Everymantis

To become international film stars, Europeans once had to learn English, and all the Marlene Dietrichs, Paul Munis, Charles Boyers, Ingrid Bergmans, Peter Lorres and Maurice Chevaliers did so. But now it is different. As ruins go, Hollywood is smoking more and enjoying it less, while the most renowned motion pictures of the present are being made by Europeans and Asians. Hence there is a new phenomenon--the movie idol who is adored throughout the U.S. in much the same way that Clark Gable was once admired from Saipan to Tangier. The greatest of these is Italy's Marcello Mastroianni.

He was the newsman-hero of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the writer-hero of Luchino Visconti's La Notte. He has proved himself a masterful comedian with his current performance in Pietro Germi's Divorce--Italian Style. With credits like that, he understandably has no interest whatever in learning English. Hollywood has tried repeatedly to lure him, but young men seldom go for old tarts. "What is being done here in Italy," he says, "is far better and much more mature and advanced than anything cinematic being done elsewhere."

Further Decay. It was Dolce Vita's Fellini who exploited most fully the characteristics that had long since made Mastroianni (Mass-tro-yahn-ee) one of the most popular actors in Italy. His handsome face, young in its outlines but creased with premature wrinkles, has a frightened, characteristically 20th century look--as of a mantis who has lost faith in the efficacy of prayer. He suggests the all-round fellow of the 1960s who is the antithesis of Renaissance man--painfully aware of nearly everything, truly able at nothing. His spine seems to be a stack of plastic napkin rings. But he has no false bravado, and he is relentlessly attractive. In nearly every woman there stirs the same silent response: "Marcello obviously needs professional help, but first he needs me."

That is how he looks on the surface, at any rate, and he has so often been cast as "himself"--he was even called Marcello in Dolce Vita--that he went eagerly for his role as a Sicilian nobleman in Divorce--Italian Style, which gave him a chance to grease down his hair, grow a mustache, and decay even more. But the man himself is nothing like the prototype his appearance symbolizes. Whereas he zealously chased a great-bosomed movie star (Anita Ekberg) in Dolce Vita, he fled when a great-bosomed movie star (Brigitte Bardot) recently chased him in real life. They were making a film together called A Very Private Affair (released in the U.S. last week), and Bardot wanted to use the Method.

Marcello stayed clear of her, according to friends, because he did not want to yawn in her face, and he cannot help yawning when he is bored. He is, in fact, a thoroughgoing family man. He has been married for twelve years to his first and only wife, has a ten-year-old daughter, and when he is not working, he potters around the old villa he recently bought on the outskirts of Rome. It contains part of the ruins of the old Appian Way, and Marcello has discovered a new interest in archaeology as he sets about restoring the crumbling house. He scorns the cafes of the Via Veneto. He has kept his family completely out of his working life, allows no publicity shots, no interviews. He is known as a fine father, husband and son.

The moral tone of his personality is so positive, in fact, that clever men like Federico Fellini can turn it around on film and find the negative outline of a total and final corruption.

Sleeping on Cue. He was born in 1924 in a village called Fontana Liri, 50 miles southeast of Rome. He apprenticed in his father's carpentry shop and later took a degree in surveying at the University of Rome, graduating just in time for the Germans to put him to work making military maps. "It was all so stupid." he says. "We were still doing maps of Sicily when the Americans were in Florence."

Shortly after war's end, he met Visconti and Fellini at Rome's University Theater Center, learned his craft on its stage in everything from Attic tragedy to Arsenic and Old Lace. His deaf mother and blind father would come to the theater, the one to see, the other to hear him. He made 50 films before La Dolce Vita, co-starring in several early ones with another beginner--Sophia Loren. He has high regard for her and she for him. She gets about $1,000,000 for a picture, and he gets around $160,000. "It's only fair," he shrugs. "After all, bosoms are bosoms."

At the moment, Mastroianni is making a new movie for Fellini, which is temporarily titled Fellini 8- 1/2. Presumably, it is Fellini's autobiography. Mastroianni, at least, is playing the part of a motion picture director. Shooting last week at night on the shiny black sands of the beach at Ostia, the shivering cast was collected around a mysterious tower; rockets and satellites were scattered about, and workmen carried sheets of glass painted with unrelated scenes, such as the Pope being carried in a procession, for the cameras to shoot through.

On cue, Marcello Mastroianni strode through the bustle splendidly faking directorial omniscience. And when Fellini wasn't looking, he sneaked off--perhaps as once happened on another film--to a nearby phone booth to go to sleep in it standing up.

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