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Cinema Breasterns. Meanwhile, the cinema in Italy had suddenly taken a new lease on life. After the sudden death of postwar neorealism (Open City, The Bicycle Thief)—stabbed in the back by politicians persuaded that seamy movies were hurting the tourist trade—the Italians produced almost nothing but mythological monstrosities and what are known in the trade as "breasterns." Only the great Vittorio De Sica achieved a faint infrequent toot (The Roof) on the clarion of reform. But around the turn of the decade Pietro Germi, who later made a wickedly wacky comedy called Divorce—Italian Style, came into view. And about the same time three major Italian talents rose vigorously to their full height.
Luchino Visconti, 56, is an Italian nobleman—Count of Modrone and a direct descendant of Charlemagne's father-in-law—whose friends say he "votes left and lives right." By the same token, his movies look left but are made right. In Rocco and His Brothers (1960), a bruising revival of neorealism, he followed a family of peasants as they moved from the country to the city and saw them grated away like cheese in the big mindless mechanism of Milan. In The Leopard (1963), adapted from Giuseppe di Lampedusa's touching elegy for feudalism, he summons from the grave a way of life and the valiant dust of a proud but kindly man who lived that life and leaves the vivid air signed with his honor.
Visconti's films are sometimes laborious and doctrinaire, but they have the solidity and urgency of living bodies. At times they seem to lack direction, but actually they are borne on a slow, irrefutable current doomward. On the tiny raft of hope his heroes glide toward the cataract of fate.
Imagination Minus Taste. Federico Fellini, 43, is the most inventive, versatile and popular of the new Italians. In I Vitelloni (1953) he put together a conventional but faultless social satire. In La Strada (1954), a poetic comedy, he followed in Chaplin's footsteps but couldn't quite fill the little fellow's shoes. In La Dolce Vita (1960), the film that made him and Actor Marcello Mastroianni famous around the world, he constructed a spectacular travesty of the Apocalypse in which the prophecy is luridly fulfilled and Rome, the Great Whore of Revelation, wallows gorgeously through seven nights of destruction. In 8½ (1963), his most daring film to date, he aimed his camera into his own psyche and let it record his fears and fantasies, desires and despairs in a cinematic language that owes more to Joyce than it does to D. W. Griffith.
All these movies were executed with tremendous verve; Fellini is unquestionably one of the most imaginative fellows who ever had his name on a canvas chair. Unfortunately, his imagination is not controlled by taste; he panders incessantly and shamelessly to the public letch for sensations. But there is nothing petty in his pandering. He is a vulgarian in the grand manner, the Barnum of the avantgarde.