Ed ecco a voi

TCM's lineup for tomorrow, May 29 is a morning and afternoon of films about bringing people back for television. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before and that was on my DVR is a foreign film, Ginger and Fred, which will be on at 11:15 AM.

The title, as you can guess, refers to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, although the movie isn't about the two of them. Instead, as the movie opens, an older woman gets off a train in Rome, where she is met by a production coordinator from a television program called We Are Proud to Present. The producer calls the woman Ginger (Giulietta Masina), which was actually her stage name as her real name is Amelia. Amelia, back in the 1940s, was part of a double act in which she did the sort of dance routines that Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire did in their movies; naturally her partner in the act took the stage name Fred although his real name is Pippo (Marcello Mastroianni).

We Are Proud to Present is a television variety show, and with it being Christmas, the program is planning an extra-large show for the holidays with all sorts of human interest stories, including the reuniting of an old dance partnership like Ginger and Fred who haven't worked together for at least 25 years, with each of them having their own families in the intervening years. On the way to the hotel where everybody is being put up, the producer is picking up an "Admiral" who went into a burning building and saved people's lives, which is the first indication that the show isn't as genteel as Amelia might think. (One plot hole is that, considering how popular the show claims to be, you'd think Amalia would know what it's about.)

Amelia gets to the hotel and finds that the show is even more of a circus than you'd might think, and that Pippo hasn't shown up yet, although in his defense he's really supposed to be on a later train that is supposedly only arriving in Rome late that evening. Among the other people being profiled on the show are a monk who can allegedly levitate; a dance troupe of people with dwarfism; male bodybuilders; and, getting a special escort to the TV studio, a young and telegenic mafioso serving a long sentence of house arrest.

Things take another turn for the worse when Amelia can't sleep because of the snoring coming from the next room. She goes to the room to wake the guy up, only to find that it's Pippo, looking every bit of his age and leaving Amelia and the viewers to wonder whether she's made the right move in deciding to do this TV special. Events carry her on through a backstage rehearsal and all the other preparations, until the cameras are about to roll....

In addition to being a sort of small, human-interest piece about two older characters, Ginger and Fred is also a biting satire on the state of television, at least as it was in the eyes of director Federico Fellini back in the 1980s. As I understand it, Italian TV has had a reputation for being even more lowbrow than American TV, even though they have the sort of public service broadcaster along the lines of the BBC garnering large ratings shares. The constant shots of TV screens showing continuity annoucers telling us what's coming up don't give us much confidence in the quality of the TV shows being produced.

For what feels like a little movie, however, Ginger and Fred runs a bit too long at a shade over two hours. Masina and Mastroianni both give fine performances, but the movie gave me the impression of the sort of film that's not going to be to everybody's taste. It is, however, one that I mostly liked.