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MATTERS OF CONTENT 269
preference for happy endings. But no matter what was meant with it, this "last laugh" still stands out as an ingenious, if crude, cinematic conclusion: it points beyond the near-tragic ending without obscuring its reality character. (The figure of the hotel porter is of course tragic only in a world saturated with authoritarian and militaristic notions— the very world which was one of the obsessions of the pre-Hitler German screen.)5
It need not be a dream of happiness. The main thing is that the ending does not mark the end. A classical example of such a finale is the ever-recurring concluding shot of Chaplin's old comedies; we see the Tramp waddle away and we know that he is indestructible. Similarly, all neorealistic Italian films which do not picture war feature characters who are given a new lease of life at the end; the ending of these films defies tragedy and is incompatible with the theatrical story in general.
An admirable achievement in terms of artistic intelligence and human delicacy is the last episode of Umberto D., in which De Sica manages, against heavy odds, to substitute a chance of survival for impending doom. [Illus. 54] At the end of his tether, Umberto, the old pensioner, sees no other way out than to do away with himself; and since his dog— a creature as unwanted as he— insists on keeping him company, he takes it with him to the railway outside the public park. The anguished animal whines and yelps as a train is approaching. "No," you hear the old man say. And he doubles back on his steps for the sake of the only being which connects him with the world of the living. Yet no sooner has he returned to the park than the dog, hurt by his master's unintelligible, nay, hostile conduct, refuses to play with him and proves unresponsive to all his advances. Like a rejected lover, Umberto continues his wooing with an urgency which cannot but kindle his will to live, as it were. Indeed, when he eventually succeeds in being re-admitted as a playmate, he seems almost happy, if one could apply such a term to him. Playing with each other, the man and the dog move toward the background, becoming ever smaller. Is doom only postponed? However pregnant with it, the future which opens before Umberto and us is unforeseeable.
The finale of Fellini's Cabiria is no less indeterminate. As the heartbroken Cabiria walks through the nocturnal wood where young people are making music and dancing and drifting about in a Dionysian mood, we do not know what will happen to her; we only learn from a change of her facial expression that she will walk on and that there is no end to her story. Fellini himself says that his films never end; moreover, he explains why he deliberately avoids the kind of conclusion inseparable from the theatrical story: "I think it is immoral ... to tell a story that has a conclusion. Because you cut out your audience the moment you present a solution on the screen . . . Conversely, by not serving them the happy