.”
#0000C only: Eighty-four page booklet featuring an essay by David Forgacs
“Lattuada is claimed to have told Fellini that he gave him a co-directors credit because: ‘my sixth sense tells me you’re a genius, and you will go on to a glorious future.’ Fellini’s version was less generous to himself: ‘To tell the truth, Lattuada did everything. I just looked on.’”
154-page booklet featuring an introduction by Bilge Ebiri and essays by Michael Almereyda (Primary Sources); Colm Tóibin (Imagined Homes); Carol Morley (Life on Earth); Stephanie Zacharek (Tough Love); and Kogonada (There is No End).
Zacharek:
“One thing about Fellini: he knows men are fools. He accepts it, like the rising and setting of the sun, to the point that it may seem as if he’s condoning their carelessness or even their cruelty. The first time you see a man behaving badly in a Fellini film is in his very first, Variety Lights. Checco and Melina are part of a group of traveling performers, specialists in corny, vaudeville-style comedy and musical numbers. They’re always broke, but their complaints are part of their happiness; a life of uncertainty is also one of adventure. Checco and Melina seem settled into a groove of contentment. They’re engaged, though they already live the life of an old married couple: she brings him soup and bread as they wait for a train, and feels his forehead for fever, pulling his beret down low to ensure that he’s warm enough. But none of this doting attentiveness prevents Checco from falling for the scheming beauty who infiltrates the troupe, Liliana. Checco abandons Melina and goes off to start a new life with the ingenue.”
Commentary
None.
#0000C only:
Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
A feature-length documentary from 2002 by Damian Pettigrew that provides an unorthodox introduction to Fellini’s life and work and features extensive interviews with the director himself.
Interesting doc; however not a thing about the film in question here!
Fellini was a genius — we all know that. He made films, not language essays.
Yet here he talks and talks about how he has no idea what he’s doing — how film mysteriously enters his mind, religiously somehow — how is actors are all empty vessels in need of filling.
Meanwhile, in between the monologue, we get clips of 8½ (1963) {Spine #0000C/#140) , Juliet of the Spirits (1965) {Spine #0000C/#149}, Spirits of the Dead (1968: segment: Toby Dammit), Fellini Satyricon (1969) {Spine #0000C/#747}, Casanova (1976) (unused scene), City of Women (1980) and The Ship Sails On (1983) {Spine #0000c/#50} … and the cast and crew of some of those films: Roberto Benigni, Luigi “Titta” Benzi, Italo Calvino, Dante Ferretti, Rinaldo Geleng, Tullio Pinelli, Giuseppe Rotunno, Terence Stamp, Donald Sutherland (Stamp and Sutherland are both brutal in their utter astonishingly massive discomfort with the man’s ways and methods!), and Daniel Toscan du Plantier.
He talks about Kurosawa:
“In Rashomon I saw a Japanese filmmaker who almost managed to photograph air, and by means of air, he let us glimpse into … in the walk in the forest, for example, a man has an ax on his shoulder; the sun is reflected on the blade of the ax, casting sparkles into the leaves. That’s an example of how films can narrate in the most complex manner, the reality that surrounds us.”
Second Look
First episode of the Belgian television show with André Delvaux’s 1960 series of interviews with Fellini.
How he faked his suicide; how he helped revive an ailing zebra; and best of all, how he met Aldo Fabrizi and Rossellini.
Fabrizi, in fact, was a sort of model for Checco.
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