Word: fellini
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...Hollywood films appear to be turned out by a faceless corporation, and this is one reason why foreign films are popular among those who seek the sense of an artist's mind behind the completed work. There is such a single central intelligence behind La Strada: that of Federico Fellini, who wrote the screenplay (with a collaborator whose name the ticket-taking girl at the Brattle could not divulge), and directed. The questions that La Strada raises, then, resolve around Fellini. For me they are two: What is he getting at, with this superbly made story of two most human...
...opera--but a one-act opera. Fellini has made his movie with careful attention to every detail except the patience of his audience. But his sombre exhaustiveness gives La Strada an essential truthfulness in spite of the melodramatic violence. The stark, stony backgrounds, for instance, of which we see so much: no carpenter could have put them up, no paper-mache could duplicate them. They are real...
...Fellini is not the statistical sort of realist who would take the average of all the girls in all the second-rate circuses in Italy, and cast the leading role as close as possible to this ideal. In fact, it is safe to say that no woman in the world is remotely like Giulietta Masina; that may be one reason her performance carries such conviction. Masina's face, though never down-rightly funny, is always comic--and usually pathetic into the bargain. Even when not made up in clown-white, it is a clown-face. It seems to be changing...
...story has its pathos; but as the picture tells it, the tale is all too often merely pathetic. The fault lies chiefly with Director Federico Fellini. the brilliant creator of I Vitelloni, who has revived the bathetic excesses of La Strada without its noble brutalities. As for Fellini's wife, Actress Masina, she gives, almost gesture for Chaplinish gesture, the performance that made her famous as the idiot girl in La Strada. It's a case of the right part in the wrong picture...
Fire Under Her Skin definitively proves that the "realism" of De Sica, Fellini, and others has become a stock formula and has lost the wonderful freshness that it once seemed to possess. All the inevitable ingredients are here, the triangle--or is it a pentagon--of passions, the sensitive man who kills the thing he loves, etc., replete with much fondling and other fine Gallic touches. Of course the "unhappy ending" has become stock too, with the usual frustrations, murders, and general cataclysm. The plot is so implausible that the outcome seems apparent before this charming idyll has ground through...