The Day of the Beast

La Dolce Vita (Fellini; Astor) is ambitious, sensational and controversial. Acclaimed in Europe as "the greatest Italian film ever made," it has also cooked up Italy's sizzlingest scandal since the lurid Wilma Montesi case. L'Osservatore Romano has damned it as "indecent" and "sacrilegious"; Communists have hailed it as an "unmasking of corrupt bourgeois society."

What is the fuss all about? Something--and nothing. In fundamental intention, La Dolce Vita is an attempted apocalypse, a vast (3 hrs.) evocation of the Second Coming of Christ. But for those who do not care to be edified by spiritual symbolism, Director Federico (La Strada) Fellini has supplied plenty of earthy realism by clothing his allegory in the robes of a modern Roman saturnalia, stained by spiritual depravity and sexual excess.

Like Dante's Inferno, Fellini's apocalypse is infested with contemporary incidents and actual people. Every episode in the film was suggested by a Roman scandal of the last ten years, and Fellini has somehow persuaded hundreds of Roman whores, faggots, screen queens, pressagents, newsmen, artists, lawyers, and even some asthenic aristocrats, to play themselves--or revolting caricatures of themselves. These sensations have made La Dolce Vita, in one season, one of the most profitable pictures ever produced (world gross to date: $20 million). Released now in the U.S. for ten-a-week, reserved-seat showings at special prices ($1.50-$3.50), the film will undoubtedly raise another ruckus and bank another fortune. Advance sales are crowding $300,000.

"Nobody Is Leaving!" Out of a clear sky, as the film begins, a helicopter appears over Rome. Beneath it, on a cable, dangles a heroic gilded Christ, his arms outstretched. Just another adman's bright idea? Or is it "The Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven . . . the sign . . . of the end of the world"?* With that striking scene begin the days of wrath, the seven nights of destruction prefigured in the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

In those seven nights, Fellini guides the hero, a reporter (Marcello Mastroianni) who stands for Everyman, through successive stages of degradation. First the reporter casually leaves the girl (Yvonne Furneau) who really loves him and goes off with a rich bitch who seems to symbolize ancient Rome itself, the Great Whore of Revelation. Then he tries a popular sex substitute, a pumpkin-breasted, pea-brained Hollywood star (played by Anita Ekberg). On the third night, he covers a fake miracle involving a tree in which the Madonna has supposedly been manifested. When the miracle fails to transpire, the crowd attacks the tree--by obvious inference, the apocalyptic Tree of Life, whose "leaves were for the healing of the nations"--and tears it to pieces.

On go the reporter's nights, through a painful meeting with his own father (Annibale Ninchi), an amiable nonentity whose life has no more meaning than his own; through an orgy of degenerate aristocrats; through the inexplicable suicide of his idol, a sort of humanist saint who brutally kills his two small children with himself.

Then comes the seventh and last night of destruction, when the hero abandons himself to an orgy of despair at an "annulment party" attended by lesbians, homosexuals, actors, chorus girls, beach bums, barflies and assorted denizens of Rome's

Via Veneto. "Nobody is leaving! We are all here to stay!" he screams at the climax of these proceedings, which, while handsomely degenerate, also manage to be disappointingly dull. Dawn brings the epilogue, the endless end of Fellini's wretched world. In frozen horror, the revelers watch the apocalyptic "beast rise up out of the sea" in a fishing net--a sinister, obscene, colossal devilfish.

"What a Mess!" The merits of this depressing allegory are many. In conception it is noble and profound, and its visualization of the principal symbols--particularly the apparitions of Christ and antichrist --is stunning. Fellini may be pardoned for believing that "La Dolce Vita is my greatest work." Nonetheless, he is wrong. For all its vitality, the film is decadent, an artistic failure. The creator thinks the film "puts a thermometer to a sick world," but it may be that he has simply taken his own temperature.

A good deal of the picture is out-and-out sensationalism, smeared on with a heavy hand to attract the insects; and Fellini's selection of cafe society as a central symbol of evil is vulgar and naive.

Worst of all, La Dolce Vita fails to attract the moviegoer as much as it repulses him, fails to inspire his sympathies as well as his disgust. Everyman is passive throughout the picture, largely unconscious of the awful fate that is overtaking him. He therefore puts up no moral struggle against his fate, and without struggle there is no drama. Many spectators will be inclined to agree with the character who remarks in the concluding scene: "Mamma mia, what a disgusting mess!"

* Matthew 24: 3-30.

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