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When we're all substituting our tequilas and limes
I just finished watching La dolce vita (1960). All my life, people have told me how beautiful Marcello Mastroianni was; I never saw him in anything, so I had no basis for comparison. He died in 1996, but I don't remember photographs. I saw his daughter in Un conte de Noël and she was very beautiful, but her mother is Catherine Deneuve—she got some of the best genetics going in 1972. So what do you know? Marcello Mastroianni was beautiful, and not in any of the ways I expected. I can't find a good image online; all anyone seems to post from this movie is Anita Ekberg in the Fontana di Trevi. But he doesn't have a boyish face, a sleek one, a classically structured face; at least as Marcello Rubini, the helplessly self-destructive journalist, he's heavy-lidded, long-mouthed, with a rakish shock of hair that blows back silver at the temples, brazenly spoken when he knows his lines, but he looks away too much when he doesn't, a little puckish and a little flinching, and he appears most conventionally handsome from the angles that suit him least. By profession he's an intrusion on other people's lives, but he projects the wayward wistfulness of a pierrot caught up and dropped by each harlequin whirl, a marionette who is aware that he cannot summon the strength to snap his strings. (Which does not mean he's harmless: as desperately as he wants something more in his life than hangovers and camera flash, he also hurts, very badly, the character who does love him. She's a little rocky herself, but she's more stable than his spinning weathercock. At least she can say what she wants.) Women don't fall into his arms. Sometimes he wakes up in their beds, but more often they snub him in nightclubs. I didn't expect that from an international sex symbol. It makes me want to see more of his films. Also, more Fellini. With Le notti di Cabiria (1957), this makes two for two. His movies are worlds.
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La strada is next. I saw five minutes of it once in the window of a TV store with the sound turned off: I was mesmerized.
Mastroianni is arguably the most beautiful man ever to appear in the movies.
I stand by my estimation of Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. But I have no reservations whatsoever about adding Mastroianni to the pantheon.
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That is a wonderful thing to be able to say about someone.