Variety Lights

A beautiful ingenue joins a tawdry music hall troupe and quickly becomes its feature attraction in Federico Fellini’s stunning debut film (directed in collaboration with neorealist filmmaker Alberto Lattuada). Featuring Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife and frequent leading lady, Variety Lights introduces the director’s affection for the carnivalesque characters that frequent the cinematic landscape of such classics as Nights of Cabiria, La strada, and La dolce vita.

Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada
Italy
1950
97 minutes
Black & White
1.33:1
Italian
Spine #81

Special Features

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

Restored digital transfer
New and improved English subtitles

New cover by Olga Krigman

Purchase Options

Special Features

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

Restored digital transfer
New and improved English subtitles

New cover by Olga Krigman

Cast & Credits

Cast

Peppino De Filippo: Checco Dal Monte
Carla Del Poggio: Liliana Antonelli
Giulietta Masina: Melina Amour
John Kitzmiller: Johnny
Dante Maggio: Remo
Checco Durante: Theater owner
Gina Mascetti: Valeria del Sole

Credits

Director: Federico Fellini
Director: Alberto Lattuada
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Music: Felice Lattuada
Editing: Mario Bonotti
Sets: Aldo Buzzi
Costume design: Aldo Buzzi
Screenplay: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Alberto Lattuada
Screenplay: Tullio Pinelli
Story: Federico Fellini
Producer: Federico Fellini
Producer: Alberto Lattuada

Related Films

1/1

Explore

Federico Fellini

Writer, Producer, Director

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, 8½, 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.