Word: vitae
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...newsman-hero of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the writer-hero of Luchino Visconti's La Notte. He has proved himself a masterful comedian with his current performance in Pietro Germi's Divorce-Italian Style. With credits like that, he understandably has no interest whatever in learning English. Hollywood has tried repeatedly to lure him, but young men seldom go for old tarts. "What is being done here in Italy," he says, "is far better and much more mature and advanced than anything cinematic being done elsewhere...
Further Decay. It was Dolce Vita's Fellini who exploited most fully the characteristics that had long since made Mastroianni (Mass-tro-yahn-ee) one of the most popular actors in Italy. His handsome face, young in its outlines but creased with premature wrinkles, has a frightened, characteristically 20th century look-as of a mantis who has lost faith in the efficacy of prayer. He suggests the all-round fellow of the 1960s who is the antithesis of Renaissance man-painfully aware of nearly everything, truly able at nothing. His spine seems to be a stack of plastic napkin...
That is how he looks on the surface, at any rate, and he has so often been cast as "himself"-he was even called Marcello in Dolce Vita-that he went eagerly for his role as a Sicilian nobleman in Divorce-Italian Style, which gave him a chance to grease down his hair, grow a mustache, and decay even more. But the man himself is nothing like the prototype his appearance symbolizes. Whereas he zealously chased a great-bosomed movie star (Anita Ekberg) in Dolce Vita, he fled when a great-bosomed movie star (Brigitte Bardot) recently chased...
...future borghese [bourgeois] headed for ultimate material prosperity. I foresee this soon in Italy, and I wanted to show where we are headed." Director Federico Fellini has foreseen pretty much the same thing, and Smog is a kind of ground-fog version of Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Like Fellini, Rossi weights his work with symbolism and tells his story in round after round of parties. Like Fellini, he used actual people playing themselves in a picture depicting their own degradation, including Playboy Peter Howard who, curiously enough, was host at the Roman orgy in 1958 that inspired...
...hard to say. First of all, it has a continuity through narrative, unifying it from the opening shots of modern Milan to the closing embrace in a sand trap. At points, such as when one hears, then sees a helicopter whoosh past the hospital, it parodies La Dolce Vita, a film lacking tightness and cohesiveness, though also attempting to portray the senselessness of modern Italy. The essential difference in approach between Fellini and Antonioni is that the former stuns his audience by exploring the very human situations of three sympathetic characters...