Word: fellinis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...palazzo. There is the sense of an ending whenever--because of death or marriage to an outsider--anyone leaves the town. Everyone gathers at funerals and marriages to see them off; every evening, they take their stroll along the town's main street, nodding to everyone else. The city Fellini used for filming had some things in it that were obviously postwar--Amarcord is set in the thirties--but he didn't need to change or cover up any of them. The sense of community he creates is so overwhelming that it assimilates everything into a harmonious whole, like...
AMARCORD ["I Remember"] is Fellini's most ingratiating film so far--the return to scenes of his childhood near Rimini on Italy's Adriatic coast seems to have mellowed him. His fascisti are Verdi caricatures who can be deflated by a phonograph blaring out the Internationale from the bell tower in the town's main square as Mussolini begins a speech; the worst they do to the perpetrator is give him a humiliating dose of castor oil. The strangest and most wonderful things happen in the city of Amarcord, but they are all good things: A great ocean liner sails...
There is a bad side to life in Amarcord: fascism and especially the Church, with its laughable confessionals and pathetic attempts at education. But the schoolchildren Fellini focuses on aren't warped or victimized by the Church--they exploit it, puncture it almost effortlessly, without retribution. Even the ordinary cruetly of children to other children (such as the very fat or the very small) never goes beyond the verbal stage. Sometimes, particularly in the opening scene of the bonfire with which the town welcomes the spring, there is a hint of menace, but these hints are always resolved into...
...most recent film, Fellini Roma, Fellini occasionally has members of the cast step out from the tapestry to address his audience, like Anna Magnani as she reaches the door to her apartment and bids us all good night. In Amarcord Fellini plays around further with this device; along with the exquisite diction of the Italian actors and the rhythm and beauty and strangeness (to the English ear) of what they are saying, this lends a theatrical, almost ritualistic quality to the film. These characters, though, are faintly ridiculous. By stepping out of the community to address us, they forfeit...
...Millers' tribal intimacy. Even so, the play could have been cut. Dick is too fragile a character to sustain interest, and his mooncalfing is made graceless by O'Neill's wooden dialogue. But Arvin Brown's staging has a rich visual impact reminiscent of Fellini. A dwarf of a maid scuttles around the dinner table, which is dominated by a jolly drunken uncle (John Braden) sucking on lobster shells. Button-nosed Spinster Teresa Wright alternately gig gles and blushes in a new dress while Geraldine Fitzgerald presides as super-mother, projecting the presence of a queen...