I have just come from seeing a film written, directed and starring one of the
great comic geniuses of our time. It is up for seven Academy Awards, and
deserves at least six of them. The only one I question is Best Picture,
because I loved two of the others nominated: "Elizabeth," a striking film for costume, acting, sets and dialogue,
and also it was about one of my favorite queens -- ahem -- Elizabeth I of
England, but I also liked "Shakespeare In Love," which was great comedy
and a great intro to Shakespeare as a person and not just as a long-ago
playwright and author of sonnets I used in my youth for jack-off material. Of
course, it helped that in both of the latter films Joseph Fiennes, one of sexy Ralph's little
brothers (now 27) was cast (in the first) as Robert Dudley, the once-presumed
lover of the Virgin Queen and (in the second) as stud-muffin, ball-scratching
Will Shakespeare himself. In both roles, he made me feel like behaving like a
bobby-soxer (teen-age girl) listening to Frank Sinatra croon in 1942, but I didn't scream and swoon.
I allowed myself the silent agony of breaking into a hot sweat.
The movie I saw today is called "Life Is Beautiful." The conclusion it draws
is that life is -- and it ain't.
The comic genius who wrote it, directed and starred in it is
Roberto Benigni (last name pronounced "bay-NEEN-yee"), a limber
Italian whose favorite directors were William Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, both
of whom were comedic geniuses themselves.
Among other films, Wilder directed "Some Like It Hot" (1959), a hilarious
escapade in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis escaped the
St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago and jumped on a train bound for
Miami Beach, disguised as members of an all-girl band which included
Marilyn Monroe. I haven't stopped laughing since 1959 after the final
scene showed Jack Lemmon, in an act of desperation, ripping off his wig
and declaring to comic Joe E. Brown, who is piloting a motorboat across the
bay, "I can't marry you because I'm a MAN!" Unflustered, millionaire Brown,
who had thought Lemmon a girl when he proposed, drolly replies, "Nobody's
perfect!" and they speed merrily away.
An actor, as well as a producer and director, Lubitsch directed "The Shop
Around the Corner" (1940), a charmingly funny movie upon which
Nora Ephron's current hit, "You've Got Mail,"
is loosely based. As a remake of the Lubitsch film, a better film than Ephron's was "In the Good Old Summertime" (1949), an MGM musical with Judy
Garland and Van Johnson in which Liza Minelli, Garland's daughter by the film's director Vincent Minelli, made her screen debut in the final scene at the age of three. I still consider the Lubitsch film, "To Be or Not to Be" (1940), starring Jack Benny, one of the funniest movies turned out in Hollywood during the unfunny time of World War II. The glossy, 1983 remake with the same name, by and with Mel Brooks, lacked the Lubitsch charm, but it did feature a gay character, Anne Bancroft's dresser at the theater, with understanding and comedic grace.
Lubitsch's "To Be or Not To Be" had as its theme the Nazi invasion of Warsaw in 1939 and the immediate criminalization of Polish Jews. (I cannot help but think of the vicious elements of the American Far Right who would re-criminlize homosexuality in our "land of the free" and subject us, the gay and lesbian population, to a holocaust they would carry to the farthest extremes they could, doubtlessly even beyond the limits of so-called "Christian" conscience.) Both Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch were Jewish. Both fled Nazi Germany
when Hitler came to power (two years before I was born, in 1932) to escape
persecution. There is a certain relevancy in these factors when we come to Benigni's film. "Life is
Beautiful" ultimately concerns itself with the Holocaust perpetrated against
Jewish people by the Nazis (and their allies, Mussolini's Italian Fascisti). I
detected some costume and cinematographic styling reminiscent of the Italian
director Federico Fellini's "Amarcord," which also dealt with the effect of the
facists in a small city in Italy.
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