If you want to follow Fellini's career through his films on DVD, it's just barely possible to do so. Yet in these remarkably honest films, Fellini created sympathetic portraits that, while often coming dangerously close to sentimentality, were always beautifully, unashamedly humane. It turns out he tries keeping the money he takes from the father and daughter (and is later left for dead by his partners on a deserted roadside). ''Il Bidone'' is alone among these essentially comic treatises with tragic overtones in that its glimpse of Augusto's humanity is fleeting.
FEDERICO FELLINI VIDEO SERIES
Between 19, Fellini made a series of films that explored people on society's fringes whose lives were nonetheless worth dramatizing, whose every fiber was gripped by a will to love, to live, to survive. This early, rarely shown Fellini film - now available on DVD (Image Entertainment, 91 minutes, $24.99) - is a stellar discovery from its director's artful prime.
Then, posing as a priest, Augusto speaks to a paralyzed girl whose father he is in the process of taking for half a million lire she, of course, believes Augusto is the real thing in his robes, and he - if just for a moment - has sobered: when he tells her that because of her faith she's better off than most people despite her physical condition, he appears to have discovered that life doesn't mean total moral corruption.
LATE in ''Il Bidone'' (''The Swindle''), Federico Fellini's stark 1955 portrait of confidence men who bilk the poor out of what little money they have, the group's leader, Augusto (Broderick Crawford), begins addressing the matter of his conscience, which had never troubled him until recently, when by chance he ran into the daughter he had abandoned.