The title of this new book by Shawn Levy continues “Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome”. La Dolce Vita, as you will not need reminding, is Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece.
Its opening sequence is memorable. Actually so is the opening for another Fellini movie, Roma, released in 1972, but don’t bother with Roma – unless you want to be baffled and bored for two hours. Concentrate on La Dolce Vita; a helicopter flies across Rome dangling a statue of Christ, pursued by a second helicopter filled with paparazzi. They are distracted by some attractive young women sunbathing on the roof of an apartment block … the film is an allegory, or should that be a metaphor, about Rome after WW II.
Perhaps the most famous scene is at dawn in the Trevi fountain. Marcello, a photographer played by Marcello Mastroianni, splashes around with film star Sylvia, played by real-life film star Anita Ekberg. It was shot in the early hours of winter mornings in the real Trevi fountain. Anita Ekberg took it in her Scandinavian stride. Marcello Mastroianni had to be dosed with vodka and wear a wet suit under his costume.
The critics liked it from the Off – Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1960 – but how about the public? Rupert Hart Davis saw it in April 1961 and writes to George Lyttelton:
On Wednesday Marjorie Linklater (Eric’s wife and a friend of more than thirty years) paid one of her rare visits to London, and I (in all good faith) took her to the longest and dullest film either of us had ever seen – the Italian La Dolce Vita. It lasts for three hours, and there is no plot, only a sequence of incidents. The famous “orgy scene” is pretty tame, and the whole thing seemed to me pretentious and wearisome.
Crucial vocational detail…Marcello plays a journalist not a photog…in fact we are to believe he is another Moravia or Calvino in gremio Romae but for his lack dedication to the austere muse rather than to the bimbos is of via Veneto and the news drivel cycle.
Thank you for that correction.
“In gremio Romae…”. Am I right that this is, “In the lap of Rome”? As in nurtured by, in the heart of, sort of succoured and supported by, a scion of…? Has yr commenter cobbled it together, or shd I know it as a tag?
I am unsure but I think he has aptly appended Romae to the tag “in gremio”. One for Robert Redfern-West himself to answer more authoritatively.