Anita Ekberg

  • Hollywood or Bust (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) The Martin and Lewis comedy duo may have been legendary during the ten years it ran, but today is usually a footnote to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ later solo careers. Hollywood or Bust came at the very end of their decade-long partnership, past the point when Martin was itching to get out of their contract considering that Lewis was getting all of the attention as the more overly comic half of the pair. That pressure is clearly at play here, as the film features Martin as a fast-talking hustler who is forced to partner with nerdy Lewis when they jointly win a car and decide to head southwest to Los Angeles. There are a few obvious resonances with the later Rain Man, but much of Hollywood or Bust is self-obviously about seeing Martin as the smooth talker and having to real with the insufferable Lewis along the way (and his big dog, because big dogs are comedy). There are plenty of period references for those well-versed in the period (including some worshipful shots of Anita Ekberg) and perhaps the best feature of the film is the capture (in colour!) of what a country-spanning road trip could mean before the rise of affordable commercial aviation. The gags are all over the place — if you’re the kind of person who laughs at Jerry Lewis antics, then the film will go over much better than otherwise. I liked it well enough (especially as the film reaches Hollywood and reaches into self-referential gags on the Paramount studio lot), but part of it is seeing earlier incarnations of familiar actors known for subsequent roads. You can certainly see echoes of Matt Helm and the Buddy Love here — although now that I know that Hollywood or Bust was made during a period of considerable tension between Martin and Lewis, I’m curious to see them at their best.

  • Back from Eternity (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m at a point in my exploration of Classic Hollywood where Sturgeon’s Law is finally reasserting itself. As a reminder, Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said that “ninety percent of everything is crud.” This is relevant to classic Hollywood in that most people who dive into the era will first see the classics — and over the forty-year period from 1927 (sound cinema) to 1967 (New Hollywood), there are a lot of them. But sooner or later, you run out of the best and have to tackle the rest, and that takes us to Back from Eternity, a rather disjointed survival drama that takes forever to get going, eventually making its way to lifeboat ethics that it tackles with disturbing gusto. The premise of the film has an airplane crash-land in South America, with nine survivors doing their best to repair the plan and survive the local headhunters. My TV guide log entry helpfully adds, “…but the repaired plane can only hold five people,” which pretty much gives away everything but the last three minutes of the film. As with other stories manipulating a plot to end up in an ethical quandary about lifeboat survival (seriously: Why five rather than eight when you’re dealing with an airliner? The pilot’s fiat declaration carries a lot of weight here), the screenwriter goes straight to logic and reason as arbiter of who should live or die, which usually leads us straight to arbitrary decision based on the screenwriter’s morality. Blech. This being said, there are many, many other problems with Back from Eternity even before it finally gets to its final reel — the interminable setup that ends up with very little payoff being the worst of them. Much of the film’s publicity material makes a bit deal out of Anita Ekberg as the film’s pin-up girl, but the most interesting role here goes to a bearded Rod Steiger as a moral criminal with nothing to lose in making decisions for others. The black-and-white cinematography is a disappointment given the lush jungle setting, although it probably simplified the process of shooting most of the film on a soundstage. All in all — Back from Eternity is far from being the worst film ever made, but it’s still a disappointment considering the long setup and the disappointing payoff. But then again, most movies are crud.

  • La Dolce Vita [The Good Life] (1960)

    La Dolce Vita [The Good Life] (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) At nearly three hours of a nearly plotless movie about a nearly unlikable protagonist, writer-director Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita can be a trying viewing experience. It’s a collage of scenes with minimal narrative connective tissue, a lot of supporting characters that come and go without resolution, a decidedly depressing outlook on the search for meaning and enough ambiguity and loose ends to frustrate anyone who thinks that cinema is a primarily story-driven art form. That used to describe me almost perfectly a few years ago, but I’ve grown far more relaxed in my outlook for a while, striving to find pleasure even in movies that would have exasperated me not too long ago. La Dolce Vita does manage to remain interesting despite having been made into cliché—much of what it did to shock audiences back in 1960 (it was banned in a few countries) has been remade, redone, and re-examined (often far more interestingly, sometimes even by Fellini himself). We’re not exactly shocked anymore by a protagonist going from woman to woman, adventure to adventure, excess after excess in search of existential fulfillment. We’re not so shocked by backless dresses, form-fitting bras or prudish stripteases filmed to avoid showing nudity. There are scores of meandering films chronicling a few days in the life of an erring protagonist. But La Dolce Vita remains the ur-example of the form for a reason—it’s at its best when it jumps the bounds of strict Italian neorealism to spend some time in Fellini’s expressionist imagination. It features an impressive number of striking women: Anita Ekberg certainly makes an impression as a movie star in the film’s most purely enjoyable moment. But above all, La Dolce Vita features Marcello Mastroianni, world-class-cool despite playing a borderline reprehensible character. We can coast a long time on Mastrantonio’s charm and the odd visuals that the film throws at us in the middle of the protagonist’s search for meaning. It doesn’t really lead anywhere but a melancholic sense of missed opportunities, but it’s an interesting trip. This being said: I’ve seen the film, all 174 minutes of it. I don’t need to do so again anytime soon.