An unexpected treasure re-appeared from the Italian Film Archives in 2008: two rolls of film that had been cut from Lo Sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952), the first film directed entirely by Federico Fellini. Fulvio Baglivi, cinema academic, and Sergio Toffetti, head of the Piedmont branch of the Experimental Film Centre, identified twenty minutes of editing cuts, double versions and unreleased scenes from the already mixed audio and from the fade-outs, which probably belonged to a first edit. A few of these scenes were already present in the original screenplay (published for the first time only in 1969, in Il primo Fellini, edited by Renzo Renzi, Cappelli): the appearance of two Indian ladies, sitting in the hall of a Roman hotel, and contemplated by an enthralled Wanda (Brunella Bovo), who has just arrived in the capital with her husband Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste); the moment when the photonovel editor, Marilena Alba Vellardi (Fanny Marchiò), is amused to find out that Wanda is married and the girl phones her husband, asleep in the hotel, to say “I’ll be back soon”, with the effect of throwing him into a panic. However, the most important scene is unquestionably the one where Ivan wakes up in the bedroom of a prostitute he has innocently spent the night with, and of the encounter with the old lady who would like to serve him coffee and with the man stretched out on a bed in the middle of the living room. Anxious and distraught, Ivan is walked to the door by the prostitute (played by Jole Silvani, who almost thirty years later would be the sex-starved ‘boiler woman’ in La città delle donne – City of women, who is a friend to the little Cabiria/Giulietta Masina in Sceicco bianco. Pieces added during shooting but not mentioned in the screenplay include the episode where Ivan, alone in the bedroom with Wanda, and before the girl steals away with the excuse of having a bath, smothers her with clumsy kisses that betray his excitement at the idea of a ‘nighttime snooze’. Alberto Sordi (as Fernando Rivoli, the ‘white sheik’) probably improvised the several lazy wisecracks directed at Wanda on the boat she has been coaxed aboard in his attempt to seduce her. These cuts show some close-ups of the actor, who accentuates the smarmy and narcissistic traits of the character he plays. The lunch at the restaurant was also planned to be longer, with Ivan’s uncle (Ettore M. Margadonna) asking him to recite Dante’s verses on Count Ugolino. Baglivi and Toffetti have included the rediscovered Lo sceicco bianco scenes to correspond with those of the final version of the film, or, in the case of variants, immediately after the ones that were in fact chosen, so that the viewer may make an immediate comparison. This editing is preceded by an introduction by Moraldo Rossi, continuity supervisor for the film and later assistant director on I vitelloni, La strada and Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria).

Roberto Chiesi