Yours Cruelly, Elvira

Cassandra Complex

Yours Cruelly, Elvira -
Memoirs Of The
Mistress Of The Dark
by Cassandra Peterson
Hachette Books ISBN: 9780306874352

Wow, what a great book. I just want to give a quick shout out here to one of those rare autobiographies that come along every now and again that remind you that there are some nice people around in this world who, you know, haven’t let the gruelling pressures of the hardships they’ve somehow had to endure turn them into complete monsters. This is just such a tome and, given that Cassandra Peterson... aka Elvira - Mistress Of The Dark... has been pretty much co-writing her own material for decades, it really shouldn’t come as any surprise that she’s managed to write a memoir as  burdened with the weight of some heavy experiences and revelations as this one is, in a witty, poignant and vastly interesting manner. And to somehow make it an absolute hoot of an entertaining book, to boot!

I first became aware of ‘Elvira’, I think, around about 1988, when I was twenty years old. I saw the movie poster being advertised in some magazine (or possibly comic... or both) and instantly, somehow, recognised the iconic ‘boobs n’ hair’ image of someone who looked like either Vampira or Vampirella (or a thrilling combination of both) being burned at the stake. Now, the IMDB doesn’t list the movie as getting a theatrical release in the UK and, while I know I had it on good old trusty VHS at the time (since upgraded twice now to both DVD and Blu Ray editions), I’m pretty sure I did see it at my local cinema over here at the time (a cinema which is, alas, now a Tesco but, still, good times were had).

It was a film which nobody seemed to have heard of at the time, which I introduced a few people to, who then also became staunch supporters of the legendary lady. I met her once and got a photo signed by her in the 90s, or possibly just into the next decade, at the old London Film And Comic Con, back in the days when it was good and not many people went (which probably explains why she never returned to do it again... I didn’t have to wade through a huge queue of pre-booked visitors to meet her at that point). I also remember buying vinyl record albums of her at around the same time and reading comics too, including a black and white, biographical comic which started off highlighting how she got scarred by life-threatening boiling water burns as a very young child (not even two years old yet, I think?).

The full story of that accident and just how lucky she was to survive it due to various things all lining up at once is almost a forewarning of the way things seemed to have happened to her over her life... at least that’s one of the things I took away from this account. She goes on to explain the way things came into being in terms of her career and opportunities much later in the book but, there’s also a lot of dark stuff she went through and she captures a lot of it for the reader as she goes, chapter by chapter, through her life.

And there’s a lot to take in as she goes from tragedy to fortune to tragedy again in small, perfectly formed installments... starting off with a dramatic opening when she is on her honeymoon and getting the call to audition for the role of a certain little ‘Horror Hostess’ for a TV station before flashing back through her memoirs, catching up with this moment a little over half the way through the book and after a bunch of amazing and, sometimes gruelling, stories.

Lots of great stuff here to unpack including her relationship with her parents and siblings, her early obsession with horror films and her love, as a young girl, of building those old Aurora model kits of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy etc  (remember those?), her times as a ‘virgin groupie’ meeting various big bands and the bizarre time she hung out with Jimi Hendrix... to her obsessions with Elvis (who she stayed up talking to for most of a night when she was working as a showgirl in Las Vegas... a conversation which changed the course of her life), Ann Margaret, The Beatles and eventually landing her way to the role that made her fame and fortune.

On the way there are stars who were nice to her (I might mention Liza Minelli) and those who weren’t ultimately all that pleasant (I might mention Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones). And I love the way she humanises some of the celebrity people she meets by initially teasing them into the text by just their first names, so you take in what good deeds they might have done (or not), before she suddenly hits you with a second name and you realise just who it is she’s talking about. For instance, I’m not going to say who Bobby was, who pinned her boyfriend against his car because he was being abusive to her... you’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who that guy was... but it does give a solid, positive sketch of the man behind the name. I will say, though, that when she was taking acting lessons alongside two students, Lynda and Debra, who fast became friends with her... it gave me a little insight into just how Debra Winger came to be cast as Wonder Girl in Lynda Carter’s hit TV show Wonder Woman (reviewed by me here only last week).

So yeah, there are lots of celebrity stories such as hanging out in Rome in her teens and working as an extra on Fellini’s movies... but there’s also often a downside to these periods of her life, such as fleeing Rome after escaping captivity from some criminals who starved her for three days with not much expectations of surviving the experience.

And, of course, her time promoting her brand image Elvira in various shapes and forms over the years... including, of course, the two wonderful films she made and explaining how she modelled the famous Elvira wig (seriously, it took me years to twig that wasn’t her natural hair... I'm naive) on Ronnie Spector’s hairstyle. I also didn’t realise the number of films and shows various actors don’t put on their CV or, perhaps as importantly these days, the IMDB. For instance, I hadn’t a clue that she appeared as a showgirl in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. I also need to check out another new collection of memoirs she tips the reader off to, from the lady who road managed her and which is called The Opposite Of Famous, as soon as time and money will allow.

And there’s more... lots more, including of course the now famous revelation, with the publication of this book, that she’s been living with a female lover for the last 20 years who is finally able to support her emotionally in the way her husband never could (it seems to me). So, yeah, Cassandra’s Elvira brand has had a couple of prominent bumps along the way (many of them detailed in this book) but she’s in a very strong place right now, it seems... finally getting something which approximates the happy ending she deserves.

So, if you’ve not been taking notes, I’d have to say that Yours Cruelly, Elvira - Memoirs Of The Mistress Of The Dark is a sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious but certainly informative, candid and entertaining tome... I honestly wish it was twice the size so it didn’t have to end so fast. I’d recommend this one to most people I know in a shot but, for now, until I find out the next project she’s getting involved with, I shall continue to play my iPad simulacra versions of the Elvira pinball machines and gaze up, from time to time, at the shot of her on the wall by my bed, to read the message I asked her to inscribe all those years ago (when I had to remind her it was actually a direct quote from her movie... I think she remembers it better nowadays)... Revenge Is Better Than Christmas!

Foxy - My Life In Three Acts

Only Here For The Grier

Foxy - My Life In Three Acts
by Pam Grier and Andrea Cagan
Springboard ISBN: 978-0446548502

I first became aware of Pam Grier when I saw her in the films Foxy Brown and, my personal favourite of hers, Coffy. I later became aware of her in all kinds of films like Mars Attacks, Ghosts Of Mars and Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, loving the ‘strong woman’ type of character she portrayed in the majority of the films I’d seen her in. About a year ago I became aware that she’d written (with the help of Andrea Cagan) an autobiography, Foxy - My Life In Three Acts... so I managed to get a hold of a really good condition, ex-library copy of the now out of print hardback edition of her book.

Now as I’ve said before, some autobiographies are great and fascinating accounts of the writer’s life and, others... well, they aren’t all that. This one, as it happens, is absolutely all that and goes the extra mile too. It seems bizarre that one can find entertainment value in a series of anecdotes about a person’s life experiences, especially since Miss Grier has had her share of tough times over the years but, there you have it. This one blew me away and I couldn’t put the thing down. It’s fast paced, inordinately interesting and has a lot of unexpected surprises tucked within its pages.

I don’t know how easy it must have been for the writer to talk about the two rapes she suffered... once when she was six years old by a bunch of boys and another at the age of 18 in what I can only describe as... a bad date gone wrong... but it shows right from the outset that she’s not one to hide things away and mince words, that’s for sure.

The book is chaptered and then split into three sections (or acts, I guess) entitled The Early Years 1949-1970, ‘Fros and Freaks 1979-1989 and Finding The Balance 1990-present (where ‘the present’ is roughly ten years ago). And it’s filled with fascinating stuff and also demonstrates a good sense of humour when she refers to a car turning over on the motorway with her in it at the age of three as... her first stunt. Everybody in the car was just fine and without a scratch... apart from a goldfish being carried which was presumably thrown from its bowl.

I was surprised to hear that, between the ages roughly of about 6 and 8, because she was the daughter of an airbase father and so would be constantly moved around with the family, she came to live over here in the UK at Swindon for a couple of years. This would have been the early to mid-1950s when London and other places in England were still trying to recover from all the bomb damage of World War II. But she absolutely loved it over here by the sound of it. Where, in America, the whole family was segregated and treated like second class citizens because of the colour of their skin, here they were accepted and Pam’s education in those years is something she really seems to look on as some of the most valuable experiences of her life. Which is nice. I also smiled to myself when I learned her first movie at a cinema was Godzilla (the 1954 one so, my guess is she saw it about 1955 or ‘56 in its US version).

She doesn’t, like a lot of film-makers writing about their lives, give much specific detail about the actual making of her movies and, to be honest, most of them are not even mentioned... but she does have some nice anecdotes from some of them. So her early films with Corman and AIP where she was shipped out to the Philippines are something which, unlike certain other actors and actresses of the time, she viewed as valuable lessons because you couldn’t get that kind of education and experience out of a book. And talking about an education... she kind of fell into acting almost accidentally, it seemed. Her only interest in the opportunities that were thrown her way when she joined up with those AIP, low budget exploitation pictures was about saving the money for her college fund. She wanted to get more educated although, I have to say from her attitude and eloquence talking about how she learned to dissect things like classical music and jazz when she was around 7 years old, I’m not sure she was desperately in need of much extra educating.

The book also shatters some silly myths by revealing, for example, her strong friendship with Tamara Dobson (of the Cleopatra Jones movies), when the media were trying to turn them into rivals (as pretty much the two leading ladies of blaxploitation, is my guess). But even when she was shooting movies, in between jobs you’d find her working in a drug store or some such to just keep the money coming in for her college fund. Somewhere around the middle of the book, though, as she gets more and more successful and famous, the talk about the college fund stops although, as the book goes on, you realise she does appreciate the pursuit of a good education and she is always finding new things to learn about and enrich her life with.

The other thing you find out is about her various lovers over the years. In the span of the book, she has about five significant others. I’m not going to mention the last couple but there are some amazing things in the book about her first three, more famous ones.

Her first big love decided to take up the Muslim religion and revealed his new name to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Bruce Lee fans and basketball followers will surely know this tall guy). However, after attempting to study the religion in the interest that she could convert and become his wife... well, Pam didn’t exactly take to it and you can certainly see why (and if not she makes it crystal clear).

Second big love was the even more famous stand up comic Freddie Prinz, who I’d only heard of through his dying fairly young but he’s something of a comedy legend. Again, though, there seems to be a pattern of tragedy in the path of Mr. Grier’s love life at the time and they all, in one way or another, treated her quite badly (and certainly not just the famous ones in that respect, either).

Her third big relationship was Richard Pryor. There’s a gripping ‘three strikes and you’re out’ accounting of the final period of their relationship including Pam being diagnosed with some vaginal problems which turned out to be because Pryor had ingested so much cocaine by that point that his semen was impregnated with it. It’s entertaining but tragic when she recounts how performing oral sex on him would make her lips go numb for the amount of drug residue on him. I’m probably explaining that badly but, you know, read the damn book, it’s fantastic.

It tells a little bit about the lead in to working with directors like Tim Burton and the bizarre chance meeting with Quentin Tarantino which helped land her Jackie Brown (completely unexpectedly) and also the big, long period in her life when she was fighting off cancer (and was once again treated quite badly by a boyfriend because of it). Not to mention a good amount of time talking about a show she did for a while which I’ll now need to check out sometime called The L Word. And there’s always lightness mixed in with the darkness, like the time she was thrown out of a nightclub with John Lennon and a few others after Lennon started throwing punches around. There’s even a photo of the apology card he sent her the next day.

Perhaps my favourite story, though, is how her horse started galloping uncontrollably (she’s a pretty good rider) on the set in the Colosseum for the Corman movie The Arena. One of the many places she and the horse went hurtling destructively through was the set of a new Fellini movie being made at the same time. Fellini was delighted by the chance encounter to meet her (and she him, of course, she’s a pretty cool film appreciating lass too, it turns out) and they ended up spending that lunch period together.

Of course, that’s just my personal highlight gleaned from Pam’s rich and wonderful book. Other readers will have their own but, even though she never reaches all her dreams (romantically, at least), her epilogue leaves the reader with a certain sense that she has found some peace, optimism and enlightenment during the course of her life. Which is a good space to be in, I imagine. Honestly, I’ve got nothing bad to say whatsoever about Foxy - My Life In Three Acts. If you like the actress then you’ll surely want to read this as it’s both one of the breeziest but also one of the more substantial, in terms of the content it covers, of the celebrity autobiographies I’ve read over the course of my life. So glad I picked this one up. Absolutely brilliant and it turns out the paperback is still in print. Seriously worth investing some time in, if you haven’t done so already.

Frances Ha

Ha-binger

Frances Ha
2012 USA
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Potential spoilers, depending on how you look at things.

Okay, so I don’t know why we got Noah Baumbach’s latest movie so far behind the USA release but, whatever, at least it got here. One of the things I heard about this movie was that it has no story. Now, I’m cool with movies with no story, plot or any kind of coherent structure. I honestly don’t think those are necessary components of cinema at all... no matter how many directors insist on saying it is.

On the other hand... Frances Ha is not that kind of movie.

I don’t know what other people were watching but it certainly has a certain amount of story content... it’s just that it’s a small story and is more like an arc of progressive spiralling down than anything else, told through conversation rather than incident. Kind of like a building of an impression of life like Koyaanisqatsi, but with conversations shot in gorgeous black and white replacing the speeding imagery and Philip Glass score.

And I’m also fine with that... although I have to admit I was quite looking forward to seeing a movie without a story again. Haven’t seen one of those for a while.

The film is cleanly framed and most of the shots seem to be absolutely static. Like a series of master shots strung together and used as they are... which is as good and stunningly beautiful a valid technique as you’re going to get. The film, because of the black and white photography I suspect, has been compared to the works of Woody Allen... but this is really not much like Allen’s oeuvre except for, perhaps, locale. In fact, if I was going to compare the style of the movie to anyone, I think I’d be looking more in the direction of Mr. Whit Stillman than Mr. Allen, although either way, to be honest, should be taken as a compliment.

The dialogue, co-written by the lead actress Greta Gerwig, is charming and portrays the titular (kinda) role as a person who is perhaps at odds with the real world. Gerwig plays her as a totally upbeat and uplifting spirit who refuses to let life’s little (big) problems get in the way of her general cheerfulness. A bit like the character Poppy, played by Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky (reviewed here), but with a little less of the in-your-face quality to it.

This being said... I’m sure a lot of people must have bought in to her as a character without realising the not too subtle difference between the way she acts and the way she is. Her situation is mostly a kind of dead end and a terminal one at that, throughout the majority of the movie and I find the “poster quotes” that the movie is uplifting to be mostly false. Sure, I can see that her easy going personality could be seen on its own as fairly uplifting... I’ve pretty much said so above. But the fact that her character seems, most of the time, doomed to misunderstand the social and economical milieu in which she finds herself, in addition to being a person who will go the extra mile for someone... only to find her loyalty not really reciprocated as she expected, makes her more of a sad character.

I loved the film, and Gerwig in particular, but all the way through I kept thinking of her a little like the title character in my favourite Fellini movie, Nights Of Cabiria... but without the added insight of the notoriously once cut “man with the sack” scene.

To clarify, in Nights Of Cabiria (reviewed here), the prostitute Cabiria follows around a kind benefactor one night, the “man with a sack”, as he charitably gives food to various poor people who find themselves at life’s ragged end. Cabiria sees well known people from her past who were big shots in her trade who have drifted from memory and ended up on the scrap heap, thus enabling her to see her life as her future is likely to be and try to make plans accordingly... only to find her destiny inevitable (which is another story).

I felt this way about Frances Ha who, when things don’t go the way she plans, tends to mostly not be flexible enough to adapt to her current situation straight away and instead, finds her situation getting worse and worse. Although it might be seen that her plight isn’t the same as the Cabiria role made famous by Giulietta Masina, the stakes seem to me to be exactly the same as the former character in many respects, as they are for us all. We all need a roof over our head and a basic job to keep some money coming in. What Frances Ha doesn’t have, is a character like the “man with a sack” who can help give her the insight into where her life is going at a time when she can do more about it.

Unlike Fellini’s opus, Baumbach’s Frances Ha at least gives the title character a certain amount of hope in the mix and the last sequence, where she sacrifices her dreams to take the job and then create her own opportunities, is something of a reprieve and a chance to take stock for the character. At least that’s the way I saw it.

Frances Ha, and the title sums up the character really well if you say it out aloud*, is a witty, insightful and charming movie. Hypnotic, entertaining and, certainly, very funny. It also, I have to say, put me on a bit of a downer for the rest of the day. The fact that some of the characters in this film are ultimately missing out little pieces of themselves and mostly falling towards their fates or, in some cases, being dragged towards them, was less than uplifting to me, in all honesty. But that’s actually not a criticism (it’s as valid an emotion to prod with the sharp end of a cinemaic stick as anything else) and I found a lot to laugh at too. There are some genuinely clever one liners throughout the running time of the movie. It’s light and fluffy in places but using that frothy top to hide the emotional weight it harbours underneath. I’ll certainly be watching this one again and I think it’s a good night out at the movies. I also think it’s the best film yet that I’ve seen this particular person direct. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it too.

*Actually, when I asked the lady at the box office for a ticket, I asked loudly for a ticket to Frances HAAAAAAAH! Warning... some people get perplexed by even the slightest deviation from the accepted norm, it would seem.

Fellini VS Fosse: When Cabiria Meets Charity

Two directors battle it out on celluloid!

In Federico Fellini’s 1952 movie, The White Sheik, his wife Giulietta Masina makes a five minute appearance playing a prostitute called Cabiria. Fellini was so inspired by this small sequence in his film that he later devoted a whole movie to Giulietta Masina’s exploration of this character... Nights of Cabiria.

In 1966, American showman Bob Fosse based his new stage musical Sweet Charity on Fellini’s Cabiria screenplay and went on to release his own movie version of this in 1969.

I thought it would be worth rediscovering these movies for two reasons... one of which is that the way in which the Italian and American directors handle the characters for their native audiences might possibly be quite telling in revealing something about popular tastes in these two countries at the time of their release. Secondly, my own agenda, is that Nights of Cabiria is one of my all-time favourite movies and Sweet Charity is one of my all-time favourite musicals. So I get to have more fun than usual while I’m researching an article ;-)

Both of these films are interesting in that they convey a very tragic story and contrast it with the genuinely upbeat outer personae of a character, Cabiria and Charity Hope Valentine respectively, as they go through some of the worst knocks that life could possibly hit them with. And to Fosse’s credit, selling that kind of grim reality to an audience in a musical is hard, which might explain the enormous box office flop he had with Charity.

Both movies have a fairly upbeat opening. Cabiria starts off with a light, fluffy Nina Rota score playing over some fairly standard title cards. There is very little in the score which betrays the dark tone of where the movie is heading. Fosse takes the same approach with split screen multicolour half-tone shots conveying Charity having a generally good time as she withdraws her money from a bank and heads over to Central Park.

After the titles play out in Fellini’s film, Cabiria is seen... I think “cavorting” is probably the best description... with her “lover” by a river. He grabs her money laden handbag and pushes Cabiria into the river, in the hopes of drowning her, and leaves her for dead. After she is almost drowned, some locals rescue her and revive her. Although it isn’t quite made clear to us yet, Cabiria has had all her savings stolen. Although the events in the sequence are quite grim, and are used to foreshadow the dark pattern of Cabiria’s life, the trappings of her rescue are played very much for comedy. It his here, too, that her occupation as a streetwalker prostitute (as opposed to the “dance hall girl” in Charity) is inferred to the audience when, after identifying her, one of the locals adds the comment that “She lives the life!”

Fosse’s Sweet Charity starts off in much the same fashion with Shirley MacLaine (playing Charity Hope Valentine) singing a song before she meets her lover. In her dialogue with “Charlie” she makes clear that she has withdrawn all her savings from the bank and is carrying it all around in her handbag, which is something the more subtle Fellini film does not make explicit at the outset... instead letting realisation dawn on the audience as the film progresses. After Charlie has pushed her into a lake and made off with all her money, Charity’s subsequent rescue is played even more for laughs in the Fosse version of the film, even if the character herself in this sequence is, if anything, even more distraught and wretched than Cabiria was under the same circumstances in the Fellini movie. The main difference is perhaps that Giulietta Masina makes the sense of impending tragedy of her character arc implicit in her wonderful facial expressions whereas Maclaine’s portrayal of Charity goes for the quicker gut punch.

It is also in this first sequence in the Fosse version that Charity implies her profession to a cop (and again the audience) as being a “Social Consultant at a Dance Hall”. In Charity the aforementioned Dance Hall replaces the familiar street where Cabiria and her friends ply their trade. Interestingly, Giulietta Masina has a couple of dance scenes in Nights of Cabiria and it is in this first sequence at one of her regular spots where she starts some lively and highly conspicuous dancing to a tune playing on a car radio. Although this sequence is fairly light-hearted and entertaining, and truly a joy to behold, it can’t match for the sheer spectacle and technical genius of Fosse’s replacement “Big Spender” routine with its brilliant use of fast zooms, dissolves, rack focussing and movement within some superb shot compositions.

It is in this musical sequence in Sweet Charity that you really start to realise that you are in the hands of a master choreographer... not just with the dance routines which are stunning and in this particular sequence a masterpiece of minimalist body movement, but also the choreography of colour and light and camera movement and editing. In short, a truly cinematic achievement to be applauded and celebrated and remembered far more than it is currently.

The whole of the next section where Cabiria finds favour from a wealthy movie star, accompanies him to a night club and then goes home with him for dinner... only to find herself having to hide and sleep in the next room when the ex-girlfriend comes back to make up with the movie star is played similarly in both movies, although the trappings and details of this sequence in Charity are a lot more elaborate and fun. And perhaps the ambling but poignant sequence in the nightclub where Cabiria does a vigorous mambo, which says everything about the buoyancy of her character, is a good way of looking at the contrast between the two styles of movie making on display here. Cabiria’s dance lasts maybe two minutes. In Sweet Charity, Ricardo Montalban takes Shirley MacLaine to The Pompeii Club and you are at once lost in a swirling miasma of psychedelic colour and movement and a very long (and enjoyable) set piece dance sequence before she accompanies the film star back to his home, where she gets yet another set piece song and dance number in “If My Friends Could See Me Now.”

And here, too, the dialogue makes explicit what Nights of Cabiria lets you slowly realise on your own terms, when Charity comments that she is “caught in the flypaper of life”. There is certainly no thought at this point in the earlier movie in Cabiria’s head of getting out of her current situation as there is in the Fosse vehicle.

It’s the next sequence in Cabiria that really does it for me and it really says something that this entire 10-15 minute sequence was originally not in Cabiria because the producer, Dino De Laurentiis thought it slowed the movie down. He told Fellini, who didn’t want to budge on it for obvious reasons, that he’d destroyed the sequence. He gave it back to him again in the 1980s and the sequence is now restored to the movie... and about time. This is the scene which really is the key to the whole movie... or at least the key to Cabiria... for this viewer anyway.

Known as, “the man with the sack” sequence in movie-lore, this is the scene where Cabiria stumbles upon and accompanies a man making a night cruise of the surrounding areas of Rome (where Cabiria scrapes her living). This character regularly makes his rounds giving food and blankets to the drop outs and homeless of society, sleeping rough and living in surrounding caves. It is in this sequence that Cabiria recognises one of these unfortunates as an older prostitute she used to know “back in the day.” With this too comes the realisation that this is exactly where she is headed if she continues to lead her life the way she is living it. And it is here that the actress Giulietta Masina shows her real talent as she lets the despair slowly creep into the background of her portrayal of Cabiria and it is this scene that gives the ticking clock nature to the character for the remainder of the movie. There is nothing like this scene in Sweet Charity... and no wonder if De Laurentiis had already cut it out of the original release prints of the Fellini film. Fosse probably wasn’t even aware of this scene.

The next sequence of Cabiria sees her accompanying her friends amidst literally thousands of people going to offer worship to the “madonna” at her local church. This is a real circus of a scene and one can well see why Fellini was continually getting into trouble with the religious establishment during the times his films were being made. Cabiria’s long and gruelling football crowd style slog to worship the madonna is contrasted with the next scene shortly after these events where she realises that, despite going through all this show, her prayers are destined to be unanswered.

To paraphrase an old Charlie Brown strip... “You’re on your own kid.”

Again, Sweet Charity really has nothing like this but the church scene is replaced with a new age church musical number, the famous “Rhythm of Life” showcase number for Sammy Davis Jr, perhaps better known to modern audiences as “that song from that Guiness advert.” This is just an excuse for a bit of a song and dance though and there are no real lessons to be learnt in this sequence.

The next little scene in Cabiria is the one that seals the fate for the character... at least in terms of how she is left at the end of the movie. Cabiria wanders into a magic/stage hypnotism show and finds herself accidentally volunteered. She is placed in a trance by the stage magician and finds herself giving away a lot more about her romantic nature and obsession to find a partner and husband than she would comfortably like any audience to know. After the show she is approached by a man from the audience calling himself Oscar who is interested in her in a romantic context and who makes overtures to her which she ultimately cannot refuse.

As the courtship goes on and Oscar gets Cabiria to sell her small hovel of a home (a family is waiting on her doorstep to move in as she is packing up to move out) and withdraw all her money so they can marry and move together to another town, it suddenly starts to dawn on the viewer, but not Cabiria, that Oscar is not all he seems and is, in fact, trying on exactly the same scam that found Cabiria in the predicament she was in at the start of the movie.

We watch as she goes for a walk on a cliff top with an ever increasingly nervous Oscar, who obviously does not want to go through with the deed himself. Cabiria nearly slips over the edge of the cliff on her own accord and it is at this point that she suddenly twigs what is really going on here. In reaction, she throws herself on the ground begging Oscar to take her money and kill her because, by this point, she really is at the end of her rope with her life.

Oscar does make off with all her money but he leaves Cabiria alive and at the end of the film, she has finally hit rock bottom. No redemption has come her way. She has no money and even her home is no longer there for her for shelter.

In place of the stage hypnotist in Cabiria, Charity snags an interview for a secretarial job where she is, quite literally, laughed out of the office. As she is riding down many floors in an elevator to leave the building, she gets stuck in a lift with a claustrophobic gentleman named Oscar.

A slow romantic relationship develops and although more or less the same ending concludes Sweet Charity, at least on the surface, the Oscar as portrayed here is in no way the mercenary and predatory animal the Oscar in Nights of Cabiria turns out to be. In Charity, he doesn’t marry her simply because of... well, cold feet really. He certainly doesn’t steal Charity’s money but at the end of the film the misery is still readily apparent as we watch Shirley MacLaine’s heart slowly and inevitably torn to shreds.

At the end of both movies, Cabiria/Charity is “found” by a group of wandering teenagers/flower children and although the characters have lost absolutely everything... one can see them slightly perk up and put on an outer appearance for the rest of the world. A small token gesture at the suggestion of a possible happy ending which in no way dims the impact of the abject tragedy of the characters in question.

Again, what is implied in Fellini’s more subtle film is made overt in the American movie with an onscreen caption proclaiming “And she lived hopefully ever after...” and I think, in conclusion, I have to say that although I love both versions of the story and although I can recognise and enjoy Sweet Charity as being one of the most cinematically inventive and watchable films ever made, I think the subtlety of Nights of Cabiria coupled with the sheer genius of Giulietta Masina’s comic timing and intense acting performance (and Shirley MacLaine is no slouch either) make for a much more satisfying film experience for me than the Fosse movie.

When I put on Sweet Charity I’m guaranteed to be both amused and to cry at the end... when I put on Nights of Cabiria I know I am going to be alternately laughing and crying my head off all the way through. And that’s not an altogether easy task to accomplish.

Fellini wins 2-1.