deickos

This is Fellini's best film - many people in the movie business could confirm this, they were able to borrow ideas one way or another from it all these years passed. What makes it so special is not only the abundance of themes and characters inside the main story or even the impeccable performance of Massina that binds everything together in her remarkable journey. Fellini here seems to possess something really rare, a unique moral and artistic authority that is so pervasive throughout the film and is able to embrace all humanity - beyond all these nights of both laughter and suffering finally comes redemption. Cabiria though has lost everything, she has managed to find herself nevertheless and is recognizable for what she truly stands. She glows the same way all the moments taken from this film inside other works.

Visconti's work is always refined and involves deep psychology that goes far beyond the elaborate and complex scenery. Passion in all forms is the theme of this film - love, betrayal, jealousy, egoism, arrogance, instincts, conflict, motives, reciprocity, revenge. Visconti although maintaining (as is his style always) a distance and although confines emotional outbursts to the minimum, he manages to reach the end of the road without a glitch. Death (suicide) and (self) destruction is the order of things. It is precisely because he believes in a deeper (or higher for others) order that is able to maintain his composure throughout this tempest of passions along all the way. Something very few people in the cinema have accomplished so far.

The closing words of the film are "these people are so careless, they always do what they want and expect others to deal with the mess". Fitzgerald's remark was prophetic for his era - but at least then it was FDR who put America on its feet again. It was prophetic again when at the turning of the century America was led by irresponsible incompetent idiots and psychopaths - America now is a shadow of its former self. I have not found another writer capable to portray this country like Fitzgerald and in this aspect this film is a must-see. The film itself was prophetic on its own right when it came out after the worst decade in America's history, then. Unfortunately the worst were and are still to come.