BOOKS.

WE GIVE OUR APPROVAL TOO EASILY

LA DOLCE VITA by Federico Fellini. New York: Ballantine Books. 75¢ Reviewed by Oberon.

Already many famous homosexuals have noted their approval of this film and script, and we hear discussion of "its shattering, controversial theme which lays bare the corruption of our times." And, as bad as the film really is, I do not write of it now in order to keep anyone away: I went for the same reasons of scandal that will prompt most of you, and I only hope that you will find more pleasure in the results of your eagerness than I did. Certainly "transvestites, pederasts, effeminate men" do appear in both book and film, and there is even one sequence-decadent and boring to Fellini, but independently of his presentation, rather witty-in which two drag queens dance a can-can to Jingle Bells. With such as that how could you or I keep away? But I do think that somewhere in these pages, even if as a minority report, someone should doubt the seriousness, the weightiness, of this film. Or, rather than doubt, merely raspberry those who do take it solemnly. Nothing that the characters do is as decadent, as degenerate, as little humane, as the camera eye itself, and it is this eye that ironically finds its perfect metaphor in the stare of the monster pulled out of the sea at the end of this seemingly endless film. For the camera sees its people just as the journalists that it mocks see them, and the result is an exploitation, a heavily laden theme which like a cossack raid scythes down whatever life there is in such material and allows none of that growth which leads to a work of

art.

If a character out of Our Town, with that sort of intelligence, that sort of "moral scope, had escaped Thornton Wilder's fierce and clammy grip and had come to the Big City, he might have imagined such a film as La Dolce Vita (and won an Academy Award?). By this I mean not only that the intelligence in the film is a poor one, although such is surely so, nor only that the imagination is puny, but that finally humanity is absent and intolerance alone is contagion. We need only contrast La Dolce Vita with another, and superior, mattachine REVIEW

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current Italian film, L'Aventura. In L'Aventura, a young woman falls in love with a young man who, like the characters in La Dolce Vita, moves in aristocratic circles; they make love, and promptly thereafter she finds him pursuing another woman, his third in the film. He weeps, she forgives. Sentimental? No-she learns, she is clear-eyed now, in a sphere as bleak and hopeless, as rapidly corrupt, as any Fellini can present us, and her tenderness touches that world in a way that means something genuine. Fellini gives us one of his "innocents," smiling and distant, a girl on the other side of a sand-bank-Symbol, everybody-and we can only contrast the first girl's knowledge, her power of giving in a world that she recognizes is as limited as the one in which we all live, with the shallowness of Fellini's concept (and indeed, are any of his people anything but concepts?) and know which director, which writer, describes grace the more seriously. Fellini is a clown.

No doubt in a world where many still consider Alfred Hitchcock an artist there is a place for Federico Fellini; and probably in these comments I am complaining as if I were vengeful that a bad mystery writer is not something more. If Fellini is not serious, why should I be solemn? But I think solemnity appropriate in this magazine: just as we will read any book, see any play, that touches on the homosexual theme-no matter how bad the book, how poor the play-we will hurry to this movie; and something in us should protest that we know better. We give our approval too easily. We are almost masochistic in our eagerness for even this sort of recognition. Junk is junk, whether it involves homosexuality or not, and La Dolce Vita is just that. Surely we find it difficult enough to fight inhumanity in our own lives, whether in ourselves or that which is shown us, to accept it so easily, with such praise, where it is so obvious in a film.

A WICKED BOOK

A NUMBER OF THINGS by Honor Tracy, 1960. Reviewed by Oberon. No doubt this is a wicked book. Miss Tracy looks like a Celtic Sappho, durable, doughy and toughly determined; and most likely the only reason that her mouth does not show the same astonishing gap of teeth that Brendan Behan has recently made so sufficiently Irish is that she is obviously too tough, too durable, too doughy, to have suffered the more ridiculous indignities of life and battle. Although she sports her favorite hobby of raising flowers the way an older lady would wear a print dress, in order to mark the establishment of her gentility, her fragile fondness of the alive and love27