Federico Fellini

La dolce vita

La dolce vita

The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight. This mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become.

Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1960
  • 174 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 2.35:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #733

Special Features

  • New 4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New interview with filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, an assistant director on the film
  • New interview with scholar David Forgacs about the period in Italian history when the film was made
  • New interview with Italian journalist Antonello Sarno
  • Interview with director Federico Fellini from 1965
  • Audio interview with actor Marcello Mastroianni from the early 1960s
  • Felliniana, a presentation of La dolce vita ephemera from the collection of Don Young
  • New visual essay by filmmaker : : kogonada
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Gary Giddins

    Cover by Eric Skillman

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Essential Fellini

Essential Fellini

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

Special Features

  • New 4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New interview with filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, an assistant director on the film
  • New interview with scholar David Forgacs about the period in Italian history when the film was made
  • New interview with Italian journalist Antonello Sarno
  • Interview with director Federico Fellini from 1965
  • Audio interview with actor Marcello Mastroianni from the early 1960s
  • Felliniana, a presentation of La dolce vita ephemera from the collection of Don Young
  • New visual essay by filmmaker : : kogonada
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Gary Giddins

    Cover by Eric Skillman
La dolce vita
Cast
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Rubini
Anita Ekberg
Sylvia
Anouk Aimée
Maddalena
Yvonne Furneaux
Emma
Magali Noël
Fanny
Alain Cuny
Steiner
Annibale Ninchi
Marcello’s father
Walter Santesso
Paparazzo
Lex Barker
Robert
Nadia Gray
Nadia
Valeria Ciangottini
Paola
Riccardo Garrone
Riccardo
Audrey McDonald
Jane
Polidor
Pagliaccio
Enrico Glori
Nadia’s lover
Credits
Director
Federico Fellini
Produced by
Giuseppe Amato
Produced by
Angelo Rizzoli Jr.
Written by
Federico Fellini
Written by
Ennio Flaiano
Written by
Tullio Pinelli
Written by
Brunello Rondi
From a story by
Federico Fellini
From a story by
Ennio Flaiano
From a story by
Tullio Pinelli
Music
Nino Rota
Cinematography
Otello Martelli
Edited by
Leo Cattozzo
Production design and costumes
Piero Gherardi

Current

Marcello Mastroianni on Fellini
Marcello Mastroianni on Fellini
In a fascinating 1963 audio interview featured on our new release of La dolce vita, actor Marcello Mastroianni talks to film historian Gideon Bachmann about how he met Federico Fellini and was cast in La dolce vita. This disarmingly personal ex…
8         ½: When “He” Became “I”
8 ½: When “He” Became “I”
Until the time when he was consecrated as a great director, Fellini didn’t have an easy relationship with writers, his contemporaries who used to gather in the evening in Via Veneto’s many cafés. In those circles, the filmmaker was merely tolera…

By Tullio Kezich

La dolce vita: Tuxedos at Dawn
La dolce vita: Tuxedos at Dawn

Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.

By Gary Giddins

Nina Menkes’s Top 10
Nina Menkes’s Top 10

The director of Queen of Diamonds shares a list of favorite films, including uncompromising classics of world cinema that reveal the mysteries of the human condition.

Azazel Jacobs’s Top 10
Azazel Jacobs’s Top 10

The director shares some of the films that have helped guide his creative process and inspired his approach to his latest movie, French Exit.

Party Time in Fellini Land

Songbook

Party Time in Fellini Land

In La dolce vita, an upbeat tune by Nino Rota turns a dour party into a feast of ecstatic movement.

By Michael Joshua Rowin

Explore

Federico Fellini

Writer, Director

Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini

One of Italy’s great modern directors, Federico Fellini was a larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique. While his most popular—and accessible—film, the darkly nostalgic childhood memoir Amarcord, is a great entryway into his oeuvre, , a collage of memories, dreams, and fantasies about a director’s artistic crisis, is perhaps his masterpiece. In his early career, Fellini was both a screenwriter for neorealist pioneer Roberto Rossellini and a newspaper caricaturist in postwar Rome, competing influences he would bring together with startling results. After such early works as I vitelloni, Fellini broke away from neorealism’s political strictures with the beloved La strada, and from there boldly explored his obsessions with the circus, societal decadence, spiritual redemption, and, most controversially, women, in such films as Nights of Cabiria, Juliet of the Spirits, and And the Ship Sails On.