Cheap Variety Lights (Video) (Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini) Price

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Customer Reviews of Variety Lights

This movie, co-directed by Fellini, is his first film. The story follows a young woman who joins a vaudeville act and brings great popularity to it.

The film has good acting and the English title is a very close translation of the original title, "Luci del varietà" or "Lights of Variety"

The DVD has no special features which is a disappointment since this is a Criterion release.

Green Fellini-- but still worth a look
Variety Lights is Fellini's debut film. The film consists of ideas and motifs that would succeedingly appear in movies like 8 1/2 and The Clowns. However, these traits are still undeveloped but we can see how they would be used as personal metaphors for the director. Running under an hour, the film is shown in black and white with legible subtitles and moving at a smooth pace. The story follows a variety show troupe and an female audience member who is so inspired by one of their performances that she asks to join their group. We are then presented with the rise of the performer's act and how mistakes like having her dress fall off soon attracts the attention of the audience. Soon the variety show begins displaying a more racy repertory all which is fronted by sexy novice. Some images in the film like large behinds and women in bikinis may have been provocative for its time in America --although Italy's standards tended to be more shocking. Nevertheless, as discussed in the documentary Rated X, Fellini's movies was generally restricted to Adult theaters due to subject matter, although much more provocation was soon to come. Variety Lights features Masina, Fellini's wife, in a supporting role as a dancer with few scenes, although she still gives a good performance nevertheless. Masina would soon gather more attention to her acting in succeeding Fellini films like Night of Cabaria and La Strata. However, the focus of this film is directed at De Filippo for his role as the impresario and Poggio as the desperate actress. Veriety Lights is not the best Fellini production but still worth a look.

Fellini's fascinating debut.
This is the '1/2' film alluded to in the title of Fellini's masterpiece '8 1/2', Il Maestro's debut, co-directed with the now-forgotten Alberto Lattuada. it tells the story of a troupe of small-time entertainers travelling through the provinces of Italy, playing in poky, leaking theatres to small, abusive audiences, their meagre fees impounded by hotel owners with long memories; they're usually forced to sneak train rides or walk miles between stops.

Against this lively backdrop is a tragicomic romance, part-'A Star is Born', part-'The Blue Angel', between a middle-aged performer and a budding starlet. The former deludes himself about his greatness and influence in order to hide the cruel realities of failure and aging, but when the latter takes him at his word, he throws up the very real security his shambling peripatetic life offers, to promote his ambitious charge, with tragedy lurking around the corner.

This tale has a nasty, misogynistic undertow, with Carla de Poggio's Lily portrayed as cold and almost homicidally calculating, and Peppino de Filippo's besotted loser Checco sentimentalised (although his is the one emotionally truthful performance in the film), but luckily it isn't the film's main interest. Although it's only half his work, many of Fellini's motifs, themes and stylistic trademarks are present - the uneasy co-existence of dusty, small-town Italy with the American-fuelled dreams of theatre and showbiz; the nocturnal, dream-like scenes on empty streets, where the lead meets strangers and has a kind of group epiphany in which reality is enchanted or suspended; the indulgent (though clear-eyed) portrait of flawed, family-like artist life against the soulless commericalism of the nouveau riche; the cinematic momentum in which plot is less important than set-pieces in which accumulated incidents and protracted character interaction achieve a kind of carnivalesque truth.

Fellini would refine these elements later - scenes that should be magical fall a little flat; the characters aren't interesting or comic enough; the blaring music definitely lacks the Nino Rota touch - but the film is fascinating to see Fellini struggling with the limitations of his neo-realist apprenticeship.