I would have to be dead, I suppose, if I didn't succumb to some of the terrible gags in Top Secret! or Step Brothers. Laughter is a kind of autonomic response after all, like your leg kicking when the doctor uses that rubber hammer on your knee. But it becomes irritating if you laugh when you don't want to laugh - when it becomes clear that the people trying to make you laugh have done so little to earn it. This is especially bothersome when you realize that you are one of the few people alive, apparently, who has seen René Clair's Le Million or It's a Gift with the magnificent W. C. Fields. Is the absence of the near- perfect Smiles of a Summer Night the result of negligence? Whoever is convinced that Raising Arizona is "funnier" than these great films is undeserving of either the title "critic" or "scholar." Clearly, they are nothing but fans.
Federico Fellini is represented on the BBC's list - at number 85 - by Amarcord, which has some incidental humor but is hardly a comedy. By the time he made Amarcord, Fellini had long since lost his way as an artist. How could anyone find the spectacle of his decline the least bit funny?
But why is his early masterpiece The White Sheik nowhere to be found on the list? For his first film on his own (he co-directed Variety Lights with Alberto Lattuada), Fellini used a script about the "fumetti" - cheap photo-fantaserials - that had already been prepared for what what would have been the first film of Michelangelo Antonioni. Fellini developed it with his usual script-writing partners of the Fifties, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. It is the story of newlyweds Ivan and Wanda Cavalli who have come by train straight from their wedding in their hometown of Altavilla Marittima to Rome in order that Ivan can show off the lovely Wanda to his Roman relations. Entirely unbeknownst to Ivan, however, Wanda has a clandestine second life as "Passionate Dolly" (Bambola Apassionata) - a devoted fan of the fumetti featuring The White Sheik. "All week I wait for my magazine on Saturday. I buy it at the station, hurry home and shut myself in my room. There my real life begins." Wanda's fanatical devotion has no contact with reality, and she has written three letters to The White Sheik telling him she is coming to Rome, and he has responded with one typewritten letter, telling her "If in Rome soon, come and see me. We'll spend unforgettable hours together."
Upon checking into a hotel in Rome, where Ivan tells Wanda about their tight schedule, meeting with his family, seeing some monuments and an audience with the Pope, Wanda asks a porter the directions to the address The White Shiek gave her and suggests a long bath to Ivan as a pretext for her escape. What follows is a great deal too much experience for both of these innocents.(1)
For his three leads, Fellini had two veteran Italian comedians - Alberto Sordi and Leopoldo Trieste - and a newcomer. Sordi is perfect as the ridiculous sheik, whom we first glimpse (through the dazed eyes of Wanda) on an impossibly high swing suspended between two trees. Fellini even indulges in a bit of cinema sleight of hand for his graceful dismount. Wanda is so mesmerized by his antics that the only thing that spares her from becoming another of his amorous conquests is when a timely sailboat boom raps him on the skull.
Trieste is hilarious as he proceeds from pride to bewilderment to near- hysterical shame. In one of Fellini's signature night scenes, having spent the day in search of his missing wife, he collapses at one of the innumerable fountains of Rome. Splashing water in his face, he looks up at the indifferent stars. Around the corner come two rather well-heeled prostitutes, one of whom is Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) whom Fellini would later follow in The Nights of Cabiria. Seeing Ivan, they wonder if he's thinking of suicide. They listen to his sad story, until a man appears whom Cabiria persuades to perform his specialty, which is fire-breathing. It's a strange, surreal moment in the scene, that presages many such moments in Fellini's later films.
Both Ivan and Wanda are mistaken for lunatics, and Ivan, when he has finally run out of excuses to his family, collapses in the hotel lobby. But his efforts to save Wanda and himself from the shame that her foolishness might have caused is heroic. Both of them emerge physically unscathed but emotionally purged of whatever illusions they may have entertained about each other.
The film abounds in tiny but beautifully observed details. The hotel desk clerk who looks and sounds like he's seen everything, and is incessantly pushing postcards on the clientele. The man in swimming trunks who shows up on the set of the latest fumetti number. "What do you want?" the director asks him. "I'm an admirer of the Tenth Muse," he says. The morose police detective trying to comprehend Ivan's disjointed tale of a disappearing wife, and then calling for a psychiatrist when he becomes convinced that he's crazy. Sordi's fantastic dance with Wanda.
Listening to Nino Rota's instantly unforgettable music, especially the sad waltz in the final scene, before it returns to the jaunty theme from the beginning of the film as the Cavalli family is hurried off to meet the Pope, is an unadulterated pleasure. At times it sounds like a Chaplin film.
As it turned out, The White Sheik was Brunella Bovo's first and last film. She granted an interview on the film's 50th anniversary, carrying those fifty years with surprising grace.
Now regarded by everyone (everyone except the BBC's 253 fans) as a classic, The White Sheik was not well received in Italy in 1952. Unperturbed, Fellini moved on to make I Vitelloni in '53, another classic but in a different mode.
(1) When Wanda assures Ivan at the end of her escapade that she is still pure, he looks toward heaven and announces that so is he - despite his having spent the night with a prostitute the night before.
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