LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Federico Fellini: Friend
built 612 days ago
Federico seized one such opportunity to invent some dreadful sins, including setting fire to a house and causing hundreds to perish, and axing a priest to death. At the finish he raised his voice and confessed that he had kicked a friend during recess. He was told to say 100 "Hail Mary's," and then another slap. He became adept at jumping out of reach, and avoided confession if at all possible.
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Fellini's feverish imagination is evident in interviews as well. His friends and enemies alike were quick to call him a buggiardo--a big liar. It is perhaps more accurate to note that Fellini understood the inherent theatricality of all performance, including the interview form, and that artifice is just as revealing as plain truth. In his conversations with interviewers and the media, he often blurred the line between truth and sheer invention.
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Fellini ... scripted the monastery episode. Mann had written about an American padre who, having killed two Germans at Anzio, deserts and hides out with the monks, from whom he gets the courage to return to the front, but Fellini suggested a different plot in which three American chaplains visiting a monastery scandalise their pious but simple hosts by revealing that only one is Catholic, the others being Protestant and Jewish. They politely chide the Catholic for having failed to convert his friends and, though they've starved through the war and the Americans have provided a sumptuous meal, elect to fast that night, hoping the pagans will be converted. Puzzlingly, the American priest announces that he's been given a lesson in 'humility, simplicity and pure faith' -- when, if anything, the act seems emblematic of arrogance and bigotry. Fellini obviously liked the story, derived distantly from Boccaccio, but was unequal to providing the sting in the tail it demanded. As a result the episode falls flat.
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