Criterion Collection 81: Variety Lights

1950, dir. Federico Fellini & Alberto Lattuada, 97 min.

Co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini's film debut, Variety Lights, is a movie about show business. I point this out because it's striking how many Criterion Collection films are about showbiz--movies about movies, movies about acting, movies about theatre or burlesque or entertainment. (And the next film in the series is Hamlet, which of course thematizes acting, drama, and theatricality.) I know that all artworks make implicit statements about their own forms or genres, but the history of meta-theatricality is especially interesting because movies about movies--or theatre about theatre--don't annoy their audiences. Think of all the classic movies about a young ingenue trying to make it in Hollywood, or the dark films about the seedy side of the business. I think movies are unique in getting away with this to the degree that they do; in poetry, for instance, we critics love reading poems about poetry, but I think many readers find such poems annoying.

Anyway, Variety Lights is one of the ingenue stories--a beautiful young woman with dreams of the stage casts her lot with a tawdry variety show troupe that performs bawdy and corny little numbers in tattered theatres across Italy. The troupe perpetually has money troubles, and despite having a variety of acts they seem only to be able to please an audience when the women dancers show off their legs. The ingenue--Liliana (Carla Del Poggio)--has nice legs herself; she's won a dancing contest and a waterside beauty pageant. After conning her way into the troupe, she becomes a star in the show only after her skirt accidentally falls off.

One of the frustrated actors in the troupe, Checco (Peppino De Filippo), at first tries to get in Liliana's pants, but then becomes her protector and, he hopes, her promoter. He sees in her the chance to make it big in the theatre, and sets about trying to put together his own show with her as the top star. What follows is an interesting twist on the story of the naïve young ingenue--the relationship between the young girl and the seedy older man becomes somewhat inverted, with the older man revealed as well-intentioned and honest and the young girl being less naïve than she appeared. The film doesn't let this be as simple, though, as innocent actor and ambitious actress; who in this pair is guilty of using or hurting the other is always a bit of a question.

One of the most randomly memorable parts of Variety Lights comes from the variety of acts Checco attempts to cobble together for his show--a "Brazilian gypsy" sings a really very charming song about a jacaranda tree. The scene, in the middle of the night on a street somewhere in Rome, suggests the rowdy energy and theatricality that shows up in later Fellini films like Nights of Cabiria (starring Giulietta Masina, who here plays Checco's disappointed fiancée) and even Satyricon.

Next: Laurence Olivier's Hamlet