Grand Guignol on the Grand Canal

In front of the almond-paste architecture of the Excelsior Palace hotel on the Lido in Venice, the orchestra plays on the terrace above the beach. Two young couples dance, the kind of dancing that looks like arguments between peddlers on a busy street corner. The terrace is almost empty. In other years at this hour, six in the evening, no chair was vacant. The Adriatic murmurs at the rows of cabanas--tents that look as though they have been arranged for a medieval tournament. The sky is soft, mid-ocean gray. Far out, the horizon is ambiguous. A cargo vessel seems to be floating several hundred feet in the air. A waiter comes out with the specialty of the season, a drink called a Bellini, fresh peaches mixed in a blender and laced with champagne. A bearded young man confers in a corner with two longhaired contemporaries over an announcement to the press denouncing the management of the XXIX Mostra Internazionale D'Arte Cinematografica of Venice as bourgeois and anti-cultural. The festival has opened two days late, a year ago this month, and nearly hasn't opened at all because of demonstrations and a belligerent Sorbonne-type sit-in. Policemen prowl before the Lido Palace. Six hundred other policemen are bivouacked nearby, ready to charge if any lovers of the seventh art are carried away by an excess of enthusiasm. Detectives with pistols bulging under sports jackets patrol the bar, the dining room and the corridors of the hotel. Posters advertising a movie glorifying Ché Guevara are pasted on fences all over the Lido, as are other posters exhorting the merchants of Venice to unite to fight the saboteurs of the festival who are taking the bread and butter out of the merchants' mouths. There are no yachts in the harbor. The Czechoslovakian entries have won most of the prizes for short subjects, but most of the Czechs have gone home to face the Russian tanks in Prague. The orchestra goes on to another number. A singer intones in French, "Que c'est triste, Venise."

In Venice itself, tourists mill around by the thousands--Germans, Americans, British, Dutch, Swiss, Japanese--pouring past the arcades of the Doges' Palace, which now shelter rows of gaudy stands selling souvenirs. Amateur photographers bunch up on the Riva degli Schiavoni to take pictures of the Bridge of Sighs. A fat American girl goes by, alone in a gondola, sipping a Coca-Cola through a straw. The clientele of Harry's Bar is older than I remember. There is a photograph of Hemingway, smiling, at the entrance. At night, a flotilla of gondolas, jammed to the gunwales with tourists, goes slowly down the canal, being sung to by a tenor thriftily placed in the middle of the fleet--watery romance at a wholesale rate.

On Sunday there is a regatta and gilded barges float by, rowed by gondoliers dressed in medieval costumes, in all colors of the rainbow. The main barge has a symbolic figure of a woman holding a golden globe--Venice, mistress of the seas. Venice is sinking by inches into the sea, but the tourists do not seem to worry. None of the tourists comes to see the films at the festival. None of them even talks about the festival. The young men with their pronunciamentos and their grim strips of celluloid are determined to pull down the world of the tourists, their snapshots of gondolas, their three-week tours, (continued on page 104) Grand Guignol (continued from page 97) their miniature pillars of St. Mark's. It is not impossible that the young men will succeed. Some other year.

The young men remember with martial satisfaction the great moment when, in the name of Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Castro, several millionaire film directors stopped the festival of Cannes earlier in the year by pulling the curtains in front of the screen during a projection.

• • •

"Que c'est triste, Venise," the singer sings. "Au temps des amours mortes, / Que c'est triste, Venise, / Quand on ne s'aime plus."

A small homemade bomb has exploded in front of the hall where the films are shown. A glass door has been damaged. The Beautiful People are not in Venice this year. They are not partial to small homemade bombs. The Beautiful People are in Sardinia or Greece. There are no costume balls. A lone buxom blonde strips off the top of her bikini for a few languid photographers on the beach. It is a ritual salute to the past, without meaning, without sex. The great beauties of the cinema are making pictures elsewhere or acting for Godard or having babies. Pretty things are not lacking, but they are too young and local for the most part, honey-tanned by the summer on the beach, 14, 15, only a few 18-year-olds. The bar of the Excelsior Palace is like the steps of Hollywood High School, a torment for aging lechers.

The heroine of a German film makes an appearance. According to the daily program, the film is called, improbably, Artists at the Top of the Big Top: Perplexed. The heroine has the face of an old club fighter. The photographers gather for an instant, then ignore her. She sits by herself, smiling uneasily. We have seen her naked in her bath in her film. She plays the part of a circus owner obsessed with the idea of revolutionizing the circus. One of her numbers is the execution of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico by a group of clowns. In another number, a tiger seems to be turned loose on the spectators. The circus is probably meant to symbolize the German soul. Or perhaps the German film industry. The lady has led elephants across the border to escape taxes. The German soul in exile, perhaps. She has spoken of Auschwitz. She has a very good figure for a circus owner, with a fine triangle of pubic hair. We have seen her lover in the film naked in the bath, too, eating breakfast. He does not have a very good figure for a lover. In almost every film, we have seen somebody naked in a bath or in the throes of copulation. It is the obligatory scene of the XXIX Mostra Internazionale D'Arte Cinematografica. Even Galileo, in a film made in a Bulgar-Italo attack on the Church, is seen being washed down in a wooden tub by a fatarmed peasant girl. Still, in the end, as we knew he would, when shown the instruments of torture by order of the Pope, he renounces his belief that the earth revolves around the sun. He is a pretty good figure of a man for a scientist who knows that the earth revolves around the sun. He is an Irish actor, dubbed into Italian in a picture shot in Sofia. He assists, in a ruff, at the dissection of a cadaver. A lecturer holds a human brain in his hand. It is a real human brain, marvelously colored. We are a long way from the special-effects department of MGM.

We are a long way from Hollywood, altogether. The days of the long cigars are over. Mr. Chiarini, the director of the festival, is a Socialist, or was one until a few days earlier, when he resigned from the party in a spate of mutual criticism. If Mr. Chiarini is not anti-American, he can take Americans or leave them alone. The major companies have decided they can leave Venice alone. Zanuck no longer flies in from Antibes in his private amphibious plane. Spiegel does not draw up in front of the Piazza San Marco in his yacht. Anatole Litvak is no longer to be seen at the baccarat tables in the casino. Even Carlo Ponti and Dino de Laurentiis, once the new breed of internationalized Italian producers, make no appearance. The contessas and the principessas who threw open their palazzi in aristocratic patronage of the arts in former years have decided to sit this one out, waiting for revolution, perhaps, or the restoration of the Bourbons.

The new proletariat of the arts imposes its manners. Rude propositions are openly exchanged. Insult replaces wit. Slogans make do for epigrams. The clothing seen reflects the opinions heard. Nobody wears a dinner jacket. After the showing of his film, a young French director rises to accept the plaudits of the audience wearing a red sport shirt, open at the throat.

Was it only the previous year that Henry Miller, one of the judges on the jury at Cannes, was forbidden entrance to the evening projections there because he did not have a tuxedo? Or was it the year before, or the year before that? Festivals blend in the memory: Customs change.

• • •

"On cherche encore des mots," the singer wails to the waves. "Mais I'ennui les emporte, / On voudrait bien pleurer, / Mais on ne le peut plus."

A photographer poses three long-haired boys, dressed as hippies, unwashed, with bare dirty feet in scuffed sandals, on the steps leading to the hotel terrace. The photograph, as is so often the case, is misleading. Whatever is happening at the festival has nothing to do with hippies.

An Italian director asks all Italian newspapermen to leave his press conference, to indicate his feelings about journalism on the peninsula. The newspapermen refuse to leave. The director goes down to the bar on the beach and has his press conference there, with only the non-Italian journalists present. Perhaps if the director could read other languages, he would have banned them, too. At the subsequent morning showing of his film, the director gets up while the film is being projected and addresses the audience and tells them that he is against his film being shown and is leaving the hall forthwith to emphasize his objection. He invites all of like mind to follow him. Nobody leaves. The audience is interested in the film and wants to see it through. The director must have mixed feelings as he strides out of the hall.

The film is called Teorema [reviewed in last month's Playboy] and even before it is shown, the rumor spreads that it is going to win the big prize. Nobody knows how the rumor started, but it is repeated with confidence. The picture itself is a strange hodgepodge of eroticism, religiosity and political yammering, all shot with a high degree of professionalism and a complete absence of humor. In it, a beautiful young man (Terence Stamp) comes to visit the home of an upper-bourgeois family whose son is a friend of his. In the course of his visit, he makes love successively to the son of the family, the daughter, the maid, the mother and, finally, the father. All this is shown with little left to the imagination, especially in the case of the ladies. There is a great deal of lifting of skirts and opening of bodices and painful grimaces of lust. A curious feature common to almost all the films at the festival is that nobody seems to enjoy sex, although there is a lot of it lying around.

The beautiful young man leaves the house and the effects of his splendidly impartial visit begin to make themselves felt. First, the maid leaves, carrying her valise, presumably without giving notice. She goes back to her native farm, seats herself at the foot of a wall in the farmyard and instructs her mother to gather thistles, the only food she will indulge in from this time on. Aspiring to saintliness, she grows lined and haggard. People come from all around to adore her and she cures a small boy of what might have been plague spots or pimples. At one time, she can be seen levitating above the roof of the barn.

The son, with whom the beautiful young visitor opened the festivities, becomes a painter, making tortured abstracts, and finishes by putting a canvas of solid blue on the floor and urinating on it--a criticism by the director, I take it, of the quality of modern art.

The daughter, affected mentally, takes to her bed, and is soon carted off to an asylum.

The mother becomes a hopeless victim of nymphomania and picks up one (continued on page 167) Grand Guignol (continued from page 104) young boy after another on the street, and when last seen is in a ditch doing guess what while another boy waits his turn ten feet away.

The maid, to return to her, leaves her post at the foot of the wall and lies down in a vacant lot and has her mother bury her alive, while a pool of tears two feet across forms in the mud next to her left eye.

The father, a big industrialist who has been ill earlier in the film--an illness brought on by having his advances rejected by his wife in the marital bed--has been cured by the young visitor in a simple treatment that consisted of taking the industrialist's bare feet and putting them up on the young man's shoulders, one on each side of the young man's head, a treatment that must be new in medical science. But after the young visitor has gone, the industrialist gives his factory to his workers and then goes to the Milan railroad station, where he takes off all his clothes, the last item dropping down being a pair of canary-yellow underpants. After that, we see the industrialist running naked, screaming, over what looks like the steaming side of a volcano. He doesn't have a bad figure for an industrialist.

Later discussions are enlightening. We are told that the young visitor was God or the agent of God and that the bourgeois family, corrupted by its material values, could not stand the touch of God's love and suffered accordingly. Only the servant was ennobled by it, not being bourgeoise.

Teorema wins the Catholic award for the festival. An eyebrow is raised here and there.

An American distributor, gambling on the picture's winning the main prize, buys it for America. Our simpler notions of religion in our young country may make for a misunderstanding now and then when Teorema is shown at your local theater.

• • •

While all this is going on, Jean Renoir, whose films are being shown in a retro-spective tribute to him, sits in the lobby, looking like an old Burgundian winegrower, and speaks gently into tape recorders. His works make most of the films we see each day seem like crude scratches on schoolyard walls by mentally disturbed children. There is a rumor current that Mr. Chiarini wrote somewhere in 1938, of Renoir's masterpiece, Grand Illusion, that it was Jewish-Communist propaganda. But nobody can get hold of the magazine or newspaper in which this judgment from the Mussolini period was published. Everybody is prepared to believe the worst of poor Mr. Chiarini this year. It is rumored that he is going to resign.

Mr. Chiarini is also reported to have said to an American critic that there are no good American pictures anymore. Later the critic says, over lunch, "All the good American novelists are dead." At a festival, everyone is entitled to his own opinion.

The critics do not speak highly of one another, either. One of them repeats with relish a description of Kenneth Tynan as a no-longer-quite-boyish English writer who is always riding each new wave in the arts and in politics like an indefatigable surfer. "Rip van With-it," Gore Vidal is said to have dubbed him. The laughter at the table is hearty and ungenerous. He who lives by the sword....

The critics suffer from the Emperor's New Clothes syndrome. Most of the films chosen are tortured allegories, as obscure as the directors can manage to make them. To an innocent eye, many of them are devoid of any meaning, but the critics use shining words like "nobility of intention" and "beauty of realization" to describe works that stun the soul with boredom. Secretly, everybody longs to see a Doris Day movie.

• • •

The weather is bad, the sky overcast, the sea troubled. Only the critic for Variety manages to remain tanned. He reminisces about a festival at Cannes at which I met him some years ago. "That was my worst festival," he says. He is not speaking of the quality of the films. A dog had bitten him in Paris and he was taking a series of rabies shots and was not allowed to drink. I sympathize with him. He is a friend, but no dog can be all bad who picks a critic to bite out of all the population of Paris.

People say that this is the last festival for Venice. Other people say that is what they say every year.

An old-time American movie-theater owner says that he used to be able to see a movie in a projection room and come out knowing within five percent what it would gross, world-wide. Now he can only shrug. He also says his theaters have shown a bigger profit in the past year than in the past 15 years. He is puzzled but, understandably, not unhappy, and leaves before the end of the festival.

Walking back to the hotel after a showing one night, my wife and I are knocked down at a street corner by a man on a motorcycle. The driver crashes, too, with his machine, and lies in a dramatic Italian imitation of death on his back in the gutter. He gets up when he sees that we get up unbloodied. He smiles placatingly. He was going five miles an hour and the street was brightly lit. He smells like a winery. Two policemen on the corner look on placidly. A crowd gathers immediately and a man in the shirt sleeves tries to push us on our way, saying, "Signore, signora, you are not harmed." He brushes my jacket, glancing uneasily at the two policemen, who take a reluctant step closer to the action. "Return to your home," the man in the shirt sleeves says. "It is nothing."

"He is an imbecile," my wife says loudly, gesturing at the motorcyclist, who is standing weaving and smiling, his back to the policemen. She repeats it in Italian, stuttering a little. When she gets angry, she tends to forget foreign tongues and that makes her angrier.

"No, he is not an imbecile," the man in shirt sleeves says. "He is merely drunk."

The motorcyclist smiles more widely at this accolade. The entire crowd now urges us to return home. The policemen take a half step closer. I prevail upon my wife to abandon her American ideas of justice, of crime and suitable punishment, and go back to the hotel with me. We are in Italy, that flexible country.

We break loose from the crowd and the policemen turn happily away. We go into the night club of the hotel, where a young American actor is dancing with a tall blonde critic from Munich, dressed like a bullfighter. She is cool and handsome and she does a lot more than just keep time. If more critics looked and moved like that, they would be more welcome in polite society.

Another actor is reported to have scratched at the door of three different ladies in the course of the same night. The ladies get together the next morning and compare notes, but they were not watching the clock and they can't establish in what order the actor made his rounds. Tact forbids asking the actor which, if any, of the three doors opened.

At two o'clock in the morning in the bar, a 100-pound girl, standing five feet and no inches tall, slaps a well-known television commentator. Before the commentator can answer in kind, he is carried out, his feet off the carpet, by a platoon of young men, like a character in a cartoon. The commentator is reported to have told the lady that she was not an honest woman. The next day, the story has taken a political cast and people are saying it was a director who slapped the commentator for artistic reasons.

A Yugoslav picture is withdrawn because it has not been allotted an evening showing. National pride is offended by daylight.

A Spanish picture, featuring Mijanou Bardot, BB's sister, sinks without a trace. The "English" press handout that describes the story of the film gives some hint of the reason for its fate. "A cloud of fire felt down to Sodome and Gomorre and razed everything. Only two men and a woman and a gun were left. The men fought together and the woman looked down at them and felt bored. One day, she opened a cabinet and saw that it was full of women's dresses. And the woman grisped the gun. The fire felt down again to Sodome and Gomorre and ended with all that still remained."

The judgment on Miss Bardot is that she is perhaps prettier than her sister. She bears up under the comparison with shy grace. When asked why she did the Spanish picture, she replies that she did it because her husband had hepatitis. He was stuck in a hospital in Spain and she wanted to be near him. Actors have taken roles for worse reasons.

Maximilian Schell comes to town with a German version of Kafka's The Castle, in which he stars and which he has produced, rashly using his own money. It is a worthy effort; but Kafka, that poet of the action that never takes place, of doors that never quite open, is a problem for the camera. The reviews are bad and Mr. Schell has dinner in his room. He and the people in his entourage tell one another that the German critic who gave him the worst review has one glass eye. An American distributor buys the film for the United States and Canada and predicts he will make a fortune with it.

A gentleman whose business is selling German films to Russia and Russian films to Germany bemoans the fact that since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, his trade has fallen to zero.

A statuesque Parisienne, chicly dressed, who comes to Venice every year at the time of the festival with an aging escort and who has not read the papers this year, complains bitterly, "It is all different. What has happened? Nobody has given a party. I haven't seen a single good dress."

A young woman whose face seems vaguely familiar wanders alone among the drinkers, the arguers, the interviewers and the interviewees. Nobody seems to speak to her. A slight smile plays about her lips. Then you remember. It is the young girl who smiles at Mastroianni across the rush of water on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita, that unforgettable smile that represented youth and life and innocence for a generation of moviegoers. Is it possible that one lovely smile was a whole career?

At the Biennale, the international exposition of art, which also had its troubles with demonstrators when it was opened, three bars of aluminum, joined and lying on the floor, represent the creative urge of a Spanish artist. A few minutes away on foot are the church walls covered by Tintoretto and Titian. When the painting of the Assumption by Titian was unveiled behind the altar of the church of Sta. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, what were the demonstrations like? Is there any record that Titian made a speech announcing that he did not wish his picture to be shown?

"Que c'est triste, Venise," the sad voice sings to the Adriatic. "Au temps des amours mortes,/Que c'est triste, Venise,/Quand on ne s'aime plus,/Les musées, les églises ouvrent en vain leurs portes,/Inutiles beautés devant les yeux déçus."

• • •

A French movie based on a book by Boris Vian is shown. Vian, who was also a jazz musician, was a culture hero in St. Germain des Prés in the 1950s. He wrote a book about the United States called I Will Spit on Your Graves, although he had not visited America. He died young and now is the object of a cult. An American who lives in Paris says, after seeing the new film, "Vian is not for me. He is a figure in somebody else's nostalgia."

Other Americans make their appearance. There is a lady from California who has won an award, in the short-subject festival that precedes the big one, for a documentary on the painter Soutine that she made with $40,000 of her own money. In it we are treated to the kosher slitting of a chicken's throat by the ritual knife and lurid scenes in slaughterhouses, where Soutine drew his subject matter for paintings of bloody carcasses of beef with their disturbing echoes of the Crucifixion. Fittingly, the film ends with the depiction of an operation for a bleeding ulcer, a malady that proved fatal to the painter. The lady does not know how to make use of her prize and timidly asks for the names of people in various countries who might be prevailed upon to distribute the picture.

Another American lady, Mrs. Helen Silverstein, who looks somewhat like Paulette Goddard and who is probably described ungratefully in her passport under the heading, "Occupation: Housewife," bustles around getting people to see one of the more bizarre films of the festival, Me and My Brother, which she has worked on for three and a half years with the brilliant director and photographer Robert Frank. An attempt at synopsis is hopeless. One of the things it is about is a young man who is a speechless catatonic schizophrenic who is being taken care of by his brother, a homosexual friend of Allen Ginsberg. The speechless schizophrenic in real life is actually a speechless schizophrenic; the brother is real and is really the friend of Allen Ginsberg. The brother during the course of the filming of the picture became hooked on speed and the results of the drug are terrifyingly apparent in his rasping, fierce, resentful speech. The film begins hideously with the lovemaking of the brother and another homosexual before the Kinseylike cameras of a team studying all kinds of sexual behavior. The schizophrenic is present, too, but refuses to comment. Later, we have Ginsberg and his friend giving a poetry reading in Kansas before 6000 people, to the accompaniment of a small Indian musical instrument. Ginsberg and the two brothers stride across the plains of Kansas and play the instrument and recite poetry to the empty prairie. An actor takes over the role of the schizophrenic, so as to explain certain things about him that the schizophrenic cannot explain himself, and the role is taken for a while by the two men together. Psychiatrists, a German dentist, a Negro photographer, voluble actresses confessing all and performing Lesbian acts mingle in beautifully played and photographed hallucinatory scenes. Childhood fantasies of violence are played out, asylums visited. Reality and art interchange abruptly. Finally, the schizophrenic actually speaks. He says nothing of importance, but it is impossible not to be moved. The whole thing is a dazzling incoherent tour of what might be called East Village culture.

It should be put in a time capsule to demonstrate to future generations what it was like Downtown in the late 1960s. What will happen to it when it is put into a theater is another matter.

Mrs. Silverstein says the picture cost $75,000 to make. She hardly knows where the money came from. From her own pocket, from the director, from friends, from people who saw bits of the film and had faith. She herself brought the picture to Venice under her arm, arriving in Italy with not enough money, no Italian, and in pain from a blood clot in her leg. In a time when faith is unfashionable, only the making of films seems to inspire people with the same dedication that moved the infants of Europe toward Constantinople on the Children's Crusade.

Mrs. Silverstein's husband, caught helplessly in the fire of his wife's determination, is on hand. He works for The New York Times and is on his summer holiday and is in Venice with their ten-year-old daughter. While Mrs. Silverstein ranges the Lido, plumping for her film, the husband minds the child and searches for someone to play tennis with. The little girl is precocious. She has probably seen the film.

The film wins no prizes. The Silversteins rent a car and go south to tour the hill towns.

Part of the team that made John Cassavetes' film Faces arrives. One of the leading actors, with a wild mustache, is dressed in Levis. The cutter and coproducer is an ex-ballplayer who found out in triple-A ball that when he pitched, he was hit, and that when he was pitched to, he did not hit. Their first cut was 20 hours long and their final film is still too long; but it is done with painful honesty, telling the story of a failing marriage with meticulously realistic acting that Stanislavsky would have approved of. There is a refreshing absence of symbols and we are treated to a touchingly old-fashioned note. The morning after spending the night with a whore, the hero admits he enjoyed it. The whore says she doesn't have a heart of gold. But she does have a heart of gold. Even Cassavetes can't escape all the traps.

• • •

The days wear on, the pictures succeed one another--Czech, Senegalese, Italian, Spanish, Dutch. You begin to have the feeling that half the world is conspiring against your eyesight. The pictures have one thing in common: There isn't a laugh in any of them. In the Dutch picture, the actors have been allowed by the director to make up their own dialog, in English as well as in Dutch. The value of a writer, any writer, is suddenly made clear. The heroine of the picture is a pert little dark-haired girl. We see her naked; but, surprisingly, she is making love to the actor who plays her husband in the film.

The contesters of the festival sit daily and make long speeches to one another and produce announcements complaining that the direction of the festival is interfering with the journalists in their reporting of the Mostra. The direction responds with its own announcement: "This appears so ridiculous that there should not be any necessity for a denial, but since we are in a climate in which we are trying to credit even the most absurd ideas ..." etc.

A young French journalist who has been involved in the protest against the festival is called back to Paris. He strides down the dock from which the launches leave for Venice, followed by two collaborators who are remaining behind. He is handsome, with a bold, disdainful look on his face. When he gets into the boat, he does not use the rubber-protected steps but climbs directly over the polished-mahogany thwarts, as the boatman winces. He gives final instructions about a press release to the two young men who have come to see him off, and then, as the line is cast off, he gives the Communist clenched-fist salute and says, "Salut, campañeros. Et merde à Chiarini."

Standing heroically in the stern of the smart launch, he churns down the canal, Simón Bolivar in a corduroy jacket, saying farewell to a $40-a-day hotel. You begin to have a sneaking affection for Mr. Chiarini, if only because of the style of his enemies.

The day of the awarding of prizes is upon us. By afternoon, everybody knows who will get what that evening. The nonwinners are, for the most part. packing their bags. The young American actor with the wild mustache from Faces comes excitedly out of the hotel. He is wearing a tie and a yellow jacket, his robes of celebration. Exuberantly, he announces that he has won the prize for the best actor. I shake his hand, not knowing what else to do. The critic from Variety swallows and then takes the hard line. He tells the young man he is mistaken, it is the other actor in the film, who is not present in Venice, who has won the prize.

The young man with the mustache goes up to his room. Later on, at the ceremony, he courageously marches up to the platform to accept his colleague's Golden Lion. Suffering is the lot of the artist, in all ages.

The actual distribution of prizes at night, aside from being an anticlimax, is spoiled, as are most ceremonies these days, by the clusters of photographers, who beam a huge light into the audience's eyes and who barely leave room on the stage for the participants in the rites. It is impossible not to feel that photographers are no longer there to record events, but to be the event.

The German film about the circus, Artists at the Top of the Big Top: Perplexed, gets the prize for the best picture. The director, a pleasant, modest, smiling, youngish man, is applauded mildly as he receives the Golden Lion. There is a consoling thought. At least he is a writer. He has published a book. There is no prize for screenplays in Venice. Writing is considered too negligible an accomplishment to be discussed in Venice.

The girl who plays the servant-girl-turned-saint in Teorema is awarded the prize for best actress but, loyal to her director, does not go up to claim it. The producer of the picture stolidly accepts it for her. Loyalty is meaningless if one does not have to pay a price for it.

No prize is offered to the audience, although they have been subjected to ten days that could well have induced combat fatigue in lesser spirits. They have been exposed to burnings at the stake, a dissection, civil war, children and bridegrooms being shot, men making love with men and women with women, drug addiction, suicide, dementia, schizophrenia, modern poetry, bonzes immolating themselves, policemen clubbing students, the breakup of marriages, prostitution, thefts, threats of guerrilla warfare in the United States by black nationalists, nymphomania, self-betrayal, vertiginous swoopings by hand-held cameras over heaving naked flesh, wounds, both of the flesh and of the spirit, of all kinds. And yet they sit there, under the hard eyes of dozens of detectives in the handsome hall, in the glare of the photographers' lights, and applaud politely out of the waste of their lost illusions. A communal Purple Heart, at the very least.

An American documentary, Monterey Pop, is shown, to end the festival on a gala note. In it, a hippie girl offers a flower to a California policeman, his pistol on his hip. Nobody offers flowers to the policemen outside the festival hall, although they wear pistols, too.

There is a big party in the ballroom at the Excelsior Palace to finish things off. A lady who knows whispers that there is food for only 700 and there are over 1000 people present. In the socialistic spirit of the affair, I reluse to eat. To each according to his need.

A last drink at the hotel bar. It is like the night before docking on an ocean liner. Everybody promises to look everybody up. Suddenly, people realize that they have enjoyed themselves.

Charley Beal, the pianist in the bar, sings in the hoarse, pleasant accents of Harlem, "I love Paris in the springtime." He has put in five years in Paris at the piano in the Calavados, opposite the Hotel George V, but he prefers Italy. He can never live in Harlem again, he says.

The next morning, there are two cars with Czechoslovakian license plates on the car ferry to the mainland. There is a pretty Czech girl with pink bows tied around blonde pigtails. She is wearing white-jean shorts, brief and tight around an adorable behind. A leather patch, with the word Wrangler branded on it, is sewn on next to a back pocket. I ask her in English if she is going back to Prague. She asks if I can speak French. I ask her the question in French. She smiles apologetically. "Rome," she says.

Someone at the bar of the ferry says, as we sail down the Grand Canal, past the Doges' Palace. "This is the last year. There won't be one next year."

When I get home, I send a letter of thanks to the manager of the hotel and ask him to save a room for me for next year's Mostra Internazionale D'Arte Cinematografica.