Cinema: A Judas Goat

The Easy Life. Dust swirls, the camera whirls to follow a flashy type in a flashy car varooming through Rome on a sleepy summer morning. All at once the car skids to a stop, and the type hollers up at a young man watching him from a second-story window. "Ciao! Ha telefono?" The young man hesitates—should he reply to a passing stranger?

"Sì," he says at last, and the word sets in train the strange and affecting tale of this strange and brilliant Italian film, the hilarious and horrifying parable of a Judas goat who innocently leads a lamb to the slaughter.

"Sì," he says, and the flashy type (Vittorio Gassman) comes bounding upstairs to use the telephone. Turns out he's a gay and charming playboy on the sunny side of 40, a colorful drone who buzzes from mistress to mistress, job to job, meaning no harm but constitutionally unable to consider anyone but himself, any moment but now. The young man (Jean Louis Trintignant) is the typological opposite: a self-swallowing introvert who buries his life in his law books and doesn't even dare say hello to the girl he secretly loves.

"What are you living for!" the playboy bellows, and drags him off for a spin in his sports car. The young man tries to resist but he cannot; the energy, the zest of the older man sweep him along like a leaf in a gale. Eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour and, mamma mia! no hands on the wheel! Two girls appear in a convertible; the playboy gives chase. The police roar after him; he flashes a government pass. Gas, cigarettes, food; the playboy orders but his companion pays. The young man objects to being used; yet at the same time he knows he is getting his money's worth. He is getting a shot in the arm, a transfusion of hot red blood from a vitality more abundant and intense than his.

With ruthless force the new life forces out the old. After 36 hours of it, the young man suddenly feels empty, light, free: free of the past, free of his own galling limitations, free of his existence even, free as a bird and like a bird he longs to spread his wings and fly, fly! "Faster!" he shouts into the shouting wind. "Go faster!" The playboy, catching his mood, laughs with a mad demonic exultation and pushes the pedal to the floor. Ninety, a hundred. "Faster!" Laughing, the playboy swings out to pass . . .

Up to that point, The Easy Life is one of the funniest pictures ever made in Italy—a picaresque podge of Don Quixote and La Dolce Vita, a Tom Jones with jetaway. Gassman is superbly absurd as a sex bomb stuffed with ravioli, and Director Dino Risi faultlessly paces and spaces the fun and games. In its whole intention, however, The Easy Life is clearly more tragic than comic. The party is over before the picture is over. The spectator lifts the last glass of champagne to his lips and finds it full of blood: the blood of a decent, bewildered boy who does not understand that every man must live his own life, no matter how dull it may sometimes seem; who does not understand that the easy life is essentially an easy death.