Fallen City of Man

A n important part of any new work’s appeal is always the extent to which its virtues can take one unawares, or conversely, the degree of one’s own capacity for consumer surprise. One reason Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless took many film-goers by storm was because they had heard so little about it in advance. But the news about Fellini’s La Dolce Vita has been coming out of Europe for two years now. We have been assured that it is decadent, brilliant, immoral, pretentious, too long. With such a build-up, any movie would be at a disadvantage. No matter how good, or bad, it is, it cannot live up to the prejudices lying in wait. In the case of La Dolce Vita, I have even heard people complain about the famous “orgy” scene, which they had found disappointingly tame.

At least, though, it seems to me that the following is true: 1) It is an ambitiously conceived and wholly serious piece of work, very moral though never didactic, and as unmendacious a venture in a mass entertainment medium as we’ve had since Shoeshine. 2) It may well be the most perfectly cast movie of its scope ever made. There are over one hundred players identified in the credits and I can’t imagine one—from Anita Ekberg to Count Ivenda Dobrzensky—who could be replaced without a loss. 3) In the same way, I can’t think of a film which has made better use of a real-life milieu—in this case, the glamorous-cum-grivoise gamut of the Via Veneto, where film actors, deadend aristocrats, the idle rich, hustlers, phonies, arrivistes, and scum of all nationalities gather to be harassed by news photographers and gossip columnists (whom Fellini uses as a sort of twentieth-century equivalent of the classic Furies). 4) It is a continually inventive, if never startlingly original work of film art. Rossellini’s sense of landscape and Chaplin’s instinct for visual narrative are still the two poles on which Fellini’s own creative axis turns. 5) It is a memorable movie. I doubt if anyone seeing it this year will fail to remember many moments of it a decade from now; and this is not only because so much of it is pictorially vivid, but because the whole film is charged with a quality of feeling that just does not get into film-making very often.

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Peter Melik

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A n important part of any new work’s appeal is always the extent to which its virtues can take one unawares, or conversely, the degree of one’s own capacity for consumer surprise. One reason Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless took many film-goers by storm was because they had heard so little about it in advance. But the news about Fellini’s La Dolce Vita has been coming out of Europe for two years now. We have been assured that it is decadent, brilliant, immoral, pretentious, too long. With such a build-up, any movie would be at a disadvantage. No matter how good, or bad, it is, it cannot live up to the prejudices lying in wait. In the case of La Dolce Vita, I have even heard people complain about the famous “orgy” scene, which they had found disappointingly tame.

At least, though, it seems to me that the following is true: 1) It is an ambitiously conceived and wholly serious piece of work, very moral though never didactic, and as unmendacious a venture in a mass entertainment medium as we’ve had since Shoeshine. 2) It may well be the most perfectly cast movie of its scope ever made. There are over one hundred players identified in the credits and I can’t imagine one—from Anita Ekberg to Count Ivenda Dobrzensky—who could be replaced without a loss. 3) In the same way, I can’t think of a film which has made better use of a real-life milieu—in this case, the glamorous-cum-grivoise gamut of the Via Veneto, where film actors, deadend aristocrats, the idle rich, hustlers, phonies, arrivistes, and scum of all nationalities gather to be harassed by news photographers and gossip columnists (whom Fellini uses as a sort of twentieth-century equivalent of the classic Furies). 4) It is a continually inventive, if never startlingly original work of film art. Rossellini’s sense of landscape and Chaplin’s instinct for visual narrative are still the two poles on which Fellini’s own creative axis turns. 5) It is a memorable movie. I doubt if anyone seeing it this year will fail to remember many moments of it a decade from now; and this is not only because so much of it is pictorially vivid, but because the whole film is charged with a quality of feeling that just does not get into film-making very often.