On Screen

...Aschenbach, as will be recalled, goes to Venice on a whim, feels himself dissolve under the oppressive sun lurking behind cloudy skies and the incessant blowing of the enervating sirocco...

...Mann's Tadzio once stands with one hand on his hip...

...part history of the clown's provenience, evolution into types, and present decline...

...No clear history of the clown emerges, no panorama, no perspective...

...Instead of a 14-year-old ephebe, Bjorn Andresen is a 16ish androgyne, looking like a semidepraved version of a figure from Botticelli's Primavera...

...But when you have likened two supposedly typical figures from life to a pair of allegedly major types of clowns, what have you really said...

...Tadzio's playmate, rather than being in every way like him only less attractive, is here about 20, and as darkly loutish as any male whore you can find on the Via Veneto...

...As a documentary, it is defiantly antitruth...

...He silently follows the child around and slowly lets himself go in every way—even to the point of allowing the hotel barber to rejuvenate him vulgarly with cosmetics—and eventually dies in his beach chair while watching Tadzio walking on a sandbank in the water...

...Art, in its very purity and demandingness, becomes a kind of decadence (or so, at least, the somewhat strait-laced Mann saw it), and Death in Venice, with subtle ironies within ironies, probes the doubleness of Aschenbach: strict classicist in his writing, repressed sensualist in his innermost being...

...The film's pseudo-Schonberg drivels on about "Evil is a necessity, it is the food of genius," and "Do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream...

...the novella is really, as we are told in it, about "the questionable nature of art, of artisthood itself...

...the end of The Clowns with its grandiose mock funeral of an imaginary super-clown, a funeral that turns into a fiesta, symbolizes the immortality of clowning—including, of course, Fellini's...

...Next year, Mahler died prematurely, not yet 51...

...Cute incidents keep unspon-taneously cropping up...

...Meant to look cold and intellectual, Bogarde's face is pouty, pettish, and rather vapid...

...Worse, Aschenbach-Mahler is made into a now simpering, now petulant, now blustering fool, who listens to Tadzio badly playing Fur Elise only to be reminded (flashback) of a favorite whore in a most improbable bordello playing Fur Elise almost equally badly...

...The camera zooms in on her again and again as she laughs maniacally in front of the leopards' cage...

...But there is the implicit philosophizing or allegorizing...

...We are allowed to guess right away that Fellini's "crew" are in fact clowns, something that is later openly, and rather unfunnily, revealed...

...vitelloni, whole episodes of which are here grotesquely reenacted...

...Erich Heller aptly refers us, in connection with the novella, to the finest verse of August von Platen, a poet Mann admired: "Wer die Schonheit angeschaut mit Augen, ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben" —whoever has beheld beauty with his eyes is already delivered into the hands of death...

...The parallels are less between circus and life than between The Clowns and Fel-lini's filmography...

...but here, too, the lip-syncing of the Polish dialogue is the worst I have ever seen...

...Even worse are the staged set pieces...

...Typical example: two enormous women slugging it out for the presumptive title of Most Monstrous Womanoid Grotesque...

...What Mann wrote in his one letter to Mahler, about recognizing in him "the gravest and holiest artistic will of our time," applies equally to the novella's protagonist, Aschenbach...

...In any case, most of this dubious dubbing quickly yields to voice-over summaries of a particularly highfalutin and heart-tugging sort, presumably because what was actually said did not falute sufficiently high or tug heartily enough...

...On all of these counts, the film relentlessly fails...

...Mann's Aschenbach permits himself to be shamefully made up once...

...it is cinema-verite de La Police: not cinema-truth but cinema-truism...

...he does not, like Visconti's, repeatedly wear clownish-looking makeup, and die with it running, mingled with sweat, all over his face, panama hat and white summer suit...

...No more than the leopard, alas, can Fellini change his spots...

...Some of these figures they omit, others they retain: sinister, but without the family resemblance and the deathlike traits...

...Worst of all, though, is the dubbing of Visconti's flashy, blatant sensibility into Mann's thoughful, ironic novella...

...Visconti has turned the hero from a novelist into a composer-conductor modeled on Gustav Mahler...

...And Tadzio...

...at dawn, he is found there in the bleachers, dead...

...The narration spouts equivalent vulgarities about the most savage beast of all...

...LUCHINO VISCONTI is not really an Old Master, rather a master forger, but he too strikes out dismally with Death in Venice...

...The woman-mountain Ekberg shakes her platinum mane at us and bares massively sculptured rows of teeth in a carnivorous leer as the camera lands reiterated haymakers on her puss...

...Alfred is the worst of the many bad inventions of the screenplay by Visconti and Nicola Badalucco, who also collaborated on the abysmal The Damned...

...As political satire, compare this with any scene from Luciano Salce's II federate, and it is immediately shown up as impotent posturing...

...The interviews with stellar clowns are post-synced by God knows whom...

...The small, silly, irascible sta-tionmaster of a two-lire railway station (/ vitelloni) is mocked by a passing trainload of raffish schoolboys...

...The obverse of Fellini's sentimentality is his crudeness...

...But, more truly, of yielding to a beauty he has for decades pursued as well as held in check...

...The boy now subsumes Hermes and the angel of death, Eros and Thanatos...

...The Clowns is not even staged cinema-verite...

...This mixture of Lucifer and Clown...

...WHAT Visconti and Badalucco have concocted is worsened by Dirk Bogarde's performance as Aschenbach...

...Not only are these dialogues about music and art of the utmost banality and pretentiousness, they also falsify both Mahler's and Schonberg's ideas about music and belie the nature of the composers' works...

...This desperate flirtation is, finally, a romance with death, and it is giving in to dissolution and death that Mann's story is mainly about, not to dissoluteness and guilty passions...

...By such desperate stratagems Fellini tries to drag humor into this farrago...

...Yet he neither warns Tadzio's elegant mother, nor removes himself (despite one feeble attempt) from the pestilential city and the boy who fills him with love...

...That there is a parallel between the circus and life...

...Shaken by the news, Mann wrote the novella Death in Venice, about the dying of a great writer, to whom he gave Mahler's first name and age, and a few of his external features...

...He applauds them generously...

...True, the lavish costumes of Piero Tosi and opulent decor of Ferdinando Scarfiotti work handsomely...

...A renowned clown said to be Spanish in the film is listed in the credits as French, and speaks with an accent that is neither...

...Gustav von Aschenbach resembles Mann much more than Mahler, though even that is not particularly important...

...In Mann, it is art and beauty that are suspect and deadly...

...Later that year, after a meeting with Gustav Mahler, Mann said to his wife that for the first time he had the feeling of having met a truly great man...

...The harridan in charge inquires of our celebrated director whether he is Monsieur Bellini...

...and part philosophizing about parallels between clowns and humankind, and the relations of the clowns to Fellini characters...

...and also between the slovenly, furibund, often pathetic Auguste (the other principal clown type) and the station-master...

...Consider one much admired scene...

...Back and forth fly platitudes between the master and his demonic pupil, apparently "modeled" on Arnold Schonberg: Visconti must have heard that Mann wrote something called Doctor Faus-tus, whose composer protagonist, loosely based on Schonberg, sells his soul to the devil...

...The real Schonberg once wrote Mahler humbly asking him for help with his rent bill, and once more to thank him profusely for sending a larger sum than was needed...

...Visconti is a liar when he says Mann wrote the story about Mahler, and a double liar in his representation of that composer's nature...

...Fellini and crew go to the immense skyscraper of the French National Radio and tv to dig up the only existing film record of another famed clown, only to find it so short and slight as to be useless...

...one of the shell-shocked wounded fixedly gazes ahead of him into space...

...More offensive yet is a series of closeups of Anita Ekberg...

...this one nearly always with one, sometimes with both...

...The implication of this scene is that Aschenbach could not find fulfillment with his pretty wife, sought out whores, and, as the parting expressions on his and the girl's faces would indicate, failed as much with the profane love as with the sacredly conjugal...

...The immortality of the soul is presumably demonstrated by this maudlin duet...

...As if this weren't enough, there is an epilogue: A living clown and his beloved, dead colleague play a trumpet duet of "Ebb Tide" to each other across the cavernous space of an empty circus...

...The little Federico at the beginning of The Clowns who gazes rapturously at the arriving circus is, once again, the young boy from 8V2 who feasted his eyes on the seaside dance of the huge, clownish Saraghina...

...In a letter of 1910 to Samuel Lublinski, Thomas Mann wrote: "What is art...

...and "Your music is still-born...

...After pretending to be infuriated by a hotel error obliging him to stay on in Venice—which he wanted to do all along—he gives a prolonged little smile of secret self-satisfaction that must be the coyest, smuggest, most obvious bit of facial play this worthy actor has ever permitted himself...

...That was all...

...There is supposed to be a parallel between the pedantic, domineering v/h'te clown, or Pierrot, and the Fascist official...

...Mediocrity...

...The clown "crew" Fellini drags around with him symbolizes the oneness of the clown show and the cinema...

...Immortality of the clown, of the soul, of Fellini—how beautifully they blend together in this fake of a film...

...Aschenbach dies of cholera...

...part autobiography, showing Fellini's early-acquired and enduring love for the circus...

...But the film promptly catches fire in the projector, and we are left darkling...

...Indeed, Mann's writing is a continuous inquiry into the dual nature of art, its delightful playfulness ard its Luciferian disregard for ordinary proprieties...

...The Fratellinis entertain at a madhouse, with such throat-catching details as one patient staring away from the performance and grimlv into the camera...

...Pierre Etaix, the film comedian, takes Fellini and crew to his place to screen a unique film about the great Fratellinis, those legendary clowns to one of whose granddaughters he is married...

...Shambling along the hotel beach, officiously ordering about the beach attendant (one of numerous 20ish, corrupt-looking youths with whom Visconti populates his movie), eating a strawberry with exaggeratedly fussy gusto, or merely ogling Tadzio with a sheepishness that keeps spilling over into bovine-ness, Bogarde, in his white togs and funny hat, looks less like Death in Venice than like Monsieur Hulot's Holiday...

...A celebrated French clown lies dying in a hospital, but sneaks out to the circus to catch the act of the two new favorite clowns...

...Cholera breaks out in Venice, and though its raging is mercenarily hidden from the tourists, Aschenbach learns the truth...

...The novella is not homosexual, or, at least, not overtly so...

...The Fratellinis clown at a field hospital while (again...

...So we get all kinds of freaks and brutes performing garish feats gratuitously mixed in with the clowning...

...How perishable a thing is fame, we are to note with melancholy: a great clown's or great filmmaker's...

...in Visconti, it is the protagonist who is dirty...

...It is meant to be part documentary about the lives of the clowns...

...The gratuitous presence of Ekberg is only one of numerous hom-mages Fellini pays to his earlier films...

...The little Pole—of the wrong sex and age, speaking a deliquescent language Aschenbach cannot understand, and deigning to notice the aging writer only now and then with a look of curiosity and mild sympathy—represents the Ineffable, the Unattainable, the Impossible that the true artist spends his life straining after...

...part exploits of Fellini and his crew tracking down famous old clowns or the scarce records they left behind...

...At his luxury hotel on the Lido, he espies a beautiful 14-year-old Polish boy, Tadzio, whom he wordlessly adores from a distance...

...If the point is not cinema-verite but a piece of lively pseudohistory, a story film about a clown, a true fiction film, would serve artistic truth far better than this fictionalized historicism...

...What is the artist...

...He did this, presumably, because his showy, unintellectual nature—despite intellectual pretensions—is more at ease with music and the gesticulation of the conductor than with cerebration and the tiny wrist movements of the writer...

...But the novella is intimately involved with the writer's world, his mental processes and analyses—including even mock-Platonic dialogues—that have nothing to do with the musician's sphere...

...And what of the shabby way Mahler's music is used on the soundtrack...

...Instead of exchanging a few glances and a smile or two with Aschenbach, he is made to go through a variety of oeillades, mysterious little grins, near-contacts...

...Homosexuality, clearly, was the only possible answer...

...Though meant to be only 50, Bogarde tends to affect an 80ish dodder...

...and what makes these self-tributes particularly unfortunate is that the scenes worked so much better in the films where they originally appeared...

...Visconti's three swimsuits, six or seven more or less provocative street outfits, and a couple of hats to match...

...As in all Fellini films, foreign accents almost invariably come out German, either because they elicit the biggest yoks in Italy, or because of some special Fellini grudge...

...Not only was Mahler not a homosexual like this Aschenbach ("to live for you, to die for you," he wrote, among other endearments, to his beloved wife, Alma, on the manuscript of his last, unfinished symphony), he was the very opposite of the emotionally constipated formalist that a young disciple, Alfred, here accuses him of being...

...Thus, for instance, several staged sequences about odd characters Fellini compares to clowns reintroduce personages we remember from Variety Lights, The White Sheik and, especially...

...Mann's Tadzio has two suits and one swimsuit...

...That the horrors of history have their grotesque aspects...

...And of the flaccid color photography?sometimes pretty, more often undistinguished—of Pasquale de San-tis...

...Badalucco and Visconti have not even perceived the figure of Death that appears throughout the story in several strange characters, all vaguely similar...

...These vignettes are cov to the point of odiousness, but Fellini has to add insult to iniury: A dozing nun near the sickbed from which the clown steals awav is revealed as—a man in nunnish drag...

...He promptly summons a pasty-faced comic giant of a Fascist official, and the louts are forthwith deferentially offering the Fascist salute as the tiny stationmaster beams in ecstasy...

...Even while being a denial of life in its cruder, and perhaps happier, aspects, the pursuit of beauty and art dooms its adepts to spiritual and imaginative excesses far more depleting than any toll that mere living could exact...