I Vitelloni (1953) - film review

In the seaside town of Rimini, five young men spend their days amusing themselves, living off their parents, and doing everything possible to avoid adult responsibility.  Hearing that his girlfriend Sandra is pregnant, the leader of the group, Fausto, decides to make a break for Milan.  His father intervenes and he is compelled to stay and marry the girl, to preserve the honour of both families.  Even when married, Fausto still cannot give up his flirtatious ways.  An attempt to seduce his boss’s wife results in a humiliating dismissal.  He takes revenge by stealing a statue, which is subsequently unable to sell.  Meanwhile, his friends have problems of their own.  The clown-like Alberto is entirely dependent on his mother and sister, and feels desperately alone.  The intellectual Leopoldo is frantically trying to establish himself as a playwright, but his attempt to sell his play to an ageing actor ends in disaster.  Riccardo is content to hang along with the others, in spite of the fact that he has the potential to be a great singer.  Moraldo, the most introspective of the five friends, watches Fausto’s ill-treatment of his sister and begins to wonder whether he belongs here at all...

I Vitelloni, Federico Fellini’s third film and his first international success, is an engaging piece that alternates between melodrama and farce in its colourful depiction of five wasters who seem incapable of growing up.  Partly autographical (it is set in the director’s hometown), the film combines the neo-realist aspect which was prevalent in Italian cinema at the time with a dreamlike insouciance, the latter tending to dominate Fellini’s later works.  Whilst the film doesn’t quite have the emotional impact or artistic maturity of La Strada (1954) and later works, it reveals the director’s gift for storytelling and a total mastery of chiaroscuro in his camerawork, which is surprisingly fluid and vibrant for a film of this era.

Nino Rota’s score, which ranges from vulgar exuberance to haunting pathos, emphasises the film’s poetry and is one its main selling points (as would be the case in many of Fellini’s subsequent films).  The typically Felliniesque carnival sequence would not have been the same without Rota’s cheeky appropriation of Chaplin’s “nonsense song” from Modern Times.  What Rota brings to Fellini’s oeuvre is a sense of what it is to be young and alive, and no film is better served by his music than I Vitelloni.

Part of the success of I Vitelloni must be down to the performances from its excellent cast.   Franco Fabrizi is hilarious as the cowardly Don Juan, an obvious prototype for Marcello Mastroianni’s character in La Dolce Vita (1960).  Alberto Sordi combines pathos and comedy with a sense of real inner torment in the film’s most touching sequence (not an easy task for a portly man dressed in women’s underwear).  As the thoughtful Moraldo, Franco Interlenghi (the star of De Sica’s Shoeshine , 1946), makes the film’s last scene devastatingly poignant.  And Jean Brochard is irreplaceable as the perpetually indignant father, ready to whip out his belt at the least provocation (and, boy, is he provoked).

“I Vitelloni” is a provincial term which refers to middle class layabouts.  Whilst many of his neo-realist contemporaries were preoccupied with the grimmer side of Italian society (poverty, old age and mass unemployment), Fellini looks at a totally different social group, with just as much insight and passion.  The enormous social changes that followed the end of World War II had created an almost unbridgeable divide between the generations, which this film conveys brilliantly.  The young (those under the age of 30) have difficulty finding work and, with all the uncertainty around them, seek sanctuary in a prolonged childhood.   The older generation, who have endured so much in the past decade, lack the authority or even the will to instil in their offspring a sense of maturity and selfless compassion for others.  As a result, what we see is a generation of self-obsessed young men larking around like children, having no idea when it comes to adult responsibility.

At the end of the film, Fellini closes the drama with a muted note of optimism. One of the five Vitelloni (the thoughtful Moraldo) has some sense of what is wrong and manages to find the courage to break free and embark on an adult life elsewhere.  The others are condemned to play out their last years of empty post-adolescent fun before sinking into the mire of middle class mediocrity.   In that wondrous closing shot, it is as if Fellini is thanking his lucky stars that he was about to escape and fulfil his potential as an artist.  How many did he leave behind, lost and forgotten in that pit of obscurity?

© James Travers 2006

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