Monthly Archives: April 2020

  • Ginger and Fred

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Federico Fellini (1986)

    Ginger and Fred’s clear main purpose was as a vehicle for pairing, for the only time, Fellini’s two best-known collaborators – Giulietta Masina, his wife and muse, and Marcello Mastroianni, the director’s alter ego in 8½ and perhaps elsewhere.  The title characters were once a popular dance partnership, performing famous Astaire and Rogers routines, but Fellini doesn’t clarify whether on stage or screen or both, let alone suggest what the real Fred and Ginger may have meant to Pippo Botticella (Mastroianni) and Amelia Bonetti (Masina) – or to Fellini himself.  Ginger and Fred is all about what this film’s two stars mean to the director, and to his audience.

    Amelia and Pippo parted company – she left him, to be precise – in the mid-1950s.  Thirty years later, she’s a mother and grandmother, running her own small business.  He earns a pittance selling encyclopedias door to door.  Their reunion takes place in Rome, where they’re invited to take part in the Christmas special of a popular, trashy television show – ‘Ed ecco a vuoi’.  (The phrase translates variously, perhaps best in this case as ‘We are proud to present …’)  Two in a cast of hundreds in the glitzy extravaganza, they’re to perform a medley of tunes from Astaire-Rogers musicals, giving viewers the chance to laugh at, or be sentimental about, the spectacle of two sixty-somethings still trying to hoof it.

    Fellini isn’t ideally qualified to satirise this particular strain of exploitative TV pap.  Ed ecco a vuoi is a freak show but plenty of those taking part are familiar types in the director’s own work – conspicuously big-breasted women, gender benders, a troupe of dwarfs, elderly men with the faces and hairdos of worn-out circus clowns.  A couple of participants provide relatively topical digs at the all-embracing nature of TV celebrity culture:  a business tycoon (Friedrich von Thun), who survived kidnapping by political extremists; and a notorious Mafioso (Francesco Casale), granted a day out of jail for the occasion.  The clerics in the line-up – an ancient thaumaturge monk (Jacques Henri Lartique) and a priest (Luciano Lombardo) defrocked after abandoning celibacy – are a different matter.  They serve as reminders that religion was part of tabloid news and fraudulent show business in Fellini’s world as far back as La dolce vita.

    Fellini’s own form as a freak-show ringmaster is both a plus and a minus in Ginger and Fred.  On the debit side, he devotes so much time to parading the bizarre contributors – in the outer reaches of the TV studios, the dressing rooms, and so on – that the eventual show, though amusing enough, is short on climactic impact, despite Franco Fabrizi’s lively cartoon of a dazzlingly insincere master of ceremonies.  It might also seem a disadvantage that, when it comes to skewering such an entertainment and its cultural context, Fellini’s heart isn’t really in it.  In fact, this turns out to be one of the film’s appealing qualities – an admission on its maker’s part, though it may be an inadvertent admission, that he’s naturally drawn to this kind of excess.

    As Amelia and others appearing in the show head for their hotel in the taxi that picked them up at the railway station, they pass billboards displaying comically exaggerated images of nearly naked women.  Fellini seems to set up details like this as if to register disapproval but is that why he keeps going back for more?   In her hotel room, Amelia switches on the set and channel hops – a hackneyed device for illustrating the spiritual desert that television fare represents (this felt like a cliché in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, nearly twenty years before this film).  Even here, though, Fellini finds commercial inanities to enjoy (and for us to enjoy).  On the TV screen, a puppet of Dante solemnly intones the opening lines of The Divine Comedy before quickly brightening up:  ‘the way forward had been lost – but with this new wristwatch …’

    There’s another reason for Fellini’s dwelling on his company of grotesques:  the story of Amelia and Pippo – as distinct from the past and present of Masina and Mastroianni – is rather thin.  Amelia’s sense of entitlement and neat propriety are nicely contrasted with Pippo’s louche outspokenness but it’s a contrast created almost entirely by the actors rather than the script.  Still, the underwriting does have benefits, too.  A power cut blacks out the TV show just as the principals prepare to dance.  In the darkness, they have an urgent, funny conversation, in which they resolve to make a last-minute escape (needless to say, the lights come back on before they can).  As they talk, they also admit to accepting the TV company’s comeback offer chiefly in order to see each other again.  That isn’t mentioned again once the show is over and the film is the better for that.  Saying no more is recognition of what’s realistic in Amelia’s and Pippo’s lives after a thirty-year separation – besides, you can see their feelings in their faces as they say goodbye at the railway station.  Ginger and Fred began with Amelia arriving by train and it closes with her departing on one.  As the train pulls out, the camera briefly picks up the figure of Pippo in a crowded station café.  The diminuendo ending feels right.

    It also comes as a relief because things have been set up for something grimmer.  The Ed ecco a vuoi cast also includes a clairvoyant/medium (Ginestra Spinola), whose son and assistant (Sergio Ciulli) is armed with tape-recordings of voices his mother picks up from the next world.  These include a man called Pippo, which irrationally unnerves his namesake still in the land of the living.  Pippo is worryingly breathless as he and Amelia rehearse their dance.  During the actual performance, he tap-dances too enthusiastically, loses his balance and falls heavily.  After struggling to his feet, he and Amelia complete the dance; the studio audience applauds with relief.  Even so, the mishap is too shocking to be (as it seems to be) instantly forgotten by all concerned, Pippo included.  Yet there’s an upside of this short-term memory loss:  the film shifts sharply away from the sub-They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? territory it seemed headed for.

    At a few minutes over two hours, Ginger and Fred takes too long to tell its skimpy story.  (Fellini wrote the screenplay with two other long-time collaborators, Tonino Guerra and Tullio Pinelli.)  The first half hour or so, before Pippo joins the party, is notably leisurely.  These scenes may well be an expression of Fellini’s loving admiration of Masina – her continuing presence, for him, sufficient in itself – but there’s not much else to see in them.  I’m not a fan of Masina’s celebrated performances in La strada and Nights of Cabiria but she can’t be accused of being Chaplinesque in Ginger and Fred and I liked her more here, without finding her portrait of Amelia greatly various or surprising.  Masina does have a very strong moment after Pippo’s dance-floor tumble:  as he and Amelia resume the routine, her trouper’s keep-going-keep-smiling determination is vividly intact.

    The lengthy build-up to Marcello Mastroianni’s entrance certainly increases anticipation, though when it finally happens, I was worried.  Amelia is already failing to sleep, thanks to fears that Pippo isn’t going to show up at all, and to the light from a TV transmission mast that moves unceasingly across her hotel room (it’s like a spotlight no longer interested in her).  Then loud snoring starts in the neighbouring room and Amelia goes there to protest.  She knocks on the door – it’s opened by Pippo, who looks and sounds theatrically dilapidated.  This first appearance raises fears that Mastroianni will be expected to do a broadly outrageous-old-character.  It’s a false alarm:  for the most part, he’s wonderfully true to himself, and increasingly affecting.  His voice, at whatever volume, is expressive – his eyes and hand movements are sources of pathos and humour (but he’s not Chaplinesque either!).  Mastroianni may not have been a professional dancer.  His natural physical grace creates the illusion of one.

    The spiritualist lady in the TV show is a charlatan but Nicola Piovani’s score channels the musical ghost of Nino Rota (who had died in 1979) very effectively – giving substance to the nostalgic texture of Ginger and Fred, strengthening the piece as a remembrance of Fellinis past.  When Pippo and Amelia come off stage after completing their dance, he badly needs to get his breath back.  The floor manager unkindly hurries the couple out of the way – they’re instantly expendable.  It’s another swipe at the ethos of mindless commercial television but, like most of the others, it doesn’t cut much ice.  Fellini is just as keen as the TV man to move Amelia and Pippo on – to that sentimental but engaging rail station leave-taking.  Ginger and Fred is an essentially self-indulgent film but that is part of its charm.   It came late in the careers, and in the lives, of all three of Fellini, Mastroianni and Masina.  They’d done enough by 1986 to earn a bit of self-indulgence.

    18 April 2020

  • Grand National Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bob McNaught (1953)

    The Grand National has been an essential part of my year since 1964, when I was eight.  For a few years after that, it vied with Christmas as the annual event I most looked forward to, and which produced the strongest sense of anti-climax as soon as it was over.  I still sometimes have dreams in which it’s the eve of the National – a time, that is, of nearly unrivalled excited anticipation.  This year’s Grand National was one of the earliest Covid-19 sporting casualties, called off a few days before horse racing in the UK was suspended generally.  At the time of the announcement, advance notice didn’t seem as bad as the National-that-never-was of 1993 but I felt more deflated after watching this year’s virtual race, shown by ITV on 4 April at just the time the real thing should have been happening.  A few days later, I realised my brain didn’t quite accept there was no Grand National 2020.  In some part of my mind, I felt it must be taking place somehow, somewhere, maybe in a parallel universe.  I’ve recorded eighty-four films from television over the last three or four years that are still unwatched.  With cinemas closed, it’s now or never to work through these (though now could go on some time).  The prospect is a bit daunting but another kind of National substitute seemed a good place to start.

    Grand National Night opens with agreeable shots of horses exercising in the early morning.  These are rudely interrupted by a different kind of horse power as a car whizzes past, screeching to a halt outside the house that overlooks the gallops.  Out from the passenger seat steps Babs Coates (Moira Lister), arriving home after her latest night on the tiles.  Her husband, owner-trainer-breeder Gerald Coates (Nigel Patrick), has high hopes for his runner in the next day’s National but Babs, an alcoholic and a grade A bitch (the film was released in the US as Wicked Wife), instantly upstages the equines that she thinks occupy far too much of Gerry’s attention.  After a few scornfully obnoxious remarks to the Coates’s elderly butler Morton (Gibb McLaughlin) and a quick change from décolleté evening gown into jodhpurs and riding boots, Babs demands a horse.  The only one not out at exercise is a mare about to foal, which Babs nevertheless insists on taking.  She sets off across the gallops, riding the animal with nasty vigour.  They fall at the first fence, attempting to clear a hedge.  Babs, alas, is unhurt.

    Although I didn’t expect sporting action to dominate the thriller Grand National Night, I wasn’t prepared for just how unimportant the great race would prove to be.  The following afternoon, Gerry’s horse Star Mist does indeed win the National.  (By coincidence, the actual winner in the year of the film’s release was Early Mist.)  There are a couple of sequences supposedly at the races, substantiated by inserts of some old Pathé news film of the Grand National (Grand National Night is in black-and-white).  But Star Mist never appears and Gerry doesn’t even go to Aintree to watch the race.  He’s more concerned with the ill-used mare, which goes into labour after the exertions of the day before.  He’s concerned too with the mare’s attractive owner, Joyce Penrose (Beatrice Campbell).  It’s immediately clear that Joyce carries a torch for Gerry and he one for her, although they’re both terribly well behaved.

    Unlike Babs.  She’s carrying on with roué Jack Donovan (Leslie Mitchell), the manic chauffeur in the earlier scene; and she does go to Liverpool for the big race, staying overnight with her sister Pinky (Betty Ann Davies) beforehand.  Star Mist’s victory is a good reason for Babs to paint the town red on the Saturday evening but the celebrations come to an abrupt end when she falls out with Donovan, who’s ogling another woman.  Babs gets hold of his car and, even though she’s lost her licence after causing death through dangerous driving, careers back home in it that night.  There she falls out with Gerry too, goes at him with a knife, they struggle … along with Morton, we see and hear Donovan’s car driving off from the house.  The next morning, Babs’s dead body is found in the car in Liverpool.  A manhunt for the vehicle’s owner quickly tracks him down but Donovan has an alibi – ‘a red-headed one’.  The suspicions of the investigating detective, Inspector Ayling (Michael Hordern), fall instead on Gerry.

    As a piece of thriller plotting, Grand National Night is distinctly undernourished.  It has a more generous supply of clunky dialogue and coarse acting.  But the film, at this distance in time, is startling as an illustration – to some extent, it seems, an unconscious illustration – of contemporary snobbery and parochialism.  (It had something of the same effect on me as reading the rampantly conservative Josephine Tey’s mystery novel The Franchise Affair last year.)  These social prejudices come through in the monied characters’ attitude to not only their servants but also the police.  Ayling is described, disparagingly, as ‘a very ambitious man’.  The film-makers – like Gerry, Joyce, Pinky and the Coates’s louche acquaintance Buns Darling [sic] (Colin Gordon) – regard Ayling, in his efforts to nail Gerry for Babs’s death, as a jumped-up spoilsport who needs taking down a peg or two.  The film has much more time for Gerry’s creepy butler Morton, who recognises his first duty as loyalty to the master.  The local bobby Gibson (Barry MacKay) is altogether a better chap than the Liverpool CID man.  Gibson is less interested in helping Ayling solve the riddle of what happened to Babs than in arranging for Gerry and the unseen Star Mist to appear as guests of honour at an upcoming gymkhana.

    It’s soon revealed that Babs was dead when Gerry picked up her up from the drawing room floor to which she fell as they fought with the knife – an oriental knife brought home by Gerry as a memento of his two years in a Japanese prison camp.  When he mentions this to Ayling, the detective says nothing – his silence tantamount to proof the rotter didn’t even fight for his country in the recent World War.  It transpires that Babs had a weak heart and died of natural causes.  Gerry did wrong by driving her corpse back to Liverpool in Donovan’s car, abandoning both there and repeatedly lying to the police but Ayling is finally deprived of what he thought was compelling evidence of that nighttime journey.  In the film’s closing shot, Gerry and Joyce walk off in the direction of a sunny future together.  The director Bob McNaught thus achieves something rather remarkable.  When Babs is dispatched, you initially feel Gerry has done everyone a favour:  you mourn neither the character nor Moira Lister’s playing of her.  By the end of Grand National Night, this viewer felt close to outrage – on behalf of Ayling and that Gerry got the happy ending he didn’t really deserve.  Needless to say, the fact that he’s just trained a Grand National winner – a Grand National winner! – couldn’t  now be further from the hero’s mind.

    I must admit my feelings had something to do with the acting too.  Even with this material, Michael Hordern is so much more deft and varied than any of his one-note fellow cast members that it seemed only right that Inspector Ayling should come out on top.  Nigel Patrick, although he cuts a plausible figure as a racehorse trainer, doesn’t do much to dramatise Gerry’s predicament.  (The dynamics of the piece might have been very different with, say, Trevor Howard in the main role.)   The cast also includes Noel Purcell (the go-to man for resounding Oirishness in British cinema of the early post-war years),  as a vet.  May Hallatt is the maid who discovers Babs’s high-heeled shoes in Morton’s wardrobe.  (Don’t go there.)

    Grand National Night is adapted from a play by Campbell and Dorothy Christie.  There isn’t a screenplay credit as such:  by the end, you can’t help wondering if this is a case of no one being prepared to own up although a ‘brought to the screen by’ credit points the finger at George Minter.  (He isn’t the producer – that was Phil C Samuels for the Renown Pictures Corporation, UK.)   Jack Asher’s camerawork includes occasional, striking zooms in and out, at supposedly key moments.  The sharp editing is by the subsequently celebrated Anne V Coates (an Oscar winner for Lawrence of Arabia a decade later).

    So:  one down, eighty-three to go.  Next up – I’m going to try and find a link between each backlog film watched and the succeeding one – will be The Rocking Horse Winner.

    15 April 2020

Posts navigation