Cinema
Nights of Cabiria (PG, selected cinemas)
Merry and melancholy
Mark Steyn
The last time I saw Fellini's Nights of Cabiria (1957), a few years back, I was writ- ing something about Sweet Charity, the musical Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon drew from it a decade later. In both versions, the central character is a girl fall-guy who, in a handful of episodes, gets variously humili- ated, cheated and assaulted by men. The two works have other similarities, not least in the relationship between director and actress: Miss Verdon was Fosse's wife, star and muse, as Giulietta Masina in Cabiria was to Fellini.
But the characters they're playing have crucial differences: Verdon's Charity is not, like Masina's Cabiria, a prostitute, only a `taxi dancer' — that's to say you rent them per number. It was a coy evasion at the time (1966), and it seems even more so now. Yet Masina's tart, a shopworn waif with a big heart in search of someone to give it to, is an even bigger cliché, a conclu- sion underlined by the old-fashioned 'indi- cating' of her performance: Look, I'm cute! Look, I'm vulnerable! Look, I'm angry! The only thing to be said for this approach is that hookers and strippers and so forth often wind up getting through their daily routines like bad actresses — the stars, in effect, of their own ongoing C- or D-movie, forever pouting, flouncing, striking poses. If Masina sails perilously close to the proverbial tart-with-heart, it may be for the reason that a lot of tarts model themselves on the versions they see in movies. That's a kind of intellectual defence of the star: a better one is that Masina's Cabiria is an irresistible fireplug of a performance that switches from merry to melancholy as effortlessly as Nino Rota's beautiful score does. The main theme, incidentally, has a strong claim to being the most life-affirm- ing film music ever written.
Fellini in 1957 was not yet the global star La Dolce Vita would shortly make him, but the signature is unmistakably his from the opening scene: people moving, the camera dancing with them in long shot. Cabiria and a young man called Giorgio emerge from some scrub on the outskirts of Rome, where they've presumably been sating their passion. She's in love, he's in a hurry. So he steals her handbag and pushes her into the Tiber. She can't swim and the current's car- rying her into deeper peril. 'If she gets to the sewer, she'll never come up again,' says one of the boys on the bank. And that's the question at the heart of the film: once you're in the sewer, can you ever come up again?
If you've seen Sweet Charity on stage, or you rent Fosse's film version, you'll be struck by how the American version (by Neil Simon) follows Fellini scene for scene and sometimes line for line, yet manages to give every moment an entirely different emotional impulse. In Charity, for example, our heroine also gets shoved in the drink — this time, the lake in Central Park — but it's not life threatening and just played for laughs. Likewise, both Cabiria's and Charity's desperation to 'change my life' lead them to charismatic religious leaders, but in Cabiria the episode ends in the bleak disappointment of miracles that never hap- pen while in Charity it's just an excuse for a hippy-dippy, beads'n'kaftans, swingin' Six- ties love-in set to 'The Rhythm Of Life'. The only point at which original and adap- tation are truly in tune is the episode in which Cabiria/Charity gets picked up by a famous movie star. 'Hey, chicks!' shouts Cabiria to her pals from the back of his convertible. 'Take a look who's with me!' Or, as Charity sings back in the star's apart- ment, 'If My Friends Could See Me Now'. Fellini had Chaplin's City Lights in mind for that scene, and, in their way, Fosse and his collaborators make the hommage explicit by having Charity do her 'little tramp' impression in the middle of the dance.
The biggest difference of all comes in the sombre and transcendental finale. But run- ning it a close second is the seven-minute sequence restored to the film for this release. In this episode, Cabiria gets dumped from a truck on the edge of town and meets a man dispensing alms from a sack to various lowlifes, including a deranged old whore spending her retire- ment in a hole in the ground. In the car of this good and kindly man, en route back to Rome, there is a rare moment of real rap- port, shy, tender, tentative, in which Cabiria even tells her benefactor her real name. It seems incredible that Fellini could ever have considered dropping this sequence — it's some of Masina's best act- ing — and even more amazing that he did 'I'm getting into shape for my holidays!' so, supposedly, because the Catholic Church, as the principal charitable institu- tion in Italy, was concerned at the way the scene implied their role could be carried out more effectively by a privatised free- lance.
As to the matter of the hooker's nom de guerre, Cabiria was also the name of a 1914 film hit in Italy, a costume drama about a slave girl. Perhaps this is coincidence, but perhaps not: whenever this Cabiria talks about films she's seen they're always 'cos- tume dramas'. With such details. Fellini and his two regular co-writers Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano flesh out their charac- ter. And the best thing about Giulietta Masina's performance is that, from five minutes into the picture, you feel as if she's been inhabiting this role all her life. After Dolce Vita made Fellini a star, he made himself the star — the real leading man of every picture he made. But in this film he came up with a wonderfully comic, ten- der, true character for the ages: the joyous images of Cabiria mamboing in the streets of Rome will stay with you forever.
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