It’s hard when a legend turns up to be judged: hard to judge it, hard on the legend. Everything suffers, maybe judgment most of all. How can we help being influenced— or at least forewarned to a critically unhealthy extent—by the national hysteria Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (‘X’ certificate) aroused in Italy early this year? Everything and everyone was involved and invoked in dealing with it, in feeling for it (I can’t say in judging it, because judgment of the film as a fiim—our old friend right-thinking film criticism again—was pretty nearly impossible when everyone was busy attacking or defending it as a social document, a political manifesto, a sock in the eye to Church, State, high society, café society, the gutter press, the modern age, Italy, the West, etc. etc.).
I have in front of me some cuttings from Italian newspapers of last February : Moravia compares Fellini with Petronius, a child in a school essay writes: ‘For days at home every- one’s been talking about it, Daddy quarrelling with Mummy and my brothers with their friends, and Daddy saying life at home is one long hell these days because of it, and Mummy saying we mustn’t leave the newspapers around in case Tina, the maid, finds them, because it would be terrible if she saw the film,’ above all everyone using it as a yardstick with which to judge his friends’ moral worth: ‘Ali, so you liked it? Well, at last I know what you’re like.’
Fellini himself has (understandably enough) added fuel to that little blaze by saying that only bigots and Fascists (or words to that effect) would condemn it; but there again, he’s talking of its moral attitudes, its story, its people.
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