by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a DVD I had checked
out of the San Diego Central Library of a film I’ve heard and been curious
about for years but had never had a chance to see. The film was Variety
Lights, produced in Italy in 1950
(that’s the date on the DVD box and also on imdb.com, though other sources have
said 1951) and co-directed by the already established Alberto Lattauada and a
young man named Federico Fellini. Fellini had broken into the movie business in
1945, as World War II was winding down, as one of the screenwriters on Roberto
Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, the catch-as-catch-can production (Rossellini “borrowed” his cameras
from the Italian Cinecittá — “Cinema City” — studio and shot on so-called
“short-ends” of film, unexposed stock at the end of rolls too short to be
usable in a high-level studio production) that launched the movement in
European films in general, and Italian films in particular, called
“Neorealism.” “Neorealism” meant just that — Charles noted a parallel between
it and the “verismo” (“truth-telling”)
movement in Italian opera at the end of the 19th century. Neorealist
films told stories of ordinary people, often working-class or poor people
struggling to survive (indeed, in most neorealist films, including this one,
the struggle to survive economically is the basis of the entire plot!), and
they were shot outside the studio in real locations. By chance I’d just read a New
Yorker review of a new biography
of Fellini which mentioned that as his career progressed he moved away from neorealism and made his films more artificial
and studio-bound. (In the 1980’s he made a film called È la Nave Va — “And the Ship Sails On” — that took place
entirely at sea but was shot totally inside a Cinecittá sound stage, with
old-fashioned and surprisingly obvious painted backdrops representing sky and
sea.) It’s one of those ironies history likes to throw up that a studio complex
commissioned in 1937 by Benito Mussolini became most famous as the playground
of a director who’d grown up under Mussolini’s regime, hated it, hated
authoritarian regimes in general and hated the Roman Catholic Church in
particular. (If Fellini ever made a movie that didn’t have a scene ridiculing the church — aside from
Satyricon, set in ancient Rome
before the church as an institution existed — I’ve never seen it.) Fellini
worked in the late 1940’s as a screenwriter on other people’s projects and in
1950 he wrote a story about struggling vaudevillians called Luce di Varietà which established director Alberto Lattuada
bought. Lattuada collaborated with Fellini on the final script (along with
Tullio Pinelli, who would work on a lot of Fellini’s later films, and an
uncredited Ennio Flaiano).
Lattuada knew that Fellini was anxious to “graduate”
from merely writing films to directing them, and so he hired Fellini as
co-director — though there aren’t a lot of accounts of how this film was made
and we really don’t know which director contributed what. It’s indicative of
the changing fortunes that so often rule the movie industry that the film’s actual
credit for director reads “Lattuada è Fellini” but Fellini’s name is listed
first on the DVD box (from Janus Films, which also was the film’s original U.S.
distributor) and also on imdb.com. The producers included Bianca Lattuada,
while Felice Lattuada worked on the music, and Lattuada wasn’t the only person
who got family members involved in this movie: Fellini got his wife, Giulietta
Masina, the part of the second female lead, a performer who calls herself
“Melina Amore” and who when the film opens is the sort-of fiancée of the male
lead, small-time comic Checco Dal Monte (Peppino de Filippo). She’s
conscientiously saving as much money as they can so they can retire from the
stage and buy a roadside restaurant and convenience store (the original meaning
of the Italian word traittoria — later I would be amused when there was a fad for high-end Italian
restaurants in the U.S. calling themselves traittorias when I’d seen enough Italian movies to know that
in Italy a traittoria was
basically what we in the U.S. would call a “diner”). The film opens with
Checco’s troupe giving a successful performance — the film highlights the
contrast between the exotic high-end fantasies the act is selling and the
decidedly low-rent status of its participants and production values — only the
entire box-office receipts are attached by an old creditor who has an
outstanding two-year-old bill against them. So they have to scrounge enough
money to get on the train to the next town they’re engaged to perform in, and
it looks like they’ll have to walk all the way from the train station to the
theatre when they’re bailed out by Liliana “Lily” Antonelli (Carla Del Poggio),
an aspiring performer whom Checco had previously met on the train and tried to
seduce. Lily has rented a carriage and offers the troupe a ride in it, and she
manages to talk her way into the act even though she can’t dance and can barely
sing. (Her song, “El Muchacho,” features one of the least convincing
voice-doubling scenes ever seen in a film — and midway through the song Charles
was startled to realize she, or her double, was singing in Spanish rather than
Italian.)
Checco essentially dumps Melina for Lily, only to realize that her
ambitions are far higher than he can possibly help her with, and she’s what Nunnally
Johnson in his script for the 1954 Black Widow called a “purpose girl” — one who’s willing to
have sex with whomever she has to in order to get ahead. In one scene the owner
of a castle outside the town offers to put up and feed the entire company for
the night — only he invites Lily to his room, she accepts, a jealous Checco
bursts in and makes a scene, and the castle owner responds by throwing
everybody out in the middle of the night. Ultimately the actors arrive in Rome
— Charles was surprised by how relatively unscathed by World War II the city
was, but it’s my understanding that the two sides in the war had an unspoken
understanding to keep Rome an “open city” and not risk alienating the world’s
Roman Catholics by accidentally bombing the Vatican. Checco is determined to
mount his own touring production with Lily as the star — only his former
partners won’t work for him again because they know he has no money and they
likely won’t get paid. So he scouts new talent on the streets, including an African-American
trumpet player (John Kitzmiller) — we know he’s African-American because he’s
Black and speaks at least some of his lines in idiomatic English — and a
“cowboy” who’s a trick shot that can fire a pistol at someone and blow a
cigarette out of their outstretched hand. Checco gets far enough with this
production that he invites a potential backer to a rehearsal — only Lily
doesn’t show, and he realizes that she’s bailed and signed on for a dance role
in a major production with an established producer. In the final scene,
Lattuada and Fellini stress the irony that Lily’s company has major bookings in
Italian cities people outside Italy have actually heard of — Florence, Bologna,
Milan — while Checco’s troupe is stuck playing nowhere towns almost no one who
doesn’t live there has heard of, including one so small and out-of-the-way that one of the troupe
members says the local theatre only shows movies, not live entertainment.
Variety
Lights is a marvelous movie, and
though it’s not one of those European productions that found an audience in the
U.S. because it pushed the envelope of sexuality past what American filmmakers,
hamstrung by the Production Code, could, it’s a refreshing contrast to U.S.
films of the period in deglamorizing its principal players and making the sets,
locations and costumes as endearingly tacky as their real-life equivalents.
It’s this kind of knowing depiction of the shabbiness of human existence, and
the frailties of human beings, that led to the explosion of U.S. audience interest
in European movies and the rise of so-called “art-house cinemas” that showed
them (and that could show
them because they weren’t signatories to the Production Code) after World War
II. In fact, I first heard of Variety Lights in my childhood from the elaborate film schedules
put out by an art-house theatre in Berkeley, which not only listed the films
they were showing but contained lengthy and charmingly opinionated commentaries
on them — which, I later found out, were written by a then-unknown film critic
named Pauline Kael. For the most part, Variety Lights fits neatly into Fellini’s 1950’s oeuvre: it’s about entertainers, its characters are
living a marginal existence (not until La Dolce Vita in 1960 would Fellini start skewering the upper
classes), and he uses his wife as a sort of voice-of-reason character: alone
among the dramatis personae Melina is looking towards the future and saving her money to establish
a steady existence outside the theatre. One of the surprises of Variety
Lights is how attractive
Giulietta Masina is. Fellini is about the only filmmaker I can think of who
purposely deglamorized an actor with
whom he was personally involved; though Masina in Variety Lights isn’t exactly drop-dead gorgeous she’s quite easy
on the eyes, and there are only a couple of close-ups in which she’s
recognizable as the same actress from Fellini’s next big film with her, La
Strada (“The Road”), in which she
played a homely gamine almost
literally purchased from her family by the traveling srongman Zampanó (Anthony Quinn — Fellini’s use of American stars
Quinn and Richard Basehart in this movie was what first turned on American
filmgoers outside the art-houses to him).
The other surprise about Variety
Lights is that one could easily
imagine an American studio making it: though there are intimations of sex in
the film there’s nothing so out-front about it that it would have run up
against the Production Code, and indeed there are a number of 1930’s U.S.
movies that almost eerily anticipate it, including one we’d seen recently — George
White’s Scandals of 1935, in
which Alice Faye is a small-town performer plucked from obscurity and put on
Broadway; and The Old-Fashioned Way (1934), in which W. C. Fields is the head of a traveling acting company
always struggling financially as it moves from one town to the next (though in
that one Fields wasn’t playing a letch like Peppino de Filippo is here; his
main emotional interest is his daughter, and his ambition is to see her well
married, settled down and happy away from the marginal existence of provincial
theatre people). Certainly one could well imagine Fields or Groucho Marx
playing some of de Filippo’s scenes here — notably the one in which, in order
to introduce Lily to the big producer he hopes will bankroll his show (and who
instead takes her away from him, contractually, financially and sexually), he
takes her to an expensive nightclub and runs up a bill he has no money for and
no idea how to pay. All in all, Variety Lights is a marvelous movie, maybe not as spectacular a
debut for a major director as Citizen Kane but still a solid first effort and one that, despite the unknowable
question of which director contributed what, a film that fits neatly into
Fellini’s canon.
