"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."

I took these photos of the movie "A Special Day," which is playing on The Criterion Channel (in its current tribute to Marcello Mastroianni). Begin around 53:23 to view just this segment, which has Mastroianni's character poking around inside the apartment of Sophia Loren's character and finding her fascism scrapbook. (It's 1938, in Rome.)

"Over the last weekend of June she had a full on 'Mommie Dearest' meltdown and demanded that staffers at the Huntington Theater get down on their hands and knees and scrub the floor of her dressing room..."

"...sources claim. She allegedly threw mirrors, combs and boxes of hairpins at the staff of the theater. She also pulled gray hairs out of her wig because she wanted to play a younger version of [Katharine] Hepburn than the playwright had written.... This is not the first time [Faye] Dunaway has displayed erratic behavior in a show. In the early 1990s she toured the country as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s 'Master Class.' She showed up an hour late for many performances. She had bellhops rearrange her furniture in her hotel suites in the middle of night because she didn’t like the 'flow' of the room. Once, a theater in St. Louis sent her a white limousine, and she reportedly had a fit because she hates white. She demanded a rental car from the hotel to get to the theater. The limo company sent a black car instead, but it was too late — Dunaway was racing to the theater, trailed by both the white limo and the black one. I managed to track her down back then and she was charming on the phone. 'Your story sounds like a Fellini movie,' she told me."

From "Faye Dunaway fired from Broadway-bound ‘Tea at Five’ for slapping crew member" by Michael Riedel (NY Post).

The requisite video clip:



That's Faye as Joan Crawford, back in 1981, 37 years ago. A decade after that, she did the raging diva routine again as Maria Callas. And now, at the age of 78, they installed her in the grand persona of Katharine Hepburn. Do it again, Faye. Be the imperious diva.

Some day, somebody will play the role of Faye Dunaway. The fantastically beautiful actress, snagged into playing another beautiful actress, typecast as the actress who plays actresses, actresses who age and resist their predicament, and she get pissed off about it and rages in a way that is ludicrously like the way she played another actress in that movie back in 1981. Ah, she was so young then! Now, she's 78, she's ruined her legendary beauty with plastic surgery, and she's shocked to discover the Katharine Hepburn she's been hired to play is Katharine Hepburn at the very end of her life and Katharine Hepburn lived to be 96.

Oh, that scene where she tenderly lifts the wig and soliloquizes about the depredations of age, absent-mindedly rearranging the strands, plucking a hair or two, then finally ripping out handfuls, ranting loudly and breaking into sobs. She buries her ruined face in the ruins of the Katharine-Hepburn-at-90 wig. Oscar-worthy.



As Faye Dunaway says, "Your story sounds like a Fellini movie." Speaking of Fellini, there's this in the Faye Dunaway Wikipedia article:

During the filming of A Place for Lovers (1968), Dunaway fell in love with her co-star Marcello Mastroianni. The couple had a two-year-live-in relationship. Dunaway wanted to marry and have children, but Mastroianni, a married man, could not bear to hurt his wife and refused, despite protests from his teenage daughter Barbara and his close friend Federico Fellini. Dunaway decided to leave him and told a reporter at the time that she "gave too much. I gave things I have to save for my work." She later recalled in her 1995 autobiography:

There are days when I look back on those years with Marcello and have moments of real regret. There is that one piece of me that thinks that had we married, we might be married still. It was one of our fantasies, that we would grow old together. He thought we would be like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, a love kept secret for a lifetime. Private and only belonging to the two of us.

Mastroianni later told a reporter for People in 1987 that he never got over his relationship with Dunaway. "She was the woman I loved the most", he said. "I'll always be sorry to have lost her. I was whole with her for the first time in my life."

I gave too much. I gave things I have to save for my work....

"By 1965 there'll be total depravity. How squalid everything will be."

A line spoken in the 1961 movie, "La Dolce Vita," starring the woman the director, Federico Fellini called "the most wonderful woman created since the beginning of time." About herself, she said "When you’re born beautiful, it helps you start in the business. But then it becomes a handicap."

About Fellini, she said "they would like to keep up the story that Fellini made me famous, Fellini discovered me... So many have said they discovered me.'' She said she stood out in Italy, because she was blonde:

"On the Piazza di Spagna, in the 50's, I was completely mashed by paparazzi. And the public. My blond hair.... Now everybody is blond here. Have you seen a news presenter on television that is not blond? I mean, there are more blondes here, especially on Italian television, than in the whole of Scandinavia. Really. And they are all dark Mediterranean. But they all want to bleach their hair. Blond, blond, blond.''

Everyone wants to talk about her splashing in that fountain:

''Oh my God, her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated beauty,'' Tullio Kezich, a well-known Italian film critic and Fellini biographer, recalled.... "She was a horse. She plunged into that cold fountain in 'La Dolce Vita' without hesitation or a fuss. She was so Swedish and healthy; she never caught cold. Marcello was terrorized at the idea of getting wet.''

But I think of the image of her strolling aimlessly with a little white kitten carried on her head:



In real life, it was a dog — one of her Great Danes — that brought her down, breaking her hip, leaving her in a wheelchair. And now she has died, at the age of 83 — the most wonderful woman, born beautiful, Anita Ekberg.

And 1965 — the year when, in the reasoning of "La Dolce Vita," we would descend into total depravity — is half a century ago.

ADDED: 4 more things about Anita Ekberg.

1. She's important to me as the first of the icons of feminine beauty in my father's record collection, deeply embedded in my psyche:



2. "A really cool thing about the movie ['Divorce Italian Style'] is that at one point everyone in town — a small, claustrophobic place in Sicily — goes to see the movie 'La Dolce Vita.' 'La Dolce Vita' came out in 1961, one year before 'Divorce Italian Style.' We see the whole population of the small town watching Anita Ekberg on the big screen, and we never see Marcello Mastroianni as he appears in Roman form in 'La Dolce Vita.' We just see the Sicilian Marcello Mastroianni, in the audience, trying to work out his miserable little murder scheme." That's from a 2005 post of mine called "The attorney ... was brilliant, impassioned and sarcastic...."

3."The telephone rang, it would not stop, it was President Kennedy calling me up. He said, 'My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?' I said, 'My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren.'" At least we still have Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren.

4. Only last November, I transcribed a dialogue that began with MEADE: "I just watched a movie called 'Valerie.' Starring Anita Ekberg. What rock star was she married to?" ME: "No. No. No. You're thinking of  Britt Ekland." MEADE: "It had everything: betrayal, justice, frontier justice..."

"The attorney ... was brilliant, impassioned and sarcastic..."

"... moving and moved. He played the entire scale of emotions with confident precision."

If you're keeping a list of movies about law, be sure to include "Divorce Italian Style." There are only a couple courtroom scenes, but law frames the entire movie, about a man who only needs a divorce, but because the law does not provide that escape, plots to murder his wife in a way that will count as the "heat of passion," punishable by only a short sentence. To do this, he's got to cause her to have an affair and then catch her in the act.

I remember seeing this movie many years ago on a small black and white TV and thinking it was funny but not well photographed. The new Criterion Collection DVD amazed me. The photography is actually quite beautiful, very dark and detailed. Just the thing to get lost entirely on a television from the 1960s.

Even though lately I've grown tired of watching actors act, I loved watching Marcello Mastroianni and Daniela Rocca. Mastroianni is a ridiculous baron, in love with his 16-year-old cousin and tired of his wife, played by Rocca. Why is it funny that he wants to murder her? See the movie. It's funny. The two actors make it funny. I particularly like the way Mastroianni's FeFe endears himself to us even though Rocca's Rosalia has done nothing remotely hateful. What's wrong with her? Just her incredibly annoying desire for love!

Rocca is perfect. She's not ugly or a big nag. She does have a mustache and a monobrow, but the main thing is how irritatingly she begs for love. She not only insists that her husband tell her he loves her every night, but she's ravenous for information about how much he loves her. Since he doesn't love her at all, he's quite put upon. And Mastroianni's a genius at looking put upon.

There's one scene where she brings him coffee, then insists on sipping from his cup. Why not pour her own cup? That's FeFe's weary question. But Rosalia imagines she's doing something sexy and charming.

A really cool thing about the movie is that at one point everyone in town -- a small, claustrophobic place in Sicily -- goes to see the movie "La Dolce Vita." "La Dolce Vita" came out in 1961, one year before "Divorce Italian Style." We see the whole population of the small town watching Anita Ekberg on the big screen, and we never see Marcello Mastroianni as he appears in Roman form in "La Dolce Vita." We just see the Sicilian Marcello Mastroianni, in the audience, trying to work out his miserable little murder scheme.

Coming to terms with the "La Dolce Vita" DVD.

I've complained about subtitles before. I like to fixate on the photography of a movie and constantly moving my eyes to the bottom of the screen is quite irritating. I don't mind reading. I spend much of the day reading. But I go to the movie theater to look at the moving pictures. If the pictures are worth looking at, they are worth feeling resentful about being compelled to look away from. There is a special problem with DVD if you have a widescreen television and a widescreen movie. The subtitles are placed on what would be a black band on an ordinary TV. On a widescreen TV, they are off the screen unless you size the movie image so that it has fairly wide black bands on the sides as well as the top and bottom!

I was trying to watch my new DVD of "La Dolce Vita" yesterday. The photography is very beautiful, and I just wanted to stare at it, so I was already annoyed by having subtitles, but it's also a very widescreen picture, and I was forced to watch it sized way down to be able to read the subtitles. I was losing the beauty of the images. And the subtitles are yellow, which was atrocious under the black and white photography. The DVD has no dubbed English track. The assumption must be that the kind of people who watch Fellini movies are the kind of people with the hostile attitude toward dubbing. The only English track is commentary by film critic and historian Richard Schickel, and I tried putting that on. It's not bad, but it brings you down a bit. Plus, he mostly talks about what we're seeing, not what they are saying, so who needs him?

Maybe the best option is just to keep the subtitles off and listen to the original soundtrack, which includes some English along with the primarily Italian dialogue. I do understand a little Italian. "La Dolce Vita" lines like "Ciao, Marcello!" are easy enough to pick up, and it's a sprawling, episodic story, where the images may contain most of the meaning. The spectacle is the thing here: the grand city of Rome, the wonderful face of Marcello Mastroianni, and the entire physical presence of the human divinity Anita Ekberg. Whether you understand the Italian or not, the sound of the language is beautiful (and, of course, dubbing would deprive us of that) and the music soundtrack, by Nino Rota, is perfect. What will be missed by watching the film without understanding the dialogue? Lines like: "By 1965 there'll be total depravity. How squalid everything will be."

And let me add this, since I've been thinking about Bob Dylan, whose "Chronicles" I just finished. I know Dylan took a lot of inspiration from films, so let me point out the two references to "La Dolce Vita" in Bob Dylan songs. The first is from "I Shall Be Free":

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,
It's President Kennedy callin' me up.
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg,
Sophia Loren."

The second is from "Motorpsycho Nightmare":

Then in comes his daughter
Whose name was Rita.
She looked like she stepped out of
La Dolce Vita.

I think we can see what kind of inspiration Dylan got from "La Dolce Vita." He thought Anita Ekberg was fabulous. And she was. More subtly fabulous is Marcello Mastroianni, who is reunited with Ekberg, much older, in "Intervista." There is a really nice little documentary about him called "I Remember." He's really quite hilarious. I recommend staring at his face the entire time he's on screen.

UPDATE: The problem with the subtitles was cured by going into the DVD settings and adjusting it to correspond to a wide-screen TV.