Giulietta Masina dancing in Fellini's Nights of Cabiria
Posted on 11/06/2018 7:59:31 AM PST by Rummyfan
A quarter-century ago - October 31st 1993 - Federico Fellini died from complications of a heart attack he suffered a day after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary. His memorial service at Cinecittà in Rome a few weeks later was attended by 70,000 people. Twenty-five years on, for our Saturday movie date I thought I'd pick something from that heyday of "Hollywood on the Tiber". I came to Fellini's 1957 smash Nights of Cabiria the wrong way round - because I was writing something about Sweet Charity, the musical Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon drew from it a decade later. In both versions, the central character is a girl fall-guy who, in a handful of episodes, gets variously humiliated, cheated and assaulted by men. The two works have other similarities, not least in the relationship between director and actress: Miss Verdon was Fosse's wife, star and muse, as Giulietta Masina in Cabiria was to Fellini. She was the woman he spent those fifty years with, and died five months after him from lung cancer.
But the characters these two fine actresses are playing have crucial differences: Verdon's Charity is not, like Masina's Cabiria, a prostitute, only a "taxi dancer" — that's to say you rent them per number. It was a coy evasion at the time (1966), and it seems even more so now. Yet Masina's tart, a shopworn waif with a big heart in search of someone to give it to, is an even bigger cliché, a conclusion underlined by the old-fashioned indicating of her performance: Look, I'm cute! Look, I'm vulnerable! Look, I'm angry! The only thing to be said for this approach is that hookers and lap-dancers and so forth often wind up getting through their daily routines like bad actresses...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Giulietta Masina dancing in Fellini's Nights of Cabiria
Awesome dance number from “Sweet Charity” (Rich Man’s Frug):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcrZIK3gqbU
Without fail I sob every time I watch the ending of the movie.
http://charnysculptures.com/SC_Sculptures_Site/About_the_Artist.html
ping
A very talented lady.
La Strada is definitely Fellini's best movie that I have ever seen. La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 are a road to nowhere. They just seem to be navel gazing by the director.
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