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The landscape is initially likened to Corot, by the end it's a rocky void out of Beckett. The grifters are the aspiring painter (Richard Basehart), the glib wannabe crooner (Franco Fabrizi), and the weathered charlatan (Broderick Crawford) who doffs a trench coat to reveal a monsignor's robes. "I can sell ice to Eskimos, and now I work with these amateurs!" Their gig involves posing as clerics, exhuming bogus loot in the countryside, and fleecing farmers by trading the buried treasure for religious fees. Italy is filled with P.T. Barnum's suckers, fellow showman Federico Fellini displays a more trenchant understanding of swindlers, who drive to the slums to take down payments for nonexistent homes and then stumble around the deserted plaza, facing their own emptiness. ("If you shake his hand, make sure you count your fingers," goes the greeting between hustlers.) Gesticulating locals amusingly bounce off Crawford's American bulk, his puffy thug-mug gradually reveals striking shades of shame and fear. In a "con man's symphony" (cf. St. Clair's Jitterbugs), the progression from comedy to tragedy registers Fellini's jaundiced spiritual realms. Paradise is the nightclub where the characters live it up when loaded, floating on champagne and going home with dancers. Purgatory, meanwhile, is the Minnellian New Year's Eve party held by a moneyed colleague, where Crawford tries to peddle a small-business dream, Basehart embarrasses himself with a canvas under his arm, and Fabrizi can't even properly pilfer a cigarette case. The aging trickster has a flash of conscience recoiling from a paralytic naïf's reverential kiss, and experiences Hell—a truck's headlights briefly illuminate the desolate roadside at night, the camera departs from the broken-backed protagonist as ineffable grace walks by just out of reach. With Giulietta Masina, Sue Ellen Blake, Alberto De Amicis, and Riccardo Garrone. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |