A Lost Masterpiece: Fellini's 73 Ambushes and Captivates

Mastroianni as Francesco Conti

It appears that I'm on a Fellini kick, having been enthralled by his films when I was in college.  Watching them more than a half century naturally adds perspective that I could never have had in my youth. I never watched all of Fellini's films the way I did Kubrick and attempted with Hitchcock, but I saw quite a few. Despite being outside Hollywood, he is one of the majors as a director. This is a review of his film 73, a small, almost clandestine film that he never quite admitted was autobiographical.

Directed and co-written by Federico Fellini the 110-minute film again stars Marcello Mastroianni in the company of Anouk Aimée and Laura Antonelli.

Shot quickly between the baroque excesses of Roma and the haunted nostalgia of Amarcord, 73 is a whisper where most of his work shouts. It's also, without question, one of his most painful and beautiful.

Marcello Mastroianni (playing a character named Francesco Conti) is a fifty-year-old matinee idol whose face has begun to look like a tired carnival mask. After a near-fatal heart attack on the set of a ridiculous spy thriller, Francesco experiences what he can only describe as a visitation: a quiet, almost embarrassed encounter with Christ in a hospital corridor lit by failing fluorescents. He wakes up a believer. Not theatrically, not with trumpets, but with the sheepish certainty of a man who has discovered what people mean by the twin notions of peace and joy.

The film’s first half is vintage Fellini farce: Francesco tries to confess in three different Roman churches and is turned away each time (too famous, too late, too many photographers outside). One priest mistakes him for a paparazzo. Another asks to have his picture taken with him. A third simply locks the confessional when he hears the name “Conti.” Fellini films these scenes with the merciless glee of La Dolce Vita, except the laughter keeps catching in the throat.

Then the tone changes. Francesco finds a tiny evangelical parish in the outskirts, a converted barn where working-class Romans sing off-key hymns and drink real coffee after the service. He starts attending incognito (bad wig, sunglasses at night, the full ridiculous arsenal). He wants to belong, desperately. He learns the chords to “Amazing Grace” on a battered guitar. He brings expensive pastries and is politely asked not to, because they make the poorer members of the congregation uncomfortable. He tries to give testimony and is gently cut off after twenty minutes because “Brother Mateo has prepared something on the Book of Habakkuk.” Mastroianni’s face during that scene (half crushed, half illuminated) is worth more than most directors manage in a lifetime.

I found myself rooting for Francesco to make it, to be at home with his new family. It was hard to read how this would unfold.

Fellini refuses to mock the parishioners. That is the film’s great, almost shocking act of grace. These are not grotesques; they are ordinary people with crooked teeth and sincere handshakes. The cruelty comes from Francesco himself, from his inability to shrink to human size. When he finally explodes in frustration (“Don’t you know who I am?”), the room falls silent, and you feel the old Fellini thunder. But the thunder is followed by rain: a quiet elder takes Francesco outside, points to the night sky, and says, “Up there, nobody’s famous.”

The final sequence is pure cinematic sacrament. Francesco returns to the empty soundstage where he once filmed a sword-and-sandal epic. He walks among the ruins of cardboard temples and plastic lions, humming the hymn he never quite mastered. The camera cranes up slowly until he is just a speck beneath the rafters, still humming, still trying. The lights dim one by one, fade to black. Credits roll over silence.

73 was barely distributed. Fellini called it “a home movie I accidentally showed to strangers.” Critics at the time found it minor, even embarrassing. Today it feels like the key to everything else: a great showman confronting the one audience that will never applaud him. It's tender, funny, merciless, and finally heartbreaking. In a catalogue full of masterpieces, it may be the one that hurts the most, because it is the one in which Fellini finally asks to be forgiven, and isn’t sure the answer is yes.

Watch it alone. Watch it late. And when the last light goes out on that abandoned set, you will understand why Mastroianni, in his memoirs, simply wrote: “That was the best I ever was.”