Hooked on a Fellini

Of all the films Federico Fellini made in his 39-year career--roughly 27 as co-writer between 1940 and 1958, and 20 as director and co-writer between 1951 and 1979--perhaps none embraced the essence of his humanistic art more keenly than the trilogy consisting of “La Strada” (1954), “Il Bidone” (1955) and “Le Notti di Cabiria” (1957).

The last of those--titled in English “The Nights of Cabiria” and screening Friday through Aug. 6 in a fully restored version at the Port Theatre in Corona del Mar--was perhaps the most affecting. For critic Pauline Kael, a particularly discerning fan of Fellini’s artistic vision, it is “possibly [his] finest film, and a work in which [its star] Giulietta Masina earns the praise she received for ‘La Strada.’ ”

Others consider it much less successful, too modest to compare with such acclaimed epics as “La Dolce Vita” (1960) or his autobiographical phantasm “8 1/2” (1963). Whatever its rank, “Cabiria” represents a dramatic change of tone from the rest of the trilogy, taking a more optimistic view of the individual who is buffeted by chance and the brutal indifference of society.

Continuing a search for social values and the worth of human relationships, Fellini relinquishes the all-consuming desperation of Gelsomina’s lonely circus life in “La Strada” as well as the moralistic subtext to the story of the ill-fated confidence man disguised as a priest in “Il Bidone” (The Swindle).

This time, the story centers on an aging, shabby, childlike prostitute who lives on the outskirts of Rome and who walks the streets not unlike “a lunatic little spider,” in Fellini’s comparison, “with one eye fixed on the world of dreams and the other on reality.”

As played by the diminutive Masina, who also played Gelsomina, Cabiria seems utterly disillusioned, a would-be suicide without a future and yet, as Kael has noted, “a girl whose hard, knowing air is no protection against her fundamental gullibility.”

We follow her wayward adventures: A famous actor picks her up and takes her to his villa; she goes to a vaudeville show in which a magician hypnotizes her, revealing her innocent dreams; she meets a young man who pretends he’s in love with her and who betrays, attacks and robs her. But for all her difficulties and humiliations, she doesn’t give up on life. She accepts them.

It is as though Fellini regards the cruelties visited upon her as a rite of initiation through which she must pass if she is to come safely through the existential abyss of loneliness. Only by nurturing her kindness and openness can she have any chance of happiness. In the movie’s final scene, we see her wandering alone through a forest, where she joins a group of people who walk with her, singing.

Massina, Fellini’s wife, was named best actress at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal. In this country, the picture also won the Academy Award for best foreign film.

The print being screened at the Port (2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar, (949) 673-6260) includes the “man with the sack” sequence, thought to have been lost after Fellini cut it (possibly due to pressure from the Catholic Church, which regarded the sequence as critical of its role in providing for the poor).

The sequence was seen at Cannes but not subsequently. The restored 35-millimeter print also has newly translated, laser subtitles.

Also Friday, “Space Jam” (1996), starring basketball great Michael Jordan, screens at 8:15 p.m. at Arovista Park, Elm and Sievers streets, Brea, as part of the city’s free Family Films in the Park series ([714] 990-7100).

His Airness teams with Bugs Bunny and others of Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes gang--including Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie, Pepe Le Pew--to challenge creatures from outer space in a winner-takes-all basketball game.

Produced by Ivan Reitman and directed by Joe Pytka, this blend of live-action and animation contains “more rowdiness and broad humor than vintage Looney Tunes charm,” The Times review noted. But it “also looks great” and is “pretty entertaining” and sends the uplifting message that “it takes heart as much as skill to win.”

Also screening Friday is the Walt Disney Home Video feature “Pooh’s Grand Adventure--The Search for Christopher Robin” (1997) at 1 p.m. at the Huntington Beach Central Library, 7111 Talbert Ave., Huntington Beach. $1. (714) 375-5107.

This full-length Winnie-the-Pooh movie--the first in 20 years--was inspired by an A.A. Milne story in which Pooh’s best friend, Christopher Robin, goes to school for the first time. Christopher Robin has difficulty telling his “willy-nilly-silly ol’ bear” where he’s headed, so he leaves a note for Pooh that Owl misreads.

The picture features such Pooh voice veterans as John Fiedler as Piglet and Paul Winchell as Tigger. Brady Bluhm does the voice of Christopher Robin. Jim Cummings, who assumed the voice of Pooh more than a decade ago from Sterling Holloway, does Pooh.

In L.A. and Beyond

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The American Cinematheque’s “Greatest Hits, 1993-1998,” a summer series of reprises, continues Friday at Raleigh Studio with a program devoted to a sampling of the early television work of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. The series offers a splendid chance to catch up with fine films you may have missed when the Cinematheque first screened them.

First screened two years ago are two episodes from the highly regarded but short-lived “Johnny Staccato” TV series (1959-60) that were directed by Cassavetes, who also starred as a Manhattan jazz pianist-gun for hire. They’re much closer in look and style to Cassavetes’ 1962 “Too Late Blues,” a studio-made B drama with a jazz background than to the gritty, highly personal, semi-improvised “Shadows” (1960), which he financed with his “Staccato” earnings and which launched his career as a major and distinctive independent filmmaker.

What’s intriguing about the two “Staccato” episodes that were available for preview--both involve men dangerously obsessed by women, one played by Elisha Cook Jr., the other by Walter Burke--is that as well-directed as they are, you could actually imagine them working equally well as radio dramas.

Cassavetes teamed with Rowlands, his wife, in the 1965 Kraft Suspense Theater “Won’t It Ever Be Morning?,” in which Rowlands plays a jazz singer who’s terrific on stage but who must struggle to express herself when a lawyer (Cassavetes) puts her on the stand in defense of her devoted manager (Jack Klugman), wrongly accused of murder.

There will be a Spanish-language double feature of first-time films at 9:30 p.m. Alfonso Cuaron’s 1990 “Love in the Time of Hysteria” is a wonderfully risque sex farce in which we meet a handsome young Mexico City advertising copy writer (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), an incorrigible Don Juan. Suspense quickly builds as Cuaron deftly places a classic screwball comedy in a contemporary context with deadly serious implications.

For those of us who missed it when it was screened as part of the Cinematheque’s 1997 edition of its annual “Recent Spanish Cinema” survey, Iclar Bollain’s 1995 “Hi, Are You Alone?” proves to be a real treat. At the opening of the film, Nina (Silke), an attractive young woman of 20, is found in bed with a young man by her irate father, who forbids her to continue the relationship and orders her to spend more time working with him in his shop. This propels Nina onto a two-month adventure with her best friend Trini (Candela Pena).

Nina, who is a reflective, thoughtful type, is determined to discover what it is like simply to live--to experience life to the fullest but not recklessly, to earn enough money to get by and to resist getting caught up in the rat race. Dark-haired and patrician, she discovers passionate love with a sweet, tall Russian youth (Arcadi Levin) and seeks out the mother (Elena Irureta) she never really knew. By contrast, Trini, who is a lush, blond Madonna look-alike, is a pragmatic survivor who, unlike her friend, doesn’t worry whether some things are right or wrong.

There is an authentic sense of discovery in this modest, incisive and refreshingly unpredictable film.

Saturday brings “Best Shorts of Our Years,” composed of seven works screening at 7:15 p.m. In “Number One Local,” running just shy of eight minutes, Bianca Bob Miller introduces us to subway conductor Harry Nugent, whose witty quipping over his train’s loudspeaker brings cheer to his passengers while giving this self-described failed abstract painter a chance to express himself. Maya Deren’s 14-minute “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943) is a landmark that views film noir and ‘40s women’s pictures from a feminist perspective. A special delight is Sherry Breyer’s “Dresden,” an affectionate 10-minute visit to that vintage L.A. lounge, the Dresden Room, where those durable song stylists, Marty and Elayne, hold forth.

“Best Shorts of Our Years” will be followed at 9:30 p.m. by a Werner Herzog double feature. “Lessons of Darkness” (1992) is a somber yet exalted 50-minute meditation on the devastation wrought on Kuwait, which paradoxically turns vistas of limitless destruction and desecration of the landscape into images of terrible beauty, accompanied by Herzog’s spare, incantatory narration and a score that contains great swaths of classical music.

Not surprisingly, the highlight of the opening weekend of the American Cinematheque’s New Films From Germany series two years ago was a one-hour documentary from the ever-venturesome Herzog. It’s called “Gesualdo--Death for Five Voices,” an elegant inquiry into the turbulent life and complex music of Carlo Gesualdo (1560 or 61-1613), the Neapolitan Count of Venosa.

No wonder Herzog, always drawn to the romantic and the outre, would be attracted to Gesualdo, who infamously got away with a crime of passion, a double murder in 1590, when he caught his wife (and cousin) Maria d’Avalo, believed to be the model for the Mona Lisa, with her lover of two years, the Duke of Andria. Roaming the ruins of Gesualdo’s palace, Herzog picks up from his guide gossip about a bizarre end for Gesualdo, who made a brilliant second marriage in 1594 but became a melancholy recluse. (213) 466-FILM.

Margaret Westcott’s “Stolen Moments” (Sunset 5, Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m.; Monica 4-Plex, Aug. 8 and 9 at 11 a.m.) offers a comprehensive, international survey of lesbian life and history. This fine documentary reminds us that lesbians have often suffered the same horrific fates that gay men have, simply for their sexual orientation. Sunset 5: (213) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

Tony Zarindast’s “Blood of His Own,” a technically competent but trite tale about a young Italian who enters the U.S. illegally to track down his brother in Los Angeles, opens Friday at the Monica 4-Plex. (310) 394-9741.