City of Women; Il Bidone

These two films from Italian cinema great Federico Fellini catch the prolific director during the beginning and, hopefully, late middle of his long and fruitful career. Il Bidone, aka "The Swindle," stars Broderick Crawford as Augusto, an aging crook who runs minor league scams on Italian peasants. His partners in crime are Roberto (Franco Fabrizi) an opportunist, and Picasso (Richard Basehart), a family man who carefully juggles his ignominious career with his loving marriage to Iris (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's real-life spouse). When Augusto is thrown in jail, he emerges to form a new gang and take up the old tricks once again, only this time with a startling and tragic ending. Similar to Fellini's superior La Strada (1954)--in its theme of an ignorant man learning about the ways of the world the hard way--Il Bidone is a good early work from the master. While Il Bidone only toys with Fellini's penchant for grand spectacle (primarily in one elaborate dinner party scene), City of Women is all spectacle. Using a brief framing device of a man named Snaporaz (Fellini alter ego Marcello Mastroianni) falling asleep on a train ride, the film quickly jets into an outrageous fantasy in which Snaporaz stumbles into a feminist convention, and learns a few things about women. Ridiculed, humiliated, and baffled, Snaporaz tries in vain to reach the train station, but ends up at the house of Dr. Zuberkock (Ettore Manni), a broadly painted chauvinist who is celebrating his 10,000th conquest. While there, Snaporaz takes a wonderfully filmed carnival ride during which he revisits the high points of his sexual youth and adolescence, and later has a moving heart to heart with his estranged wife. Overlong and allegorically overweight, City of Women features some brilliant vignettes, but cannot sustain its muddled examination of the battle between the sexes. While both films would be suitable for larger foreign film collections, Il Bidone is the better choice of the two, though City of Women would probably find more favor, and more controversy, with modern audiences. (R. Pitman)