Film Forum

Italy, 1953
Directed by Federico Fellini
Starring Alberto Sordi, Franco Interlenghi, Franco Fabrizi, Leopoldo Trieste, Riccardo Fellini
Music by Nino Rota
In Italian with English subtitles
Approx. 104 min. 4K DCP.

Federico Fellini's first international success, based on memories of his youth in Rimini, focuses on five layabouts in a sleepy seaside town during the winter off–season (the title literally means "The Calfs," which Pauline Kael roughly translated as “Adolescent Slobs”). Skirtchaser Franco Fabrizi is forced into marriage, but he still has eyes for his boss's wife (Czech actress Lída Baarová, one-time mistress of Goebbels); would-be poet Leopoldo Trieste (hapless star of Fellini's THE WHITE SHEIK) at last gets to read his poetry to the aged actor he idolizes — but instead gets a proposition; buffoon Alberto Sordi (THE WHITE SHEIK himself), costumed as a woman for a masked ball, begs his sister not to leave; Fellini's look-alike brother Ricardo croons and emcees at a seaside beauty pageant that's interrupted by a storm; only the youngest, Shoeshine's Franco Interlenghi (standing in for Fellini himself), will get out. Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and recipient of a then-rare Oscar nomination for a foreign screenplay — by Fellini and frequent collaborators Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli — and featuring the second of Nino Rota's 16 memorable Fellini scores. The director's "first fully confident piece of direction" (Kael), its style and story of aimless youth inspired, among others, George Lucas's AMERICAN GRAFFITI and Scorsese's MEAN STREETS.

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE

Reviews

"Full of brilliantly executed coups de theater… But what makes I VITELLONI so resonant and lovely is the way those chaotic, festive moments are shown to be part of the basic rhythm of Italian provincial life, bursts of color and noise in a landscape of quiet workaday routine.” 
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"Captures the bittersweet emotions of a moment that eventually comes for everyone: the moment you realize you can either grow up, or stay forever a child."
– Martin Scorsese