Sharp Practice
THE SWINDLERS. (Cameo-Polytechnic.) SOMEWHERE in Dostoievski a group of peoPiC play a game in which each person has to describe the meanest action of his life. One of the characters comes out with a tale “) cold-bloodedly revolting that the rest of then) rise up in fury; at which the man, innocent in his way, protests, 'Well, what did yoga expect. . . ?' Something of the same feeling is in one's response to Fellini's latest and. I think, most remarkable film to reach us, The Swindlers (the title is a loose translation of 11 Bidone, which means, not a swindler in the general sense, but specifically a confidence trickster). For Fellini is so uncompromising that at times one can hardly accept that people will go as far in meanness as he sends thetr to which the answer •must be, 'Well, what did you expect?' This is a film about meanness. And yet, because Fellini is an artist who dabbles in a rather grotesque morality, it is also a film about the pathos of the swindlers then selves.
'For all that we have seen them at their callous worst, winkling the last lira from the ° pitifully poor, raising in the despairing hopes that will come to nothing, we still, odd Y enough, sympathise with Picasso for his failure to paint, with Augusto for his failure to be important (Roberto, a frustrated crooner wt ° collects Johnny Ray's records, seems mere Y horrid, which shows what personality does to judgement). Picasso and Augusto both have daughters they adore, Picasso's a tiny creature all squeals and kisses, Augusta's a poised at d pretty schoolgirl; both have hearts warm and
responsive in places—or rather at moments— both have sympathetic personalities, under- standable frustrations: in fact, one likes them, the mercurial charmer (Richard Basehart) and the stout, ageing, dignified trickster (Broderick Crawford—both actors dubbed in Italian), whose chirpy young priest, ever ready to play with the children, and grave, comfortable monsignori, Vatican number plate and all, take in so many credulous peasants.
Fellini, and their acting, make the film—with its people who drop in and out again, its loose ends and lifelike unanswered questions about past and future—so near to life that one feels personally affronted when Augusto, appearing to repent, almost tricks his accomplices and the audience. Its social application is perhaps more restricted than that of / Vitelloni, for while con-men are rarish, vitelloni in Italy abound; but its morality is stronger, its direc- tion sterner and more confident, its use of the grotesque in particular—the almost unaccept- able—more assured and pointed. The Italian stars are Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, and Franco Fabrizi, the leader of the louts in 1
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