The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (136 page)

Well, Charlie and Jean are married (from 1934 to 1948) and they become leading social figures in Hollywood, a position that Feldman uses to promote himself as an agent—in particular, he represents some of the most interesting people in town, like David Selznick, Otto Preminger, Darryl Zanuck, and Howard Hawks.

In manner and style, therefore, Feldman was a model for a later generation—it is said that Warren Beatty based a good deal of his persona on that of Feldman. But no one ever underestimated Feldman’s ability. He was a very shrewd producer and a gallant friend—and somehow or other women adored him.

Along the way (usually without screen credit) he had a guiding hand on a lot of projects:
Pittsburgh
(42, Lewis Seiler);
The Spoilers
(42, Ray Enright)—he went from being Marlene Dietrich’s agent to her producer
—The Lady Is Willing
(42, Mitchell Leisen). Not her best work, maybe, but one of the happiest times in her career. He helped Sam Spiegel put together
Tales of Manhattan
(42, Julien Duvivier). He was roommates with Orson Welles, and that led to
Follow the Boys
(44, Edward Sutherland) and even
Macbeth
(48) which Feldman personally sold to Herbert Yates.

But the best of it all was the period from
To Have and Have Not
to
Red River
with Howard Hawks. (It was Feldman who hunted down Betty Perske from that famous photograph in
Harper’s Bazaar
and accompanied her on the way to becoming Lauren Bacall.) He produced
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry
(45, Robert Siodmak) and simultaneously seduced Ella Raines. Indeed, Feldman is as good an example of the available overlap of creative and romantic activity as you will find.

Attaching himself to Tennessee Williams, he got in on
The Glass Menagerie
(50, Irving Rapper) and
A Streetcar Named Desire
(51, Elia Kazan). He also was involved on the film of
The Seven Year Itch
(54, Billy Wilder). It was Feldman who packaged the George Axelrod play with Marilyn (a Feldman client) and Billy Wilder—but it was Axelrod who slipped himself into bed as screenwriter.

Later on in life, he fell deeply in love with the lady known as Capucine (a French model, a.k.a. Germaine Lefebvre). He was resolved to make her a star (that old version of cuckoldry) and so he did most of her films:
Walk on the Wild Side
(62, Edward Dmytryk);
What’s New, Pussycat?
(66, Clive Donner)—allegedly Feldman’s opening line on the telephone;
The Honey Pot
(67, Joseph L. Mankiewicz); and
Casino Royale
(67).

María Félix
(María de los Angeles Félix Guereña) (1914–2002), b. Alamos, Sonora, Mexico
You can call her a terrible actress, you can call her a diva of divas, but you can’t deny that she was Mexico’s greatest woman film star, and probably the biggest of all Spanish-language stars. Beginning in the early 1940s and on through three decades, she not only dominated the Mexican film industry but became a national idol—or at least a gigantic celebrity. Every artist from Orozco to Diego Rivera (who adored her: “He threw himself on me, like misery throws itself on the poor,” she said) drew or painted her, and when she went to Europe in the fifties, Cocteau, Carrington, Leonor Fini, et al did the same. She knew the Peróns, King Farouk—you get the picture: the drive and ambition of a Callas but without the talent.

There are dozens of her Mexican films, and the few I’ve seen all give us the same Maria—the vamp, the resolute woman, and (later) the revolutionary. What made Mexicans mad about her was her male pride, and her refusal to be submissive. Her acting involves flashing eyes and tossed hair, and an absolute conviction that she is the most seductive woman alive. Five husbands agreed, including the songwriter Agustín Lara and one of Mexico’s greatest male stars, Jorge Negrete, who died young, but not until the happy couple had appeared on the screen together. The Félix movies often echo Hollywood dramas of the period, except that in plot, acting, and production values it’s strictly B features they resemble. In fact, Félix is something of a B-level Joan Crawford, combining Joan’s torrid early style with her late steely one. She’s at her best for director Emilio Fernández in
Río Escondido
(46) and
Enamorada
(47).

Félix made a number of films in Europe: in Spain,
Mare Nostrum
(48), costarring Fernando Rey and directed by Rafael Gil; it’s a remake of the Blasco Ibáñez novel memorably filmed by Rex Ingram in 1926. There’s a second-rate Buñuel film,
La Fièvre Monte à El Pao
(59). She went to Italy to be
Messalina
(51, Carmine Gallone). And then there’s her real claim to fame, her role as La Belle Abbesse in Jean Renoir’s beautiful
French Can Can
(1954). Here her Crawford look shades into an Ava Gardner look—she’s really striking. She holds her own opposite Jean Gabin, she performs her belly dances like a real trouper, and she dominates the screen with that Matisse look Renoir deliberately developed for her. Renoir believed that she had Indian blood and ate raw meat. She also nearly killed Françoise Arnoul in a screen fight.

Her memoirs, by the way, are called
Todos Mis Guerras—All My Wars
. That reflects her prolonged feud with Carlos Fuentes, who had depicted her in a novel and a play as a national myth. In addition, Octavio Paz said she was “free like the wind, she disperses the clouds, or illuminates them with the lightning flash of her gaze.”

Federico Fellini
(1920–93), b. Rimini, Italy
1950:
Luci del Varieta/Lights of Variety
(codirected with Alberto Lattuada). 1952:
Lo Sciecco Bianco/The White Sheik
. 1953:
I Vitelloni;
“Una Agenzia Matrimoniale,” episode from
Amore in Citta
. 1954:
La Strada
. 1955:
Il Bidone
. 1956:
Le Notti di Cabiria/Nights of Cabiria
. 1959:
La Dolce Vita
. 1962: “Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio,” episode from
Boccaccio ’70
. 1963: 8½. 1965:
Giulietta degli Spiriti/Juliet of the Spirits
. 1967: “Toby Dammit,” episode from
Histoires Extraordinaires
. 1969:
Fellini: A Director’s Notebook; Fellini’s Satyricon
. 1970:
I Clowns
. 1972:
Fellini’s Roma
. 1973:
Amarcord
. 1976:
Fellini’s Casanova
. 1978:
Prova d’Orchestra/Orchestra Rehearsal
. 1980:
La Citta delle Donne/City of Women
. 1983:
E la Nave Va/And the Ship Sails On
. 1985:
Ginger e Fred/Ginger and Fred
. 1987:
Intervista/The Interview
. 1990:
La Voce della Luna/The Voice of the Moon
.

Although the confessional element in Fellini’s work was only unmistakable from
8½
onward, we can now see that no other Italian so absorbed himself in the act of being an international film director. No other director—apart from Orson Welles—so insisted on the personal derivation of all his work, nor managed to make even fragments of film or biographical incidents seem like parts of a total oeuvre. Fellini often takes the pose of the innocent fascinated but bewildered by the picaresque variety of life. Yet the question must be asked whether his films have made a sham of vitality in the process of smothering life with affectionate but self-indulgent egotism? There is a special aptness in that Welles—a provincial who persistently gathered accomplishment and urbanity to himself—should be the source of this comment on Fellini: “His films are a smalltown boy’s dream of the big city. His sophistication works because it’s the creation of someone who doesn’t have it. But he shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say.”

From the Adriatic coast—packed in summer, desolate in winter, and the source of so many crucial beach scenes—Fellini developed several talents: as a cartoonist, a gagman for comedians, and a radio writer. There is a famous photograph of him newly arrived in Rome in 1940, a
vitellone
already, sharp-faced but soft-skinned, in a pose of indolent self-preoccupation, yet slyly alert to the camera. It is a very intelligent, responsive face that waits for some attitude to inhabit. Sitting at a café, he looks on the point of devouring a big opportunity; it is the face of one of Stendhal’s young men ready to take Holy Orders, a military commission, or a friend’s wife if it will allow him a pretext for escaping inertia.

He took up writing for the movies, as well as radio. In 1943, he married the actress Giulietta Masina, and with the liberation he began to gain credits:
Avanti c’e Posto
(42, Mario Bonnard);
Apparizione
(43, Jean de Limur); and
Tutta la Citta Canta
(45, Riccardo Freda). His real sponsor was Roberto Rossellini: Fellini worked on the scripts of
Open City
(45),
Paisan
(46), and the “Il Miracolo” episode of
L’Amore
(48), in which he also played the part of the vagrant who seduces Anna Magnani. He also worked on the scripts of
Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo
(47, Alberto Lattuada);
Senza Pieta
(48, Lattuada);
In Nome della Legge
(49, Pietro Germi);
Il Mulino del Po
(49, Lattuada); and
Francesco, Giullare di Dio
(50, Rossellini).

Fellini’s first independent direction,
The White Sheik
, was a comic but baleful work, scourging the world of hack writing that had bred Fellini himself. Pierre Leprohon has compared its saving revelation of Masina (as a prostitute) at the end of the film with the way the prostitute character changes Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. In retrospect, therefore,
The White Sheik
seems a clear promise of autobiography. But Fellini moved on to the most conventional and least interesting phase of his life.
I Vitelloni
is good social observation, a rather old-fashioned story about the layabout character close to Fellini’s heart.
La Strada
is a desperately portentous film, laboriously drawing a trite humanist message out of a picture of a circus brute that encouraged Anthony Quinn to think there was splendor in overacting.
Il Bidone
was another Maupassant-like
conte
in which Broderick Crawford and Richard Basehart masqueraded as priests to enhance their career as confidence tricksters.
Cabiria
is a woefully sincere story about a tart with a heart that seems oblivious of its own coarseness or the risibility of the pluck with which Masina bites back her tears. This quartet needs to be put firmly in its place. They are slick, mechanical stories, feeding on superficial feelings and uncritical of sentimentality or grand effects. As to style or creative intelligence, they do not begin to intrude upon the achievement of
La Signora Senza Camelie, Le Amiche
, much less the films Rossellini was making at the same time.

In its day,
La Dolce Vita
was hailed as a brilliant satire on the new self-conscious permissiveness of European high society. Only a facile spectator could be more anguished by its sluggish dismay at corruption than by the metaphysical alienation of
L’Avventura
. And it is a glib intelligence that can find any gravity in the soulful beach ending with the central observer—Marcello Mastroianni—solacing his lazy spirit with the enigmatic tolerance of a smiling child. But the film was a scandalous success and made Fellini into the self-sufficient star name that he playfully grappled with ever after.

Besieged by interviewers and critical attention, the provincial boy grew worldly wise. His actual intellectual shallowness was passed off as the dilemma of a warmhearted man in a disintegrating world. With great skill, Fellini persuaded many viewers that his dwelling on freaks, underworld degenerates, and the chattering infantile crowd was both satirical and charitable. In
8½
he invented a director who was the representation of himself and called the man’s empty talent the mark of philosophy. It is at about this time that he introduced the metaphor of the circus as a way of papering over the artistic cracks:

The cinema is very much like the circus; and in fact, if it didn’t exist, I might well have become a circus director. The circus, too, is an exact mixture of technique, precision and improvisation. While the rehearsed spectacle is on, you are still taking risks: that is, simultaneously, you live. I love this way of creating and living at the same time, without the limits set to a writer or a painter, through being plunged into action.

That is an intriguing definition or apologia, but Godard or Warhol are more searching demonstrations of it than Fellini. The deliberate confusion of documentary and fantasy is wearisome in Fellini, largely because he has never proved himself in the way all directors must—through style and the use of film as a language. In fact, Fellini’s style is very sparse and undeveloped. He has seldom done more than arrange elaborate grotesque tableaux for the camera or listen to idle chatter from his characters. The precise point of view that is essential to the movies is too demanding for his theatre-in-the-round generalizations. Fascinated by ugliness and grotesques, he expresses himself on film without grace.

I mistrust the rather smarmy wrapping up of
Fellini: A Director’s Notebook
when the director says, “Yes, I know it must seem sinful, cruel, but no, I am very fond of all those characters who are always chasing after me, following me from one film to another. They are all a little mad, I know that. They say they need me, but the truth is that I need them more. Their human qualities are rich, comic, and sometimes very moving.” The defense is disarming; but there are no characters in Fellini’s work, only caricatures. And for all the autobiography we know nothing more about Fellini than that he was an obsessional, vacuous poseur. It is not an artistic response to breakdown to be charmed by the parades of unhappiness and to call it “rich, comic, and sometimes very moving.” Fellini appears to me a half-baked, playacting pessimist, with no capacity for tragedy. He makes Welles seem a giant and a romantic marvelously able to create tragedy without being depressing. Welles holds to order while Fellini is doodling in chaos.