We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Shorter Reviews 135
Fellini sketches the plight of these men but concentrates on one fellow. Fausto, who gets a girl pregnant, marries her, but still does not settle down emotionally, sexually, or financially. His infidelities and irresponsibilities are well demonstrated, but this rather familiar material is not transformed sufficiently to equal the imagination and suggestiveness of La Strada. There are some moments of undeniable power but they usually occur when Fellini forgoes his n'er do well protagonist in order to reveal some less personal aspect of Italian life: the carnival dance and the morning after, the sordid atmosphere in a local girlie show, and the bizarre scene between an old actor and a youthful writer. The story of the protagonist and his wife is given a happy ending, they are reconciled, but one feels that this is just a concession to the audience and that the marriage will continue to flounder upon the rocks until death or separation do them part. Although there is no hope in this relationship, there is hope for the sensitive one of the group who repudiates the irresponsible and rakish actions of his friends. As he leaves town to start his life anew, the film ends.
The music is hardly consistent with the tone of the film. There is a tremendously sentimental tune and occasionally something that sounds disconcertingly like the soundtrack of a flying saucer movie.
If one is interested in the modern lost generation of Italy and in some telling pictures of their milieu, then Vitelloni will satisfy. It is definitely among the ten best Italian films, but it is by no means the masterpiece that its international awards would lead us to expect.
(Contemporary Films)
A WALK IN THE SUN
(U.S.A., 1945)
Directed by Lewis Milestone
Milestone's A Walk in the Sun reflects the time in which it was made by not seeing war as wanton slaughter but as a dirty task that has to be done. But beyond this pragmatism, the film maintains no point of view. The enemy is seen purely as "enemy" and there is no twinge of compassion as the soldiers who fight for one government kill those working for another. Such human touches can only occur in a mass medium after the emotions, which have been raised to fever pitch during the war, have had a chance to cool. Only then can one see the enemy as fellow human beings without being traitorous.
The film concentrates on an American platoon which lands on Anzio Beach; its objective is to take a farmhouse stronghold of Nazis six miles from shore. What little plot there is concerns itself with a sergeant who takes control when the lieutenant is killed. But unused to the responsibilities of leadership, he soon cracks up and another sergeant (Dana Andrews) leads the men in a successful attack on the farmhouse.
It was not Milestone's aim to present the horrors of war as much as it *was to put on film, without cheap heroics, the faces and attitudes of the ordinary American soldier. He attempts to show an audience what