The movie Federico Fellini admitted was a failure: “That’s a sensible justification”
Having an idea or a vision is one thing, seeing it through to the end is entirely another, and often with creatives, whether it be songwriters or authors or directors like the great Federico Fellini, the result will often end up as a completely different animal from those first hastily-captured bursts of inspiration.
While Fellini was without doubt one of the greatest of all time, there were still missteps, where either films that didn’t chime with the critics, or sometimes with audiences, or he felt he hadn’t mirrored the ideas he originally put in place. Even for the man who made La Dolce Vita and 8½, there were films that were considered failures. It happens; even Christopher Nolan made Tenet.
For Fellini, one of those films was 1952’s comedy The White Sheik, starring Alberto Sordi, telling the story of a couple arriving in Rome for their holiday, only for the bride to go on a quest to meet the star of her favourite romance novels, leaving her husband floundering to explain to his family where his new wife is.
The movie represented his first time directing a film solo after a joint effort two years prior, and the treatment was penned by Michelangelo Antonioni, who would go on to direct the magnificent Blow Up in 1966. Before moving into films, Fellini had a career writing comic strips for newspapers, and that was reflected in The White Sheik, which satirised Italian society and featured a series of comic set pieces.
In conversation with the author Charles Thomas Samuels for Encountering Directors in 1973, a book of interviews with legends including Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman, Fellini was asked why The White Sheik initially failed to strike a chord with audiences, which found him relaying, “It’s ingenuous to ask an author to justify his failures. He can always find many reasons”.
Thomas pushed and suggested the film was too satiric about Italian day-to-day life, prompting Fellini to add, “That’s a sensible justification because it doesn’t require me either to mortify myself or to offer inflated excuses. Perhaps the film was ahead of its time. It’s an ironic story and Italians don’t like irony, sarcasm and buffoonery, but not irony… Listen how he makes me talk!”
Fortunately for the director, despite not performing at the box office, the film would eventually go on to be well thought of, especially once some time had passed and his work was looked at, as a whole, some years after his death in 1993. But at the time, he was in serious danger of not getting past his debut, with one critic declaring he had “not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction”.
Luckily for all of us, he was unbowed and set off on a run of films that would make him one of the most respected and influential auteurs in history. The following year, he directed I Vitelloni, a drama which was a huge commercial success and earned him an Academy Award nomination.
Then, in 1954, came the first of his masterpieces, La Strada, which was such a personal project for Fellini that he would suffer a nervous breakdown during the production, but his effort was rewarded with the Oscar for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’, with everyone from the Pope to the great Akira Kurosawa commenting on how they loved the movie.
But that was the mid-1950s, and Fellini was barely getting started. He would go on to collect another 12 Academy Award nominations and three more wins, for Nights of Cabria, 8 ½ and his semi-autobiographical comedy Amacord in 1973.
