Two Tales of Prostitutes

The law makes a difference, for starters. Prostitution was illegal in Italy in the 1950s, when Federico Fellini directed Nights of Cabiria, and legal but imperiled in Japan while Kenji Mizoguchi directed his final film, Street of Shame, in 1956. In the Italian film the hookers have to keep an eye out for the cops and have to scatter is someone decides to raid their hangouts. In the Japanese film the local cop drops by the whorehouses in the Yoshiwara red-light district for friendly visits with the proprietors, while the whores worry that the ban being debated in the legislature will mean they won't be able to work. Prostitutes had different standing in each country. If the Japanese prostitutes aren't criminals, however, they still have low status. The film isn't literally called "Street of Shame" in Japanese, (Google translates the original as "The Red Light Area."), but the work is shameful for some of the women and some of their relations, and Mizoguchi's movie ends on a note of profound shame and despair -- while the Fellini film ends like, well, a Fellini movie. That makes it seem as if Mizoguchi takes his material more seriously, but does that make his a better film?

Both directors used prostitutes as archetypes of a sort to work out personal thematic issues. Mizoguchi made enough movies about prostitutes for Criterion Eclipse to collect in a box set. I've only seen this one, however, and on that evidence I can say that Mizoguchi is interested in prostitutes as prostitutes -- as working women -- while Fellini's prostitute -- played by his wife, Giulietta Masina -- is one only superficially, the tawdry, winsome dressing on a shimmering archetype, something insubstantial yet profound and easily adaptable, as it proved, into the stuff of Broadway. Cabiria is improbably self-sufficient; she owns her own house while working the streets. Apart from a friend and housemate she has no binding ties, while the women from Street of Shame are still daughters, wives and mothers, all embedded in family relationships shadowed by their necessary occupations. Without such worries or burdens, Cabiria still yearns for a better life and has tantalizing hints of it in her several misadventures. In the end, her ambitions are thwarted and her savings are gone and she has barely escaped murder and there's nothing to do but go on. At the end of Street of Shame, the anti-prostitution bill is defeated (only temporarily, in fact) and for some of the women it's a relief that they can go on, though merely beginning is a horror for the newcomer we see last. Mizoguchi closes with despair, but Fellini forces his way past it -- the Italian has a point to make that goes beyond the issues and concerns of prostitutes. He came from the school of the neorealists, for whom prostitution seems like proper subject matter, but in a neorealism contest Street of Shame wins hands down, even though Mizoguchi does some odd things with his soundtrack, including some unexpected, unsettling electronic music that sounds irrationally anachronistic -- it doesn't seem to belong to 1956 -- but may not have seemed so alien in its atonality, despite its blatant modernity, to Japanese ears. It's arguably his one gesture toward stylization, apart from an overall and perhaps unintended noirishness, while Nights of Cabiria reveals itself as a kind of hyperstylized (one is tempted to say "kabuki") neorealism from a director on the brink of breaking loose from it. In short, we're seeing the same subject from two different genres as well as two different cultural traditions. In practice, that means that while the women of Street of Shame are prostitutes, the prostitute in Nights of Cabiria is a tramp.

On the road, but not alone.

Cabiria is Fellini's follow-up to La Strada and the culmination of his molding of Masina into a Chaplinesque figure that began with the earlier film. That doesn't mean that Masina became a slapstick comic or genuis pantomimist. It does mean that she became an object of pathos, an appealingly abject creature audiences could not help, Fellini hoped, but love. Pathos often lurked beneath the austere surface of neorealism and sometimes broke loose in tearjerkers like De Sica's Umberto D., but Fellini and Masina were more ambitiously engaged, I think, in a critical deconstruction of the Chaplinesque. By making Masina a Chaplinesque female, Fellini could add terror to pathos by emphasizing a vulnerability in Masina that could not exist in Chaplin. By making Masina a prostitute, needless to say, Fellini plumbed depths of abject scrabbling for existence that Chaplin couldn't contemplate. On top of that, when Cabiria has been duped into selling her house and offering her savings as a dowry to a man who intends to kill her and take the money, Fellini brings us to a moment, no matter how it echoes an earlier slapstick victimization of the heroine, when we can honestly imagine her being murdered. Chaplin might put himself in dangerous predicaments, but I doubt whether audiences ever feared for the Tramp's life as they may have feared for Cabiria's. This part of the equation could be seen as a neorealist critique of the Chaplinesque, but in this picture Fellini hits Chaplin from both sides. The perils of Cabiria are a critique from the Fellini of the neorealist past, but the finale comes from the Fellini of the future. He puts Cabiria on the road -- we might as well capitalize the R -- the final destination of many a Chaplin picture. It's his refuge after rejection or renunciation, where he reconciles himself to solitude until something new comes up. For Chaplin, the empty Road comes to symbolize everyman's existential loneliness -- that hardly changes when he ends up with a mate in Modern Times; the couple form a closed nuclear unit -- but Fellini merrily tramples that vision and sets the tone for his own career to come by showing us that the Road is never empty. Despair is dispelled, ever so slightly, by Cabiria's reimmersion into the multitude of Fellini's road -- the road that will become his archetypal parade. Nights of Cabiria is more compelling as a crucial episode in Fellini's career, arguably an end and a beginning, than as an empathetic analysis of prostitution in Italy.

For Mizoguchi, Street of Shame is the end of the road, though he probably didn't intend it that way. That ultra-modernist soundtrack lends an air of finality or looking into the void to the film, and there's also a hint of neon nightmare in the glare of the Yoshiwara that suggests a kind of prophetic discomfort with modernity, as does, more subtly, the figure of Mickey, the sexy-obnoxious modern-dress prostitute played by Machiko Kyo. But implications of expressionism shouldn't be exaggerated. It might be better to compare Mizoguchi not with Fellini, but with a fellow Japanese, Seijun Suzuki, whose own tale of prostitues, 1964's Gate of Flesh, throws the older director's virtues into relief without betraying its own. Suzuki made an expressionist film -- and an exploitation film, by comparison with Street of Shame. Suzuki's film is a lurid fantasy-nightmare of female empowerment through sexuality enforced by brutality. It aims for sensational effects that Mizoguchi wasn't interested in, and it succeeds as a work of sensationalism -- a mode no more automatically inferior to Mizoguchi's sympathetic humanism and melodramatic social consciousness than Fellini's archetypal grostesquerie and pathos.

 

Well, yes and no.

The object of this exercise hasn't been to declare one film superior to the others. The one you prefer depends on your interests and your standards -- and while we may be able to identify superior standards, that's a problem for another time. My point has been that despite appearances, two (or three) films about prostitutes are no more alike than an apple and an orange (or a banana). The most I can say objectively is that if you want to see a fiction film about prostitution because of an interest in the profession and the lives of the people who practice it, Street of Shame comes closest to fitting the bill. In the other films, prostitution is used in pursuit of other effects. I suppose that's true of Mizoguchi too, to an extent, since his purpose isn't really to show us the performance of sex for money. He wants to show how having to have sex for money demoralizes prostitutes and those close to them, and he manages emotional effects in the process that rival the comedy of Fellini and the hysteria of Suzuki.

 

Street of Shame isn't an anti-sex movie. Its attitude toward prostitutes is more like that of the people or groups who want "sex workers" to have the same rights and protections enjoyed by other workers than it's like the attitude of abolitionists who would end sex work altogether. I'm sure Mizoguchi would have preferred that society give women opportunities to make their livings in other ways, but I got the impression that he didn't support the anti-prostitution bill. Better that the women have these jobs than none at all. That's the trade-off illustrated but not celebrated in his film. Street of Shame may not enjoy the global acclaim Mizoguchi's period pieces like Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff have received, but it just as plainly displays the virtues that lead many critics to rank him above Akira Kurosawa among Japanese directors. I still haven't seen enough of Mizoguchi to agree with such ranking, but I respect him more with every film I see. Street of Shame is as great in its way as Nights of Cabiria is in its own. I admit to feeling that Mizoguchi was a rebuke to Fellini at first, but it's really a tribute to the fertile symbolism of the prostitute that she can inspire two profoundly different, differently profound films.

Now Playing: 5 JAN. 1962

From Lewiston, ME: the sleeper hit of 1961 -- all three hours of modern Italian decadence -- arrives for the first weekend of the year.



Federico Fellini's film was a high-water mark of the European invasion of American screens in the postwar era. According to the October 17, 1961 issue of Show Business Illustrated, La Dolce Vita had been the number-two film at the U.S. box office over the previous week, surpassed only by The Guns of Navarone. Does that say something about the American movie audience of fifty years ago, compared to us? For the record, Astor also released Plan 9 From Outer Space. I couldn't find a trailer for the Astor release, but here's a rhythmic montage of still images from the Italian trailer, as uploaded to YouTube by UmbrellaEntAU.



Meanwhile, opening in Youngstown, OH is a film probably better known now for its theme song than its actual content. Like La Dolce Vita, this one was dubbed "adult" entertainment.The second feature You Have To Run Fast is a crime picture from the redoubtable Edward L. Cahn, a director better known

 

I'll let Paul Frees explain Town Without Pity, with help from lookprettyappealing's YouTube channel.



On to Pittsburgh, where the ancient custom of promoting dance crazes with movies, a practice that would go out with the Lambada, is honored with one of at least two Twist movies circulating through the country.



Chubby Checker himself testifies to the nationwide extent of the craze in this movie clip uploaded by JohnnyKidd1966.

Look out for more attractions this weekend.

Fellini's CLOWNS (1970)

Why "clowns?" Why did Federico Fellini call his made-for-TV essay film I Clowns in Italian? It's not as if Italian doesn't have a word for the vocation, but it eventually sunk in to my initially obtuse skull that had he called the movie I Pagliacci, both Italian and English speaking audiences would have gone in expecting a very different movie. With the title accounted for, that leaves us the film itself to ponder. I Clowns comes from a period when Fellini seemed to be adapting the devices of Italian mondo movies to his particular sensibility. Working for television with a documentary mandate apparently sparked a creative process beginning with his American TV special, Fellini: A Director's Notebook, which he made while transitioning from an aborted sci-fi film to his Roman spectacle Satyricon. With Satyricon done, he returned to essay mode for Clowns, Roma and Amarcord. By the end, he'd personalized the format enough to dispense with any pretense of documentation, and what sets his work apart from mondo in general is the understanding that Fellini will show us re-enactments of actuality without pretending to show us "reality." Mondo pioneers Giacopetti & Prosperi were headed in the same direction with Goodbye Uncle Tom, but even then, while recreating the distant past, there was a pretense of objectivity, an implicit claim to show things as they were, that Fellini doesn't really require us to accept. Clowns actually invites us to call every documentary pretense into question. The director shows himself directing the film and has his assistant Maya Morin read much of the narration on screen, as if we were seeing "The Making of I Clowns" rather than the thing itself. The tactic also creates the impression that everything we see, and not just the obvious re-creations, could be scripted rather than spontaneous. Anita Ekberg's allegedly accidental appearance (she's supposedly shopping for a panther)only adds to that impression.

Fellini admits to being fascinated by grotesque freaks throughout his life. How do you feel about that, Anita?

Fellini also plays with the question of whether cinema can capture or preserve reality. In two different scenes, he makes an appointment to see rare film footage of famous clowns. The first time, at the home of a collector, the old film breaks and ignites in the projector. The second time, at a Paris archive, Fellini has a hard time determining whether the clip shows the clown he's looking for, and in any event the footage is much too short to make any impression. The director's disappointments seem linked to his implicit thesis about the incompatibility of cinema and classical clowning. The film opens with a surprising confession: the young Fellini (so the older man claims) was, if not frightened, then strongly disturbed by clowns when he first attended a circus. They reminded him too strongly, he recounts, of the disturbed or merely grotesque people he saw everyday in the real world. Those people, to a great extent, became the subject of Fellini's cinema, which evolved into an often literally circus-like spectacle of eccentricity. When the RAI TV project (originally broadcast in black-and-white on Christmas Day 1970 and subsequently released to theaters in color) gave Fellini the opportunity to film a literal circus, the result is problematic.

Circus clowning is arguably uncinematic when it involves bunches of clowns doing their shtick simultaneously while playing to different sections of the audience in different directions. The individual performance style is also uncinematic, as studios learned when they recruited circus clowns for silent comedies. Fellini can show us presumably acclaimed clowns doing their stuff, but as long as he sticks to documentary mode much of it leaves a moviegoer feeling underwhelmed. Things change when the director stages a center-ring funeral for "Augusto," one of the archetypal clown characters, for his climax. This is a true Fellini-esque spectacle, but the director portrays himself taking things too far. He wants to close it with the big Fellini finish, with clowns parading around the ring, but he makes the veteran clowns hustle around and around repeatedly, faster and faster each time, as if he were shooting They Shoot Clowns, Don't They? Many of the clowns simply can't keep up and have to step out of the ring to recuperate. While clearly sending up his own reputation for excess, Fellini also seems to answer his film's question, "Where are the old clowns?" by showing us symbolically that cinema did them in. While the film actually closes with a sentimental horn duet for two clowns in an empty ring, the climax that comes before gives the more modest scene the air of a requiem.

Like many a mondo, I Clowns is a hit-or-miss project. Most of the film lacks the creative engagement Fellini brings to the funeral scene, and while many individual scenes are beautifully done (particularly the Fratelli brothers' tense performance on wires in an insane asylum) many are also empty spectacles that exist only for illustration. As someone who knew next to nothing about clown history, I found the discussions of augustos and white clowns fascinating, but Fellini's presentation only whetted my appetite for more detailed accounts of famous personalities like the Fratellis than his format allowed. The film's limitations show Fellini grappling with a new mode of moviemaking that will bear fruit in the much superior Roma and Amarcord. Clowns itself remains a historically important film as an episode in the director's creative evolution, with one brilliant sequence to redeem it for movie fans in general.

I don't know if this is an authentic theatrical trailer, but rarovideousa has posted it to YouTube to promote last month's U.S. DVD premiere of the movie.

BOCCACCIO '70 (1962)

Boccaccio '70 is neorealism on steroids.

Boccaccio '70 is magical realism on HGH.

Boccaccio '70 is all-natural Academy Award winner Sophia Loren.

Boccaccio '70 is also a pretty dull comedy of manners with a young, civilized Tomas Milian and a young, pretty Romy Schneider.

But most of all, Boccaccio '70 is a big, barbaric chest-beating yawp by the Italian movie industry at the peak of its prestige, a flag planted in the heart of the wild world of cinema with the declaration that Italy rules the earth. A collaboration between the producer Carlo Ponti, U.S. moneyman Joseph E. Levine, directors Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica, this massive portmanteau film followed two Italian triumphs: the staggering global rollout of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which was one of the top U.S. releases of 1961, and Sophia Loren's unprecedented Best Actress Oscar win for a foreign-language role in de Sica's Two Women. It didn't hurt that Loren had also been in another international smash, Anthony Mann's El Cid, that same year, or that Fellini's part of Boccaccio was going to reunite him with La Dolce Vita's Anita Ekberg.

Italy is fairly raging with creativity in 1962. Bernardo Bertolucci is about to release his first film, The Grim Reaper. Michelangelo Antonioni will release L'Eclisse, while Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi et al are about to stun the world with Mondo Cane. Mario Bava is taking a breather before unleashing Black Sabbath, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Whip and The Body the following year. No one knows what a giallo or a spaghetti western is, but they're all about to learn. Let's say that, going into the decade, the U.S. and Japan are the superpowers of cinema. While France is developing advanced forms of psychological warfare with the Nouvelle Vague, Italy is the doomsday machine of the movie world during the 1960s. Boccaccio '70 was one way of saying that this was going to be their decade.

So naturally the Italians fall on their face practically coming out of the gate. After well-received Italian preview screenings, Ponti decides, apparently under pressure from Levine, that he's going to cut Mario Monicelli's segment out of the international release of the movie. Levine thinks it makes the film too long (it still ends up over 2.5 hours) and it lacks any star names. The decision pisses off the other three directors, who boycott the Cannes festival showing of the movie. The NoShame DVD release of Boccaccio '70 is the first time most Americans will see what was meant to be the opening segment of the film. And it's the best of the four!

Monicelli, now the sole survivor of the Boccaccio team and at age 94 only three years past his last film, may be known to film buffs as the director of Big Deal on Madonna Street. I haven't seen that and I've seen nothing else by the man, but on the strength of "Renzo and Luciana" I'm going to have to fix that. It's a pretty simple story: a young couple of working stiffs have to try to keep their marriage a secret from the bride's boss, since married women can't work for that company. But the pretense of single status leaves her prey to the tubby, icky head bookkeeper's romantic attentions. Meanwhile the couple struggle to establish some kind of private space for themselves, hoping to escape life in her family's crowded apartment. Monicelli's job is to convey how crowded their life is. He manages to make his episode look like it has a cast of thousands by shooting on location at crowded ballrooms, public pools and movie theaters (they take in a vampire movie, but we never see it and I didn't get a good enough glimpse at the poster to tell you what it was). The social comedy rings true, the visuals are spectacular, the music by Piero Umilani is cool. This they cut out because Marisa Solinas wasn't a star. You should have made her a star, morons!

"The Temptation of Dr. Antonio" is most likely more famous than the film itself. This is Fellini's first go at color and it looks as pretty as you might expect, but the genius of it is everything the director and his effects team does to set up the illusion of the giant advertising poster of Anita Ekberg (exhorting Italians to bevete piu latte: drink more milk!) coming to life to torment the prudish citizen who finds the billboard obscene. There is a real giant billboard built on location, and there are models of the same location and surrounding cityscape that would do Toho Studios proud. Fellini films from high and low angles, makes use of oversized and undersized props, and blasts close-ups of Ekberg's face across the giant screen to convey her size. Maybe it's the color and maybe it's her outfit, but I think she looks better here than in La Dolce Vita. I'll let the pictures tell the story from here.

The symbolism in the shot above is just gross; that's what's funny about it.

If this is the meaning of "latte" then maybe the future people of Idiocracy were onto something.

Luchino Visconti apparently didn't get the memo about making things big. "The Job" is a chamber piece by comparison to the previous episodes, though I'm sure he spent lavishly on interior decoration. He gives us Tomas Milian during the early matinee-idol phase of his career before his more famous work as spaghetti western bandit heroes or degenerates in Seventies crime films. It's another simple story: a German-Italian wife of Milian's aristocrat bargains with him to save him from scandal when gossip papers publicize some of his indiscretions and becomes a kind of prostitute herself when she compels hubby to pay her for sex, partly under pressure from her father to earn her own way in life. As I suggested above, this is the weakest part of the film, but it's still easy on the eye, thanks largely to Romy Schneider, whom Levine did choose to publicize as a new star, though she'd been working for a decade in Europe. Nino Rota did the music for this episode as well as for the Fellini, and I rather like this one better than his all-too-characteristic noodlings for his usual sidekick.

It's not that Visconti doesn't do anything interesting with the camera, but the small-scale story of poor little rich folk is a complete comedown after the Monicelli sprawl and the Fellini madness.

With Carlo Ponti producing, it was probably inevitable that the Sophia Loren episode would climax the film. De Sica is far away from Umberto D. or Bicycle Thieves territory in this ribald comedy, but everyone's been trying to live up to the film's concept, which is what sort of stories Giovanni Boccaccio might tell if transported to the 1960s to update his Decameron for a 1970 edition. In "The Raffle," the prize in the local spinoff of the Italian national lottery is a night with Loren, who runs a carnival shooting gallery. The complication is that she's falling in love with a local tough, but has to honor the terms of the lottery, which has been won by a local nebbish, or the Italian equivalent of such a person. This leads to some slapstick, some plain old slapping of Sophia's face, and an enticing display of the Loren legs. It ends, ending the picture, with a sort of happy ending for everybody.

Sophia Loren emerges like an apparition from a fog of fireworks in "The Raffle."

Keep your legs together, Sophia; it's gonna be a bumpy ride!

I suppose I like the Monicelli episode best because it has a lot of location shooting, and that appeals to the time-tourist in me. But the Fellini is also a kind of masterpiece, even if it lasts just a little too long, or long enough to go overboard with the Fellinisms like someone on a swing or people dancing in circles. As you've noticed, if I had to cut something the Visconti would go, but I can see how people with different sensibilities might prefer this one to the over the over the topness of Fellini or the crassness of the final story. And the De Sica is just a funny story with possibly the most beautiful woman in movies at the time to recapture your attention and wind things down. It's nothing great but it reestablishes that bustling exuberance from the first two stories that Visconti lost track of. But I forgive Visconti since I know he had The Leopard on his mind. He even does some product placement to preview his next feature by having Milian flip through an English-language edition of the Lampedusa novel.

Boccaccio '70 is an essential stop on anyone's wild world of cinema tour, if for the Fellini alone. But Fellini and Anita will have done some honest work if their gorgeous monstrosity attracts viewers to this sampler of Italian cinema in its golden age of global influence.

A trailer, too? But of course! And you'll get to hear "Soldi, soldi, soldi," which I guess was the hit tune from the movie.

Boccaccio'70 trailer
by soulpatrol