Remembering the Lost Steps Ginger & Fred

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A transvestite famous for offering sexual services to prison inmates. A woman who has risked madness, and at least temporarily succumbed to it, by volunteering to abstain from TV for a month. A clairvoyant, a mafioso, a crusader on a hunger strike until people stop hunting birds, a troupe of midgets who make up the world's smallest Spanish-dance ensemble.

In short, it is business as usual around the television show We Are Proud to Present, which provides a few minutes of celebrity to the unusual or notorious. On the face of it, Pippo (Marcello Mastroianni) and Amelia (Giulietta Masina), would seem to fit right in. Back in the '40s they were a minor but prosperous dance team, imitating the high romantic style of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in provincial Italian nightclubs and variety houses. Pippo and Amelia are long retired, but their one-shot TV comeback will be a treat for old fans and an astonishment to the younger set, especially if they can get through their act without suffering heart attacks or some lesser public humiliation.

Actually, they are misfits in modern show biz, maybe in the modern world. Their routine may not have been much, just a modest impression of a unique and immortal creation. But in Pippo and Amelia's day, performers prospered because they were willing to do the hard work of polishing an artful act, not because they had the momentary nerve to commit an outrageous one. Besides, after they have endured the indifference of the youthful production staff and the chaos of rehearsal and performance (there is a power failure just as they begin their act, and a leg cramp causes Pippo to fall in the middle of it), we see that, modest though their talents are, Pippo and Amelia had, and still have, a gift. It is the capacity to provide something universal and necessary, the romantic gesture. That grace may or may not be a vanishing one, but at least "Ginger & Fred" are called to their work by something higher than the need to make a sensation.

Perhaps Fellini, who like his stars is in his 60s, is copping a generational plea: "Our kitsch is better than your kitsch." Maybe he means for us to see the faltering but brave Amelia and Pippo as surrogates for himself, still worthy of sober interest, maybe even moral admiration, although the headlines now go to younger directorial stars. Certainly he insists on pumping out more of the "Felliniesque," his trademark blend of the grotesque and the surreal, than we need to get his point that TV is vulgar and coarsening. More moving is his presentation of two carefully imagined archetypes of aging. Masina's Amelia is a woman grown more emotionally compact with the years, defending herself against their onslaught with a sort of neat, perky reserve. Mastroianni's Pippo represents the opposite extreme, vulnerable dishevelment. She wins sympathy by asking no favors; he gains it by begging for it. These are lovely performances, observant, original and infinitely appealing. When we, and Fellini, are lucky, his taste for flash and trash does not overwhelm what he really has to say; instead, it makes a useful contrast to simpler truths, and makes us grateful for them, as we are in Ginger & Fred.