Netflix it: I Vitelloni (1953)

From Tom Piazza's essay for Criterion:

"In the long dream of image and spectacle that was Federico Fellini’s career, I Vitelloni occupies a nodal point. Filmed in 1953, between the brilliant but somewhat superficial The White Sheik (1952) and his first fully characteristic work, La Strada (1954), I Vitelloni marks a big step forward in Fellini’s ability to get deep into his characters’ psychology; it points ahead both to the bitter social satire of La Dolce Vita (1960) and to the great canvases of nostalgia and the artist’s nature, 8 1/2 (1963), Amarcord—and the neglected late masterpiece Intervista (1987).

In terms of technique, I Vitelloni may be the least “Felliniesque” of the director’s major films. It makes far less use of the odd foreshortenings, the unexpected close-ups, the expert manipulation of relations between foreground and background that formed so much of Fellini’s expressive vocabulary, and there are fewer of the gargoyles and dreamlike surreal characters that populate his most recognizable work. In places the camera work is uncharacteristically static, as in the early scenes in which Fausto prepares to leave his father’s house after learning that Sandra is pregnant.

Yet despite its relatively conventional technique, I Vitelloni takes the first definitive plunge into many of Fellini’s dominant thematic and imagistic preoccupations: arrested development in men, marriage and infidelity, the life of provincial towns versus the city, the melancholy and mystery of deserted nighttime streets, the seashore, the movies themselves. Many of these themes and major images can be found in somewhat germinal form in The White Sheik, and even to some degree in Variety Lights. But in I Vitelloni they move from being accessories to the action to being the heart of the matter.

I Vitelloni hangs us on the horns of an insoluble dilemma that lives at the center of Fellini’s work. That dilemma takes subtly shifting forms but ultimately seems to stem from the tension between childhood’s sense of wonder and possibility, with its undertow of infantile dependency and decay if the individual can’t grow up, and, on the other hand, the practical and realistic understanding of life’s responsibilities and costs, which carries its own undertow of possible stultification, cynicism and corruption. This tension finds its most pointed expression in the repeated images, throughout Fellini’s films, of the exploitation of the mysterious, beautiful or sacred by those whose ego or lust for power has blinded them to what is most precious. I Vitelloni brings this imagery into the center of the picture for the first time."






As well as I Vitelloni portrays the consequences of inaction or captures the melancholic mood of the last summer party ending in a rainstorm, perhaps the greatest cinematic value of the film is the importance it places in the psychological and emotional implications of facial hair placement in a young man's life.