#0000C: FELLINI, Federico: Il Bidone (1955)

FELLINI, Federico (Italy)

Il Bidone [1955]

Spine #0000C
Blu-ray

Between the international triumphs of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, Federico Fellini made this fascinatingly unique film, which has been long overlooked. Largely eschewing the poetic flourishes of the more famous works that bookend it, Il Bidone is a dark neorealist crime drama starring a commanding Broderick Crawford as one of the most complex characters in the director’s canon: an aging con man who, having made a career preying on the desperation of poor peasants, suddenly finds that his crooked ways have begun to catch up with him. Masterfully entwining the story’s human grit with elements of humor and pathos, Fellini crafts a searing portrait of a man reckoning with the consequences of his life’s choices that hits with the force of a profound moral tragedy.

113 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

in Italian

1:37:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2020

Director/Writers

Screenplay by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli.

Fellini was 35 when he directed Il Bidone.

Other Fellini films in the Collection:

#0000C/#189: The White Sheik (1952)
#0000C/#246: I Viteloni (1953)
#0000C/#219: La Strada (1954)
#0000C/#49: Nights Of Cabiria (1957)
#0000C/#733: La Dolce Vita (1960)
#0000C/#140: 8½ (1963)
#0000C/#149: Juliet Of The Spirits (1965)
#0000C/#747: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
#0000C/#848: Roma (1972)
#0000C/#4: Amarcord (1973)
#0000C/#50: And The Ship Sails On (1983)
#0000C: Intervista (1987)

The Film

An extraordinary film; unavailable for years in its 113-minute version, having been mutilated by producers after half the Venice audience walked out, and the public was completely turned off by the subject matter.

It’s understandable. A bidone is a trash can. Thus, a swindler, a dirty con man.

Augusto (Broderick Crawford), Picasso (Richard Basehart) and Roberto (Franco Fabrizi) pull off a scam on a naive woman, who lives on a farm in a rural area outside Rome. The ruination of her life is completely left off-screen. Fellini makes no comment, while the bandits return to Rome to party.

No wonder an audience of war-weary Italians couldn’t sit through it. It is brutal.

The scam is paralleled at the end of the film, with a different outcome. Fellini beautifully elides most of the details of this last crime, because we’ve already seen them.

A real estate swindle seems to be torn off the pages of a contemporary newspaper. Again, the victims are never shown in what must be their great agony. Fellini is not here to make judgments about anyone. He is only the storyteller.

In between, less brutal rip-offs seem mild by comparison. A trusting old gas station owner is duped into handing over 10,000 lira (about $16) for a promise to return and pay for a few cents of gasoline.

Meanwhile, Picasso (an artist, duh) is married to Iris (Giulietta Masina), parents to a young toddler. His conscience is not strong enough to overcome his greed.

In the final scene, Augusto’s fate somewhat mirrors Zampanò’s in La Strada. Will the wretched find salvation, even as they take their final breaths, after living a life of evil?

Fellini isn’t saying, so the viewer is forced to confront the very Catholic ideal with his or her own conscience.

Film Rating (0-60):

54

The Extras

The Booklets

Eighty-two page booklet featuring an essay by David Forgacs.

“Fellini took particular care over the drunken New Year’s Eve party sequence (the only scene shot in the studio, not on location — a trend which Fellini would completely reverse in later films), in which, among other things, Rinaldo (Alberto De Amicis) shuts the door on his wife and joins a group of leering men as they take a young aspiring beauty queen into a bedroom to strip, and Roberto insults a drunken French dowager he is seeking to exploit and is then confronted by Rinaldo for stealing her gold cigarette case. Witnessing all this is Iris, who sees only now whom her husband is mixed up with. Her moment of pained realization is replicated later when Augusto’s teenage daughter, Patrizia (Lorella De Luca), who knows nothing about her estranged father’s life, watches in tears [see below] as he is taken away by police after a victim of one of his scams (not shown, but familiar as a plot point in The Third Man [1949]) recognizes him and makes a scene in a movie-theater foyer. Such epiphanic encounters, in which an innocent and trusting character suddenly realizes the corruption of another, are central to the moral cinema Fellini was developing in the fifties.”

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).

Tóibin:

“In Il Bidone, when the swindlers dress as clergy during their rural excursions, they wear expressions of piety; they behave as figures who are used to respect and reverence. Augusto and Picasso offer a superbly comic imitation of provincial Catholic priests lording it over the peasants.”

Commentary

By Fellini scholar Frank Burke.

Burke is good at pointing out all the symbolism and revealing complex plot points. But he more or less is simply confirming what any intelligent viewer will find for themselves. Not a fan.

Interview

From 2013 with filmmaker Dominique Delouche.

On the other hand, this second extra is a revealing interview with a super-fan who approached Fellini the night of the La Strada disaster (although it won the Silver Lion, a physical brawl broke out from the disappointed supporters of Visconti’s Senso), and — despite scant experience in the film industry — became Fellini’s assistant on his next project, this film.

He tells several juicy Fellini stories, for example:

During the scene where Augusto is being carted off to jail outside the cinema, Patrizia must cry. Not a seasoned actress, De Luca couldn’t manage it. Fellini knelt down beside her and — tugging her arm violently — began to berate her using the crudest swear words. The tears began to fall.

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

54 + 35 =

89

By Director

By Spine #