Literally translated, the "Vitelloni" are overgrown calves, which is a pretty accurate description of the heroes of Fellini's blackly comic melodrama about (not) growing up. Pushing 30 but still living at home with their mothers, these boys hang about their dreary seaside town in 50s Italy, dreaming of escape while imbibing too many amarettos to ever get off their increasingly plump backsides. Casting a critical eye over their selfish and brattish lives of leisure, Fellini finds them seriously wanting.
Led by philandering Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), the gang are a motley crew of spoilt middle class kids turned lazy adults. Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste) dreams of becoming a playwright, but spends most of his time imagining future adulation rather than actually writing. Alberto (Alberto Sordi) is too busy messing around in drag to notice that his sister is about to run off with her disreputable lover. Marcelo (Franco Interlenghi) can see their faults, but hasn't yet found the courage to leave the world he knows.
"COMIC, MOVING AND FEROCIOUSLY UNSENTIMENTAL"
Made the year before his triumphant La Strada, I Vitelloni sees Fellini playing the poet of the provinces. In this comic, moving and ferociously unsentimental classic, he captures the pompous preening of these Mediterranean men as they lounge around bars and pool tables shooting the breeze.
Blind ignorance is Fellini's theme: Fausto is so morally bankrupt he doesn't even feel a stab of remorse when trying to hawk a beautiful statue of an angel that he's stolen from his former boss, or when he abandons the mother of his child for a quick flirtation with the woman sitting next to them in the cinema.
Rich with incident and centred around a scathing attack on the post-war generation, I Vitelloni is proof of Fellini's early genius as a storyteller. It's also proof of his desire to avoid the romantically attractive but ultimately pointless role of being a vitelloni himself: he crafted a film of such warmth and humanity that he would be guaranteed international recognition.
In Italian with English subtitles.
I Vitelloni is re-released in select UK cinemas on Friday 30th July 2004.
I Vitelloni (1953)
