I Vitelloni (, "The Bullocks"; Romagnol slang for "The Slackers" or "The Layabouts") is a 1953 Italian comedy drama film directed by Federico Fellini from a screenplay written by himself, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli. It stars Franco Interlenghi, Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, Leopoldo Trieste, and Riccardo Fellini (the director's brother) as five young Italian men at crucial turning points in their small-town lives. Recognized as a pivotal work in Fellini's artistic evolution, the film has distinct autobiographical elements that mirror important societal changes in 1950s Italy.Kezich, 130
Recipient of both the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion in 1953 and an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing in 1958, the film was also Fellini's first commercial success. In 2008, it was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978".
Plot As summer draws to a close, a violent downpour interrupts a beachside beauty pageant in a provincial town on the Adriatic coast. Sandra Rubini, crowned "Miss Mermaid 1953", suddenly grows upset and faints: rumours fly that she's expecting a baby by inveterate skirt chaser Fausto Moretti. Under pressure from Francesco, his respectable father, Fausto agrees to a shotgun wedding. After the sparsely attended middle-class ceremony, the newlyweds leave to honeymoon in Rome.
Unemployed and living off their parents, Fausto's twenty-something year old "The five youthful characters range in age between nineteen and the early twenties." Alpert, 81–82 friends kill time shuffling from empty cafés to seedy pool halls to aimless walks on desolate windswept beaches and perform childish pranks. After taunting road workers from the safety of a luxury car, they get thrashed when it breaks down.
Moraldo, Sandra's brother and the youngest of the five vitelloni, uncomfortably observes Fausto's womanizing as he ponders his own existence, dreaming of ways to escape to the city. Riccardo, a baritone, nourishes unrealistic ambitions to sing and act. Alberto, a daydreamer, is supported by his mother and self-reliant sister, Olga. Vulnerable and close to his mother, he's unhappy that Olga is secretly dating a married man. Leopoldo, an aspiring dramatist, writes a play that he discusses with Sergio Natali, an eccentric stage actor he hopes will perform in it.
Back from his honeymoon and settled in with Sandra, Fausto is forced to accept a job as a stockroom assistant in a religious-articles shop owned by Michele Curti, a friend of his father-in-law's. Incorrigible, Fausto pursues other women even in his wife's presence.
At the annual masquerade ball, Fausto is bedazzled by the mature beauty of Giulia Curti, his employer's wife. Alberto, in drag and drunk, executes a surrealistic dance across the ballroom floor with an oversize papier-mâché carnival head. Returning home at dawn, Alberto is devastated to find his sister running off for good with her lover. Fausto attempts to seduce Giulia, and is humiliated and fired by her husband. In revenge, he steals a statue of an angel in gold paint from Curti, enlisting Moraldo to help him attempt to sell it first to a convent and then to a monk. Suspicious, both turn him down. Fausto ends up leaving the statue with a simple-minded peasant who sets the angel on a mound outside his hovel, caressing it.
One evening after a variety show, Leopoldo agrees to accompany Natali on a walk along the seashore to discuss the merits of his play, but when Natali propositions him, he flees. Learning of Fausto's one-night stand with a variety performer, Sandra runs away from home, taking the baby with her. Riccardo, Alberto, Leopoldo, and Moraldo all join in Fausto's desperate search for his wife and child. When they find her at Fausto's father's home, Francesco pulls off his belt in a rage and whips his son. Later, reconciled for the present, Fausto and Sandra walk home happily and with optimism about their life together. Resolved to abandon the provincial monotony of his dead-end town, Moraldo boards a train, imagining his vitelloni friends sleeping and dreaming their lives away.
Cast
Production
Writing Having completed an early version of La Strada with co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli in 1952, Fellini offered their "modern fairy tale" to producer Luigi Rovere, with whom he was still under contract. Rovere had solid reasons for turning it down: La Strada was in no recognizable genre and Fellini's last film, The White Sheik, had been a critical and commercial flop. In a show of solidarity, Rovere loaned the script to a Venetian professor of calligraphy turned film producer, Lorenzo Pegoraro, who admired The White Sheik. Convinced that La Strada would never attract an audience, Pegoraro requested that Fellini develop a comedy instead. Biographers differ as to who conceived I Vitelloni. For Tullio Kezich, Fellini hit on the idea "after an afternoon-long consultation" with Ennio Flaiano.Kezich, 131 For Hollis Alpert, Pinelli brainstormed with Fellini and Flaiano and came up "with a notion the other two liked: the pleasures and frustrations of growing up in a provincial town".Alpert, 81 Under Fellini's supervision, the three rapidly wrote the script together, pooling their adolescent memories and inventing others.
Title Distributors interested in the script demanded a title change: incomprehensible to a general audience, I Vitelloni was a liability to an already risky venture. But Fellini refused to change it, having chosen the title after "being called a vitellone by an elderly woman expressing disapproval of one of his pranks". For him, vitelloni were "the unemployed of the middle class, mother's pets. They shine during the holiday season, and waiting for it takes up the rest of the year". According to biographer Alpert, the term is Romagnol for "veal, or calf ... used to refer to callow youths". Today, the term is widely translated as "big calves".
The term has also been defined as a cross between the Italian words for veal (vitello) and beef (bovino), implying "an immature, lazy person without a clear identity or any notion of what to do with his life".Bondanella, 90 In a 1971 letter, Flaiano offered a fuller definition: "The term vitellone was used in my day to define a young man from a modest family, perhaps a student—but one who had either already gone beyond the programmed schedule for his coursework, or one who did nothing all the time ... I believe the term is a corruption of the word vudellone, the large intestine, or a person who eats a lot. It was a way of describing the family son who only ate but never 'produced'—like an intestine, waiting to be filled."Kezich, 132. This explanation also was proposed by Tullio Pinelli in a 2001 research interview for the documentary, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002). CinéLibre (Paris), Issue July 2003.
Casting Fellini once again cast Alberto Sordi in a major role, despite Sordi's reputation as box-office poison and against Pegoraro's express wishes. Intent on playing the lead, however, Sordi didn't accept Fellini's offer until later in production.Kezich, 134 Pegoraro's skeptical distributors, far from closing the deal, demanded a clause in the contract banning Sordi's name from theatrical posters.Kezich, 133 Making matters worse, Fellini also cast Leopoldo Trieste (the lead in The White Sheik) as the budding dramatist, and his brother Riccardo, a total unknown, to interpret his own role. Further unknowns included Franco Interlenghi and Leonora Ruffo, who had just wrapped The Queen of Sheba. Although Czech actress Lída Baarová had a cult following, she was more famous for her love affair with Nazi Joseph Goebbels than for any of her film roles. Fellini topped things off by casting Franco Fabrizi as Fausto, an actor who had begun his film career in 1950 with Michelangelo Antonioni's Chronicle of a Love but had recently bombed in Christ Passed by the Barn. Pressured by his financial backers, a Florentine business group and the Paris-based Cité Film, Pegoraro finally balked at the lack of a star. "Sordi makes people run away", he complained to Fellini. "Leopoldo Trieste is a nobody. Meet me halfway—bring in a name."Alpert, 82
To placate him, Fellini contacted Vittorio De Sica, hoping to convince him to play Sergio Natali, the aging actor. When Fellini outlined the role's homosexual overtones, De Sica accepted, provided it was written with "a great deal of humanity".Alpert, 83 In the end, he rejected the offer, "concerned about being marked as actually gay".Kezich, 135 Fellini then decided that De Sica would have been "too nice, too fascinating, too distracting", and cast Achille Majeroni, a respected stage actor.
Filming and editing Described as an "itinerant production", shooting was tailored to accommodate Sordi's variety show schedule, requiring Fellini and his troupe to follow him from town to town across Italy. On tour in the Big Ruckus, Sordi rehearsed his role and was ready for filming during his hours off. Accordingly, when he toured Florence, shooting began as an all-night party at the city's Teatro Goldoni in early December 1952.Alpert, 84 Supervised by production manager Luigi Giacosi, whom Fellini had first met on location in Tripoli during the war, and photographed by veteran cinematographer Otello Martelli, the rushes served as the basis of the masquerade ball, a major sequence. With a break in production for Christmas, shooting resumed on January 15, 1953. Constrained by the shoestring budget, many scenes were shot in a natural decor. In Ostia, a quay provided the winter setting for Fausto and his gang to wander around listlessly staring at the sea. In Fiumicino, the terrace of the Kursaal Hotel was the backdrop for the beauty pageant that opens the film. Accustomed to movies produced on promises, Giacosi maintained morale by ensuring that cast and crew dined at the best restaurants in the towns they visited.
Working with several cinematographers over six months, Fellini developed a camera style based on slow tracking shots that "match the listless, purposeless lives" of his characters.Bondanella, 96 The camera often dollies in to underscore dramatic events, most notably when Sandra falls ill at the beauty pageant; after the birth of her child; and when Francesco beats his son.
With editor Rolando Benedetti, Fellini established a rhythm in which short sequences are separated by abrupt cuts while longer sequences use dissolves. The numerous brief and disparate episodes "governed by their own internal logic" are thus held together by a particular editing pattern. A freeze-frame was used to immobilize the young Guido, Moraldo's friend, at the end of the film, as he balances himself on a railroad track.
Critical response Italy and France
Screened in competition at the 14th Venice International Film Festival on 26 August 1953, the film received the Silver Lion from the poet Eugenio Montale, who headed the jury, along with a public ovation and acclaim from the majority of critics.Alpert, 85 "Belying all doubts about its appeal", the film opened on September 17, 1953, to both commercial and critical success.