Movies into Film

The Battle of Algiers

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

Algeria/Italy, 1965

I Vitelloni

Directed by Federico Fellini

Italy, 1953

February returns a pair of long unseen classic films to light in the Pacific Northwest: The 1965 Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo and 1953’s I Vitelloni from Federico Fellini. How I wish that time were on the side of both. That fickle unity serves the Pontecorvo extraordinarily well; the Fellini, as much as I wanted to love it, I can only admire.

In the disorienting first scenes from The Battle of Algiers (the grainy black and white photography is by Marcello Gatti) a wizened, grimy informant, after being tortured, has betrayed the last of the Algerian freedom fighters in hiding to the occupying French army. The soldiers offer him recompense for revealing the hideout location, yet he's too broken to accept the token bone they toss. Soon we flashback three years, to 1954, to trace the reshaping of FLN, or National Liberation Front, from a ragged coalition of “drunks, whores, and junkies” to a stronger breed that can “clean house” in order to “take on the real enemy.” Those phrases in quotes are from the quietly charismatic FLN leader El-hadi Jaffar, played by Saadi Yacef, whose real-life struggles to win Algeria’s independence from French rule served as the basis for this film. Jaffar becomes a sort of mentor in terrorism to the young petty thief Ali La Pointe (a shatteringly believable Brahim Haggiag). Ali quite adeptly does most of his house cleaning with a machine gun.

A scene from The Battle of Algiers (Photo: Rialto Pictures)

It’s worth noting here that both Yacef and Haggiag look made for the camera, yet neither had acted previously. Nor did this photogenic duo, for better or worse, ever appear in another film. The press kit describes Haggiag as “an illiterate peasant” whom Pontecorvo literally plucked off the streets.

Early on, I found the film difficult to enter. The first moment that genuinely engaged me happens as Ali, serving time in jail, witnesses a fellow prisoner’s execution by guillotine. Deliberately at odds with this image, the soundtrack pipes sweetly with a sensitive solo for flute, as opposed to the usual frenzied mania that you might expect to accompany a decapitation. (Ennio Morricone wrote the music.) The blade’s work done, Pontecorvo cuts to a shot of rain spattering down eaves. This unexpected lyricism opened a passage in for me.

Other examples of Pontecorvo’s graceful, benign, easygoing, relaxed portrayals of violence come forth. A group of French colonials bomb an Arab tenement, and the scenes of survivors and dead bodies being pulled from the wreckage are treated exquisitely. The camera hovers over one dead little boy, aged perhaps 7 or 8, his lifeless arms splayed as if in the sign of the cross. Pontecorvo matches this child, an eye for an eye, with an adorably cute toddler who’s contentedly licking ice cream at a European café moments before a bomb in a matron’s handbag blows the place to bits. Later, French paratroopers torture unarmed Algerians with electric shocks and acetylene torches in a montage scored to a Bach organ chorale. The events are horrible, their depiction unfailingly beautiful.

Our sympathies are so much absorbed with Ali and company that the movie’s mid-point introduction of Colonel Mathieu (played by Jean Martin) comes with a jolt. From the moment we see this Special Forces madman marching down the street in his battle fatigues and beret, the parallels shared by the film’s era and our own become that much clearer. While the respective hardships of Algeria then and Iraq now may bear few similarities, the sense of déjà vu between French colonialism and unilateral American imperialism resonates with a fury. When Colonel Mathieu tells his troops, “We must create a situation to justify intervention,” it's impossible not to think of George W. Bush.

The streets of Algiers, already a militarized zone with barbed wire check points that separate the European quarters from the Casbah, degenerate even further as detainees are rounded-up Ashcroft style (i.e. anyone with brown skin) and in a cataclysmic sequence, a French officer brays propaganda through a loudspeaker to the demoralized native population. “France is your motherland,” sounds not too far from U.S. blather about “homeland security.” The tone smacks of Bush. Or of Adolf Hitler, take your pick.

Much of the imagery in Fellini’s I Vitelloni feels remote, dimmed by time. Although this now 51-year-old film remains stunning in patches, and painfully accurate in etching the desperate sleaziness of human exploits, overall I Vitelloni left me cold and unsatisfied.

The situations, among them a brother objecting to his sister’s affair with a married man, are pure soap opera; and Fellini’s fleeting scenarios (the archetypal stock characters watch their hopes turn into horrors, again and again) aren’t particularly well explored. The writer-director illustrates his lone point that his 20-something male protagonists are either unmotivated oafs or starry dreamers, then gives us nothing else to go on. (The film’s title, if you don’t already know, translates roughly as “the fatted calves.”)

Nino Rota’s diamond shining brilliance has alone preserved its youth—or youthfulness. His music still sounds eerie and modern, as fresh as tomorrow, with bell-toned ornamental trills rising up where least we expect them and deep organ lurches plowing the ground out from beneath us.

There’s also one non-Rota musical moment that’s perfectly right. Fausto, the most shiftless of the bunch, takes perverse delight in hitting on his boss’s wife while the two of them are alone together in a store stockroom. Fausto (Franco Fabrizi) and the significantly older Giulia (played by the Czech actress Lida Baarová, who was once romantically linked with Joseph Goebbels and subsequently charged with treason and espionage) end up on the floor searching for candles; the young man taunts her sexually—to arouse Giulia so that he can laugh cruelly at her wants—and in the background, a mechanical music box plays its tinny version of the Wilhelm Grosz pop hit “Isle of Capri”—a delicious master stroke of irony.

Images from I Vitelloni (Kino International)

It isn’t Fellini’s fault that a half-century’s worth of homage paid to this film has robbed it of currency. However, during an impromptu mambo on a cobbled street, his camera seems to love being in the wrong place. Instead of filling the frame with his merry hoofers, Fellini inserts reaction shots that detract from the sense of spontaneity.

More significantly, besides the abomination Fausto, only Sandra (Leonora Ruffo), the local “Miss Mermaid” contest winner whom Fausto impregnates and later marries, emerges as a well-defined personality. The drag queen/clown Alberto (overacted by Alberto Sordi, who just a year before I Vitelloni had played to perfection the title role in Fellini’s The White Sheik) isn’t anything more than an effeminate gasbag, and Leopoldo, who longs to be recognized for his efforts as a playwright, rises to the foreground only in a single sequence. Leopoldo’s humiliation at the hands of a homosexual actor still has the power to make your flesh creep. This nocturnal, seaside, bait-and-switch encounter “partakes equally of the risible, the macabre, and the pitiful,” so John Simon noted in Private Screenings. (Macabre and pitiful, yes. But I found this freak show garden path too clammy for laughter.) And Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste) seems not to exist save for the sole purpose of being bashed this way. Worse still, there is the inexplicable attachment that Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) forms to an androgynous young railroad worker named Guido. Are their scenes together supposed to be homoerotic? (Christ, I hope not.) Or does Fellini suggest that Moraldo’s case of arrested development can be abated by the genuine naïveté of this child? Whatever the rationale, I was unconvinced by the pairing.

All that said, this 1953 work nonetheless towers above the director’s dismal endeavors from the 1970s and ‘80s. (In the minority opinion as I so often am, I don’t share the world’s nodding approval of Amarcord.) I Vitelloni lacks the incisive fancifulness of either The White Sheik or 8½, Fellini’s two masterpieces; and it lacks the almost perfectly controlled telescopic gaze into the abyss that makes Nights of Cabiria a near-masterpiece. I Vitelloni closes with a sublime early morning montage of sleepers in their beds. It seems a truly loving gesture—the camera sweeps in for a long, high view and moves without fuss on to the next bedroom—this glimpse of deep peace from which sleepers must inevitably awake. – NPT

February 2004

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