Luci del varieta
Luci del varietai seems to have been made rather as a vehicle for the sale of quite forgettable Carla's commonplace body (which she doesn't even put on display properly, id est frankly). Because oh look, an adolescent female! That looks just like any other one! I fucked dozens just like her -- who the fuck cares ? Or rather, should I ask, what the fuck were they doing ? To add insult to injury, one suspects a very Romanian-like inferiority complex behind the whole thing : Napoletan peasant girl looks somewhat like Rita Hayworth (in smaller part because nature, in larger part because make-up, hairdo, etcetera) and so therefore it satisfies the deep "we too" urge of the fringy morons.
Nevertheless, Giulietta works quite well for the part of the aging wife-of-the-road. The loving one, who cooks, and cleans, and is readily betrayed -- becauseii she readily forgives (as she should -- it's not her failure this, even if readily abused). The dork she supports is no good, yes, and it sucks to be her, but dem's the breaks. Fixing cars that slide on ice isn't to be attained (or even attempted) by reducing the cylinder capacity.
Toto's straight man is ok in the role of the nice guy with a great sense of humour, and that's a tough line considering all the competition. It's been done to death, ten billion trillion morons attempted "their own personal take" on that tower of towering sadness to date, even doing an ok job's by now a very high bar therefore.
Which leaves us with the story, rather typical commedia, well done in parts, tedium in summa, what can you do. At least the backdrop's informative, who even knew what vaudeville wasiii anymore anyway ?!
———- 1950, by Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini, with Giulietta Masina, Peppino de Filippo, Carla Del Poggio. [↩]
- "I figure I'll have an easier time patching things up with blondy schmoopy-of-the-week than with the Soup Nazi." [↩]
- "What is vaudeville" asks the young slavegirl. And her Master answered : "Back in the day a lot of girls showed up at the bus station, coming from rural circumstances and trying to find their place in town. The men in the market for fresh rural cunt at the time didn't, however, have the wherewithal to visit the facts of life upon the cute little lambsies directly, and so instead took them to a show. This is the practical social need vaudeville fills, a bit of song, a bit of dance, a bit of slapstick, some sexual suggestive material -- everything very flat and all out in your face, carefully adapted to the mental capacities and the intellectual universe of a rural cuntlet seeking out her fulfillment. It's a nutcracker, if you wish, taking Kansas priss from barn to bedroom within a season or two (without -- importantly -- requiring any actual work from the limp hands that should be holding the whip but long ago withered out of it). Which is why it was time-limited, the style of independent migration from the farms of recently worthless cunt started more or less during the Gilt Age and ended sometime around WW2, when whiplash started gaining mommentum. The mere trickle of young cunt coming in found ready buyers among the well to do at first, you see, but soon enough this relatively inflexible demand was satisfied, while the river on offer kept growing and growing to deluvional proportions. Au produs pe stoc, as the Romanian expression goes, for a few decades, but eventually "reform" had to come and put a stop to that. Basically you could say vaudeville was the time-limited expression of the situation where cunt wasn't economically valuable any longer in the general, but pockets of demand could still be found here and there." [↩]
