Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada

Variety Lights

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.

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Film Info

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
Variety Lights
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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

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Variety Lights

Variety Lights (Luci del varietà, 1950) is the ironically grandiose title of an Italian movie featuring the onstage and backstage antics of a provincial troupe of lovably inept vaudeville performers. Their hand-to-mouth existence is bathed in a warm…

By Andrew Sarris


Aug 29, 2000

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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.

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