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I vitelloni is Fellini’s first masterpiece
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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I vitelloni
Directed by Federico Fellini. Screenplay by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli. With Franco Interlenghi, Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, Leopoldo Trieste, Riccardo Fellini, Leonora Ruffo, Achille Majeroni, and Claude Farell. In Italian with English subtitles (104 minutes). At the Museum of Fine Arts January 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 10.
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Federico Fellini’s early films, Luci del varietà/Variety Lights and Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik, were charming, bittersweet comedies that revolved around the pop dreams of unexceptional men and women. I vitelloni, made in 1953 and showing this week at the Museum of Fine Arts, built on the gifts for tone and milieu he’d already displayed, but in its treatment of character and theme it showed a new depth. It’s a masterpiece, less known but even better than La strada (which came out the year after). I vitelloni — an accurate translation would be The Big Slobs — is about a quintet of spoiled but amiable young men rounding 30 in the Italian provinces and pulling ferociously against adulthood. They live with their relatives, work only when they have no choice, and don’t take the women they date seriously. Their point of view is still adolescent — though they affect a worldly style, they lack the experience that tests judgment. The leader of the group is Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), a handsome, callow womanizer who impregnates his girlfriend, Sandra (Leonora Ruffo), a porcelain-doll small-town beauty, and after an unsuccessful attempt to ditch town is compelled to wed her. At first, marriage is a lark — he goes to Rome on a glamorous honeymoon, returning with the latest LPs and a moustache. But then he has to settle down to a job, selling statuary and religious artifacts, and he’s ill-suited for monogamy. Fausto behaves like a bastard to his touchingly devoted wife, but it’s hard to dismiss him, and it turns out that though he hasn’t much soul, he does have a heart. Fausto’s most faithful comrade is Sandra’s brother Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi, seven years earlier one of the child actors in Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine), who tells the story. He’s the only one with enough distance, because it’s he who finally accomplishes what Fausto tried desperately to do — he gets out. Neither Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini), the overfed church soloist, nor Alberto (the great comic actor Alberto Sordi, who’d already starred for Fellini in The White Sheik) alters in the course of the movie; they’re minor characters, though Sordi has a remarkable moment where Alberto cries like a slighted child when his older sister (Claude Farell) leaves the family to run off with her married lover. It’s the other three who are jolted out of their extended adolescence by disenchantment. Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste, who would later play the lover Mastroianni foists on his wife in Germi’s Divorce — Italian Style) wears a beret and fancies himself a playwright, though much of the time when he’s supposed to be burning the midnight oil, he’s at his window flirting with the maid in the upstairs apartment. Finally he gets something out, a prolix, pseudo-poetic melodrama that he persuades a famous actor of the old, sentimental school (Achille Majeroni), now a has-been traveling with a tattered music-hall troupe, to listen to the night the vaudevilleans come to town. Leopoldo’s fall from innocence occurs when the dilapidated old thespian takes him out for a late-night walk on the pier, and Leopoldo realizes, with horror, that his appeal for his idol is sexual and not artistic. It’s possible that no one in the history of movies could get the ambiance of the seedy performances, with the overzealous, bosomy showgirls, the way Fellini does here, or the mix of creepiness and sadness in that windy seaside encounter, or the feel of the carnival in the wee hours, when the booze has begun to sour. (This is Sordi’s other sensational scene.) The movie is affecting in so many ways that you can’t sort them all out afterwards; it leaves you with a wallop of an emotional hangover. I vitelloni has influenced more directors than any of Fellini’s early (pre-8-1/2) work: Scorsese drew on it for Mean Streets, Barry Levinson’s Diner paid it loving tribute, and Gabriele Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio/The Last Kiss, the best Italian movie of the last several years, reworks its major themes. Yet until now it’s been available only in dreadful old copies that wreck the fine, neo-realist lighting of the three cinematographers (Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli, and Luciano Trasatti). It’s a joy to be able to see it in a newly restored print at the MFA.
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