Film School: Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini

Welcome to Film School! This is a column focused on movie history and all the stars, filmmakers, events, laws and, yes, movies that helped write it. Film School is a place to learn—no homework required.

The most famous scene in Marcello Mastroianni’s mammoth filmography almost didn’t happen. If mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis had had his way, it would have been Paul Newman frolicking with Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain. De Laurentiis thought Mastroianni was “too soft and goody-goody; a family man rather than someone who pushes women into bed.” 

But La Dolce Vita director Federico Fellini insisted on Mastroianni, because, as he said to the actor himself (!), he wanted “a very normal face, a face with no personality, a face with no expression, a banal face – a face like yours.” Understandably wounded, Mastroianni nevertheless asked to look at a script, and was instead furnished with, as he stated in an interview with Gideon Bachmann, “…sketches of the sea, with enormous mermaids at the bottom, and on the surface, men floating with big long dongs reaching down to the sea bed.” 

Somehow, he still agreed to sign on, and cinema history was made. 

Unsurprisingly considering the way Fellini sold it to his lead actor, there was no neat narrative to La Dolce Vita. Mastroianni plays Marcello, a journalist for a sleazy Roman tabloid who once had far grander ambitions. Those days are far behind him now, and over the course of the movie’s three spectacular, sad hours, we watch him sink irretrievably into the moral abyss. 

Mastroianni is exquisite in the role of a lifetime, giving the decay of his character’s soul a quiet, tragic weight amid the hedonistic howl of his lifestyle. “They’re not born cowards, nor without courage.” Mastroianni would say of his wayward characters in a 1987 interview with Curtis Bill Pepper, “They just get lost. They don’t know where to go. There’s no sign or moral truth to live by.” Throughout the movie, we watch as Marcello tries, fruitlessly, to find something to believe in. As he grows ever more jaded, Mastroianni seems to physically change, with the dead-eyed playboy of the final scene seeming a million miles from the earnestly besotted romantic who embraced Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain two hours earlier. 

La Dolce Vita was an enormous hit both domestically and globally, collecting impressive box office receipts, winning awards at most major film festivals and the Oscars, and even introducing a new word—“paparazzo”—to the lexicon. Though specifically about the high life/seedy underbelly of Rome, the scathing commentary on the emerging tabloid culture and appearances of stars like Anita Ekberg and former Tarzan actor Lex Barker gave it enormous international appeal. Suddenly, Fellini and Mastroianni were famous all over the world.

Still, they remained at home. “I have nothing against Hollywood. But today’s best films are being made in Italy. So why should I leave Rome?” Mastroianni wondered in 1961. He underlined his point with eight movies released in the three years between his first two collaborations with Fellini, among them, classic existential dramas like La Notte and The Stranger; Divorce Italian Style, which netted him his first Oscar nod; and Hungry for Love, a moving work of social realism in which he co-starred alongside Simone Signoret and Emmanuelle Riva.

Fellini, on the other hand, was significantly less productive, only turning in one segment of anthology film Boccaccio ’70 during that same time period. Fittingly, for a filmmaker whose work was often autobiographical, the production that would reunite the director with his newly found muse was—textually and subtextually—about Fellini having no idea how to follow up on the massive success of La Dolce Vita. 

In 8 ½ , Mastroianni plays Guido (but really, Fellini himself), a film director who holes up at a health resort in an attempt to escape the stresses of pre-production and creative block. He soon finds out, however, that there is no escape, and is followed everywhere he goes by a stream of actors and producers and various technicians, all wanting answers he’s in no state to give—and that’s all before you get to his love life, a mess of his own making. As he attempts to pick through the chaos of his life and his film, he retreats into the past, and dreamy fantasies.

While they are different tonally—La Dolce Vita is bleak hedonism; 8 ½ is chaotic hope—Mastroianni serves the same functions in the first two films he made with Fellini. Both feature a lot of people, and yet Mastroianni is so often found on the outside of the group—literally in La Dolce Vita, where he’s far smoother at finding information than his ravenous pack of colleagues; figuratively in 8 ½, where, though everyone wants something from him, he’s still operating on his own plane. He’s a lonely presence, in a busy world. 

In both cases, it’s his steady, undeniable humanity that gives Fellini’s extraordinary excess a sturdy anchor. Mastroianni was a handsome man, but (as he had been told!) he wasn’t Paul Newman. You wouldn’t stop and stare on the street if you happened to walk past. He could pass as a regular joe or as a movie star, and that chameleonic ability, paired with those sad eyes and that wry, self-deprecating smile, made him an irresistible presence. He looked at home everywhere—from the heightened dreamworlds of Fellini, to the social realism of films like The Organizer and Family Diary, to the screwball-esque comedies he made with Sophia Loren, to the beautifully bizarre sci-fi The 10th Victim. And so, in the 17 years between 8 ½ and the next film he starred in for Fellini (excepting a brief cameo in 1972’s Roma), his career continued to flourish. 

He wasn’t actually Fellini’s first choice for 1980’s City of Women. That was Dustin Hoffman, but Hoffman’s discomfort with the Italian method of “post-dubbing” (shooting without proper sound, adding dialogue later) ruled him out, and Mastroianni was next on the list. 

City of Women is a lesser film than its ‘60s predecessors, and yet it also feels like the concluding part of a trilogy. Again, we find Mastroianni playing a man obsessed with chasing women—this time however, he’s far less successful than when he was younger. When his character, Snàporaz, follows a lady off a train with amorous intentions, she leads him to a mysterious realm ruled over completely by women. He’s intrigued, then frightened, then delighted; City of Women—in typical barmy Felliniesque style—tracks his attempts to escape.

If Mastroianni was Fellini’s perennial alter ego, then City of Women was a lacerating self-portrait. When we meet Snàporaz on the train, he’s a walking penis of a man, led entirely by his baser instincts; an aging, wilted Mastroianni, with old man glasses and graying hair, adds an extra level of sadness to the scene. As he travels through Fellini’s fantasia, that drooling lecherousness makes way for fear, befuddlement and wonder—but he remains lightyears away from his suavity in La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2. Snàporaz is the perennial butt of the movies’ joke, and it’s Mastroianni’s complete lack of vanity that lets the joke land. 

The most poignant of the later Mastroianni/Fellini collaborations is 1986’s Ginger and Fred. In that film, Mastroianni stars with Fellini’s other muse, Giulietta Masina (who was also Fellini’s wife), as a pair of former Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire impersonators, real names Amelia and Pippo, who reunite after 30 years for a cheesy television special. 

City of Women was one of Fellini’s wildest, weirdest films; Ginger and Fred arguably his most accessible. Amid a selection of wacky co-stars on this variety special (among them, “the wife of the owner of a cow with fifteen teats”), the director pays tribute to the enduring talent of his two favorite onscreen collaborators, sitting by their side as they attempt to find their place in a gaudy, shallow world where their genuine talent is seen as a novelty akin to a woman who left her husband and child for an alien, or the man who invented edible panties. 

Beyond Fellini’s satirizing of television, the film’s most lasting note is the charisma of its two leads, undimmed after so many decades in the business. Although they had never co-starred in a movie before, Mastroianni and Masina had known each other since university, and they have an easy, worn-in chemistry that makes the history between their Ginger and Fred utterly believable. Mastroianni was made to look older than his 62 years (Fellini insisted thinning shears be taken to his lustrous head of hair; the actor, begrudgingly, submitted), but his charm remained as bright as ever. 

“We are phantoms! We arise from darkness and vanish into darkness,” Mastroianni’s Pippo says to Masina’s Amelia, grandiloquently ruminating on the fleeting nature of fame. But that point would be undercut by the final film he and Fellini made together. 

The next year, Mastroianni would pop up in Fellini’s Intervista: a mockumentary featuring a Japanese film crew shadowing the director as he makes a new movie. On the set at legendary Italian studio Cinecittà, he bumps into Mastroianni shooting a commercial, and whisks him away to Anita Ekberg’s country home.

The actors, director and the crew settle in for an evening of wine and roast chestnuts, and Mastroianni—in the guise of a magician, because why not!?—conjures up a screen, which plays scenes of him and Ekberg dancing in La Dolce Vita, 27 years earlier. As we watch that film, we watch the two actors visibly moved by the sight of their younger, mythically beautiful selves. They have aged, but their cinematic counterparts have not, and will not. Fellini made them eternal. 

Next week: we’ll explore Mastroianni’s work with his other best-known collaborator, Sophia Loren.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.