On Screen

...Cabiria, his latest effort, is no major work of art and is, in fact, somewhat inferior to both La Strada and I Vitelloni (which I consider his best film...

...Technically, the film is also far above the average European product and some of the pictorial effects are outstanding, notably a scene toward the end in which the girl confronts her last betrayer above the deep, sun-struck basin of a volcanic lake...

...Anyway, what with one thing and another, we now have Rossellini in India, De Sica reduced to playing comedy roles in mildly amusing potboilers, and Zampa, Castellani and Visconti confined to cinematic oblivion...

...With this film, Miss Masina establishes herself as an actress of great range and depth, not just a sensitive clown with mobile features and the gift of pathos...

...but it is nevertheless so far above the frivolous comedies, lugubrious spectacles and sentimental pieces of claptrap now being foisted on us from the Mediterranean area that one must be grateful, if only for the fact that it is apparently still possible, though difficult, to produce a serious movie in Italy...

...On SCREEN By William Murray The Decline of Italian Realism To judge mainly by what I've seen on local screens the past few years, I'd have to say that Federico Fellini is the last Italian director of any considerable talent still striving to make truthful and important movies in the spirit of postwar realism (or, if you prefer, neo-realism) that distinguished such now famous films as Open City, Paisan, Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief...

...Her characterization is particularly poignant during a scene in which, under hypnosis and before a brutal variety-hall audience, she acts out an imaginary encounter with the young Loch-invar of her dreams...

...This pressure, both economic and political, was actively supported by the American Catholic Church, which was distressed at the possible widespread dissemination of uncensored foreign films in the U.S...

...I was present at a meeting in the spring of 1952 when an American monsignor, ex-head of the Legion of Decency, made the initial attempt to persuade Italian producers to adopt the Production Code...

...It was an awfully short renaissance, but at least we can be thankful for Fellini...

...And there is always that scrupulous attention to detail that has become identified with his work...

...after the Supreme Court decision in The Miracle case...

...Since 1952, the Italian movie industry has turned its back on realism and has been trying, with very indifferent success, to emulate Hollywood...

...In any case, Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, more than makes up for any deficiencies in the script with a brilliant performance in the title role of a cheap little Roman streetwalker who somehow never loses her basic and touching innocence, her childhood dreams of romance and respectability, her seemingly limitless capacity to trust and believe in other people despite a harrowing series of shattering disillusionments...

...The pleasure I derived from Cabiria, as contrasted to my irritation with such other recent Italian films as Frisky and Gold of Naples, makes me all the more aware of the astounding, almost total decay of the virile young industry that flowered in Italy during the late Forties...

...Miss Ma-sina's portrayal of this character is subtle, beautifully worked out in even the most minor details (the way she dresses herself, listens to the radio, the small, precise facial expressions that delineate every fleeting emotion) and imparts to the entire film an aura of truth that serves effectively to link the various episodes together...

...Italians were not only apathetic to neo-realism, but often openly hostile, and considerable official pressure was eventually brought to bear upon producers who insisted on portraying life as it was...

...The reasons for this are far too complex to go into here in any detail, but some of the blame at least can be laid on an Italian moviegoing public that never supported its own product...

...In Cabiria, Fellini has attempted an admittedly cosmic theme—the preservation of innocence in a world of corruption—and if the movie does not quite succeed, I think it must be because the very grandeur of the idea requires an artistic conception not quite so banal as the one about the prostitute with the heart of gold...

...Several scenes, especially those in which Fellini strives to capture the exact, complicated nuances of life on the fringes of the twilight world of petty crime, are as sharp and vivid as anything he has done...

...Her performance in La Strada, for instance, was so Chap-linesque that, though a beautiful thing in its own way, it jarred badly against the realistic structure of the rest of the movie, most especially in contrast to an equally powerful but differently keyed performance from Anthony Quinn...

...Vittorio De Sica once admitted in an interview that without American distribution he could never have afforded to continue making his kind of film...

...Despite all this praise for Miss Masina, I don't want to give the impression that Cabiria is an otherwise listless movie...