Variety Lights, Fellini's first feature film, gives you a chance to observe the director's customary conflict between honesty and sophistication, before his own sophistication set in. Fresh from five years on the vaudeville boards, Fellini portrays his colorful troop of two-bit showmen with both insight and sympathy.

Liliana, the buxom country lass who desperately wants a career in show business, best represents Fellini. At the beginning of the film, we find her naive, spontaneous, and perhaps overly in love with her audience. But after a big-time producer has signed her for his glamorous revue show, she turns cold, slightly bitchy, and even contemptuous of her public.

A gentle lyricism pervades the film in place of the imagination which dominates Fellini's later works. The director, always autobiographical, tries to place you inside the life he has been leading by showing the tense moments backstage in provincial theatres, or the long periods of boredom on trains and country roads. Very simple details carry the message, such as the contrast between the unorthodox drummer in the vaudeville company and the super-smoothy in a Rome nightclub.

Characters who later appear in La Strada or 8 1/2 can be found, if you care to look for them. For example, a flabby stripper in the revue later turns up as the famous Saraghina in 8 1/2. Haggard actors tramping along dusty country roads surely foreshadow La Strada. By contrast, the extended aerial shots of Rome lack only the helicopter and Christ of La Dolce Vita.

But most important, all of the characters in this film maintain two personalities: on-stage and off-stage. While Checco may be "Top Banana" under the lights, he's a silly fruitcake at home. Variety Lights does not get encumbered by moral judgements, but in later works the on-stage component changes into phoniness. Fellini does not permit his urbane heroes to relieve their egos by singing and dancing before an audience; rather, they must release their tensions destructively among their friends.

Variety Lights shows us Fellini in 1949, an extremely talented bumpkin at last provided with his own camera and crew. We see how he clings to the virtues of provincial life on the one hand, and how he is seduced by the quick and elegant atmosphere of Rome on the other. Liliana opts for the city, as Fellini did, but not without a certain sadness. For in the closing sequence, as she boards the express for Milan and then Paris, she wistfully eyes Checco and his company on the next track, en route to the provinces and vaudeville. One suspects that deep down, Fellini also wished he had been on that train.