Federico Fellini

I vitelloni

I vitelloni

Federico Fellini’s second outing as a solo director yielded his first commercial success, a clear-eyed portrait of five young men lingering in a postadolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small coastal town. Drawing on memories tucked between the childhood nostalgia of Amarcord and the big-city hangover of La dolce vita, Fellini crafts a semiautobiographical masterpiece of sharply drawn character sketches: of skirt-chasing Fausto, forced to marry a girl he has impregnated; Alberto, the perpetual child; Leopoldo, a writer thirsting for fame; and Moraldo, the conscience of the group. An Oscar nominee for best original screenplay, I vitelloni captures the lassitude and longing of its protagonists with comic insight and compassion.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1953
  • 108 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #246

Available In

Collector's Set

Essential Fellini

Essential Fellini

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

I vitelloni
Cast
Franco Interlenghi
Moraldo
Alberto Sordi
Alberto
Franco Fabrizi
Fausto
Leopoldo Trieste
Leopoldo
Riccardo Fellini
Riccardo
Leonora Ruffo
Sandra
Jean Brochard
Fausto’s father
Claude Farell
Olga, Alberto’s sister
Carlo Romano
Mr. Michele
Enrico Viarisio
Sandra’s father
Paola Borboni
Sandra’s mother
Credits
Director
Federico Fellini
Music
Nino Rota
Editing
Rolando Benedetti
Cinematography
Otello Martelli
Cinematography
Luciano Trasatti
Cinematography
Carlo Carlini
Story
Federico Fellini
Story
Ennio Flaiano
Story
Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay
Ennio Flaiano
Screenplay
Federico Fellini

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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, 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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