#0000C/#246: FELLINI, Federico: I Vitelloni (1953)

FELLINI, Federico (Italy)

I Vitelloni [1953]

Spine #0000C/Spine #246

Blu-ray/DVD

2004 synopsis

Five young men linger in a postadolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small seacoast town. They while away their time spending the lira doled out by their indulgent families on drink, women, and nights at the local pool hall. Federico Fellini's second solo directorial effort (originally released in the U.S. as The Young and the Passionate) is a semiautobiographical masterpiece of sharply drawn character sketches: Skirt chaser Fausto, forced to marry a girl he has impregnated; Alberto, the perpetual child; Leopoldo, a writer thirsting for fame; and Moraldo, the only member of the group troubled by a moral conscience. An international success and recipient of an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, I Vitelloni compassionately details a year in the life of a group of small-town layabouts struggling to find meaning in their lives.

2020 synopsis

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.

107 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

in Italian

1:33:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2004/2020

Director/Writers

Story by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli.

Screenplay by Fellini and Flaiano.

Fellini was 33 when he directed I Vitelloni.

Other Fellini films in the Collection:

#0000C/#189: The White Sheik (1952)
#0000C/#219: La Strada (1954)
#0000C: Il Bidone (1955)
#0000C/#49: Nights Of Cabiria (1957)
#0000C/#733: La Dolce Vita (1960)
#0000C/#140: 8½ (1963)
#0000C/#149: Juliet Of The Spirits (1965)
#0000C/#747: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
#0000C/#848: Roma (1972)
#0000C/#4: Amarcord (1973)
#0000C/#50: And The Ship Sails On (1983)
#0000C: Intervista (1987)

The Film

vitellóne, noun:

Year-old calf, held to fatten in the stable, meat of the slaughtered animal;

fig. idle young person of the provinces, often an eternal student

As one can deduce from the interviews with his childhood pals, Benzi, Montanari and his young girlfriend Bianca (see the extra archival audio interviews for The White Sheik), Fellini himself was not really a vitelloni, because by the time they all were ready to enter university, Fellini left Rimini for Rome — leaving his old pals disconcerted because the gang was breaking up.

His producers were not thrilled with backing the young filmmaker for his 2½ film (Variety Lights, co-directed with Lattuada and The White Sheik, being the first 1½ … both commercial failures), and as the production bogged down for lack of money, Fellini kept filming, taking his time — reproducing the wild times of his youth.

Although the original gang was just a trio (Fellini, Benzi and Montanari), for the film he made them into a quintet: Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi); Alberto (Alberto Sordi); Fausto (Franco Fabrizi); Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste); and Riccardo (Fellini’s brother, Riccardo).

Fellini’s genius lies in his ability to specifically delineate all five goofballs, with unique characteristics that we catch through dialogue and visuals.

• Moraldo is the moody older brother of the young woman that Fausto nearly leaves at the altar, with a baby in her belly. He is the youngest, and most thoughtful in the group. He is probably meant to represent Fellini …
• Alberto is the showman, always blabbering about something, making an obscene gesture to some roadside workers, who chase him down after their car stalls (like much of the film, this really happened) … remarkably, Sordi was considered box-office poison at this time — the Italian moviegoers just didn’t like him — but Fellini gave him this outsized role and when the film was a success, Sordi’s career took off!
• Fausto — the womanizer — is the center of most of the action. His inappropriate passes at every skirt he encounters (including one at the boss’s wife, which gets him fired) make him the sad clown — a character that will forever be an iconic Felliniesque role …
• Leopoldo is the intellectual of the group. His best scene involves him reading his play out loud to an aging old actor, Sergio (Achille Majeroni) who seems to continually encourage him — ending in a crude farce. (Fellini initially tried to get Vitorrio de Sica for the role of Sergio!)
• And finally there is Riccardo, who isn’t given much business to do — but he looks so much like his brother, he stands out nevertheless …

Touches of the fading neorealistic style are evident in scenes like the one where Fausto’s father (Jean Brochard, a French actor, who was probably given the role because the film was a French-Italian production) beats the hell out of his adult son, after discovering Fausto’s involvement in an embarrassing profane prank involving a wooden statue of an angel.

As neorealism gave way to more fanciful cinematic flavor, Fellini seemed to touch the right nerve with the public, who gave the director his first really successful film. If it had flopped, we might never have known the great Federico Fellini.

Film Rating (0-60):

54

The Extras

The Booklets

#0000C only:

Eighty-page book featuring an essay by David Forgacs.

“Although The White Sheik had launched Fellini’s career as a solo director, it got mainly poor reviews in Italy, particularly from critics on the left who disliked what they saw as its frivolity, and it flopped at the box office. As a result, he had difficulty getting funding for his next project. He wanted to make La strada, for which he and Penelli already had a screenplay and had begun scouting locations, but producers turned it down because they found the story too bleak. Instead, a minor producer, Lorenzo Pegoraro, agreed to back a different movie, I Vitelloni, after Fellini pitched it to him, deceptively, as a light comedy.”

154-page booklet featuring an introduction by Bilge Ebiri and essays by Michael Almereyda (Primary Sources); Colm Tóibin (Imagined Homes); Carol Morley (Life on Earth); Stephanie Zacharek (Tough Love); and Kogonada (There is No End).

Morley:

“Forced by circumstances and his new father-in-law to take a job in a shop selling religious artifacts, Fausto gives the impression that working there is akin to being in purgatory. After a hapless play for the boss’s wife, he is fired. When he impudently questions why that is, his boss replies: ‘so you’ll learn to live right.’ But Fausto is not interested in living right. He convinces Moraldo to accompany him on a revenge mission to steal a wooden angel, which belongs to Fausto’s former boss. On breaking into the stables where the angel is stored, Fausto brushes hay from its face, calculates its monetary value, and casually notes its beauty with a cheeky wink. Moraldo’s reaction is entirely different. His face, glowing from the flame of a match, seems also to light up from within, as he is clearly transported to an exalted state. Fellini then brings us crashing down to earth, as he cuts to a shot of the angel lying prone, partially hidden beneath a rough sack on a cart being hauled by Giudizio (Silvio Bagolini), regarded by the town as simpleminded.”

#246 only:

Ten-page wraparound featuring an essay by Tom Piazza.

“I Vitelloni is the first of Fellini’s film to use the open-ended form that would mark his major work from then on. Allergic to endings that sum things up too neatly, or that resolve in a definitive way the tensions set up in the film, Fellini once remarked, ‘our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train … but we must at least take them to the station … to a point of departure.’ It is a striking image, one foreign to many popular storytellers: the ending of a story seen not as an arrival, but rather as a prepared departure. I Vitelloni, of course, brings us literally to the station at the end, with Moraldo’s departure from his provincial town. But on a deep level the film was Fellini’s point of departure too — the beginning of his important work as a filmmaker, the place where he got serious. And as he made clear at the end of Intervista, the only thing that kept Fellini truly happy was his work; the end of any project was a kind of death, overcome only at the moment at which one was ready to begin again, to try and get it right one more time.”

Commentary

None.

#0000C:

Second episode

Of Second Look, André Delvaux’s 1960 series of interviews with Fellini for Belgian television.

#0000C/#246:

Vitellonismo

A 2004 documentary featuring interviews with actors Trieste, Interlenghi, assistant director Moraldo Rossi, Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich, Fellini friend Vincenzo Mollica, and former director of the Fellini Foundation, Vittorio Boarini.

Presentation

Of I Vitelloni ephemera from the “Felliniana” archive of collector Don Young.

Original theatrical trailer

Gives away too much.

Extras Rating (0-40):

34

54 + 34 =

88

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