After three years of collaboration on such films as Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (1947), Senza pietà (1948) and Il mulino del Po’ (1949), Alberto Lattuada suggested to his writer Federico Fellini that they should collaborate on the direction of their next project, Luci del varietà. He was also involved in the challenge of forming an independent production cooperative (including a considerable number of the cast, from Carla Del Poggio to Giuli­etta Masina, from Peppino De Filippo to Bianca Lattuada, from Otello Martelli to Felice Lattuada), to produce their films themselves. The story, conceived by Fellini, originated in the same ironic and bitter vein as some of his juvenile stories, published in 1939 in “Cinemagazzino” and above all in the rubric “The spotlight is on” (1941) by “Marc’Aurelio”. The glittering world of the variety stage, with the choleric presence of the comedians and magicians and the provocative eroticism of the dancers and soubrettes, is suffused with disillusion: behind the scenes, behind the illusions of the sequins and spangles are small miseries, squalor, precarious and promiscuous lives, professional failure. This is the universe revealed in the film, following the unhappy amorous passion of Checco Dalmonte (Peppino De Fil­ippo), a shabby and now elderly wretch, for Liliana (Carla Del Poggio), an aspiring dancer, who has fled from the provinces (like Moraldo at the end of I Vitelloni) and she will find her fortune alone. Years later, there were polemics between Lattuada and Fellini on the paternity of the film, in large part initiated by the former, but the film is undoubtedly Fellinian in its fragmentary and picaresque structure and the mixture of pity and unsparing frankness. In 1994 Lattuada defined the making of the film, “the moments of our common work”, as “a pleasurable stimulant drug”. According to Bianca Lattuada, Fellini personally directed the beautiful sequence of Checco’s noctural walk and his meet­ing with a human faun on the margins of society, instantly recruited for a show. Fellini had also imagined a scene in which Johnny, the black musician, suddenly releases his savage and primitive nature, terrifying everyone. The production enterprise was bold but doomed, not least because Carlo Ponti hastily produced a film on a similar subject (Monicelli and Steno’s Vita da cani, with Fabrizi) in order to kill at birth this enterprise of a coop­erative of cineastes.

Roberto Chiesi