I Vitelloni

The test is subtractive, and an episodic film invites it. Some blocks are hinges. The storm over the beauty contest ends the summer and begins Fausto’s marriage in one stroke; the theft of the angel turns his idleness into petty crime and makes Moraldo his accomplice; the carnival dawn strips Alberto of the sister who keeps him; Sandra’s flight brings the belt; the departure needs Guido, the boy who works while the men sleep. Much else is permitted rather than compelled. Riccardo, a voice and a face, could go with little loss; the Natali episode arrives late and does one thing at length; the narration often explains what the image has shown. The looseness is partly the subject, idleness drawn as drift, and partly looseness, and that second part holds the figure below the line at which every part is required.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a provincial middle class keeps its sons in a prolonged boyhood, and women pay for it, the sisters and mothers who work and the wives who wait. Alberto lives on his sister Olga’s wages, and when she leaves at dawn with a married man his outrage is a dependant’s at the loss of his keep. Fausto’s philandering is compulsion, not appetite: he cannot pass a woman on the night his wife has run away. The gesture at the road menders is idle men’s class contempt, punished exactly. Held well below the bar: the film’s affection for its men softens the analysis, Moraldo, the one who sees, is drawn too faintly to make the seeing articulate, and Olga, Sandra and Giulia are given as episodes in the men’s story, their cost shown more than stated.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The elevation is real, and of one kind: melancholy rising out of comedy. The storm scatters the beauty contest and the wind tears the decorations as the season ends. The friends stand on the beach in winter before an empty sea. After the carnival ball, where Alberto danced in a dress with a huge papier-mâché head, the costume turns grotesque in the dawn and he weeps. On the pier at night wind and darkness turn Leopoldo’s hope into fear. The departure is the summit: the train moving off, Guido balancing on the rail, the camera passing through the rooms of the sleepers. Rota’s score lifts each of these. But they come mostly at the ends of sequences, and the long stretches between are comedy of manners, broad and level, so the height is occasional and the figure stays with the frequency.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The deep pattern is the puer aeternus, the man who will not grow up, and it bears weight: five versions of it, and the one event of plot, a child, makes the oldest of them a father who still runs. The prodigal comes home and is beaten, not feasted, and the father’s belt is the only rite of passage the town offers. Carnival turns the world over, and Alberto’s dress and giant head are the mask that tells the truth for a night; the stolen angel is a fallen sacred object no one will buy. But most of this is evoked as texture, not worked through: the angel is an image, the carnival one episode, and the myth of departure belongs to Moraldo, who is barely a character. The pattern is built in the five men and evoked in nearly everything around them.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance is neorealism, which Fellini had written for Rossellini, and the Italian comedy of manners. The film turns neorealist means, real streets and an episodic, plotless shape, from poverty to the idle provincial middle class, and from a social subject to an existential one: no hunger and no war, only men waiting for what will not come. It makes a group its protagonist and gives the group a voice, and it mixes farce and melancholy without settling which governs. The stake was real, since The White Sheik had failed. Held well below the bar because the swerve is of subject and tone more than of form: the grammar of the film is classical, the episodic picture had precedents, and the sharper break from neorealism came with La strada the next year.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The episodic shape is the knowledge that nothing happens: each block ends where it began, and a plotted film would have given the men the progress the film denies them. The collective narrator, a “we” with no face, makes the group the subject and lets one of the drifters tell it, with the fondness and the self-excuse that implies. The seasons do the work of plot, and the last shot passes through the beds of men who have not moved as one of them leaves. But the narration is often a container, filling in what the image already knows, and the late episodes, Natali and the variety show, are placed in sequence, not required by it. The form is the instrument at the frame and the close, and a container for much of the middle.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Evidence over promise, and seventy-three years of return supply it. The film yields in three ways: as autobiography, the first statement of Fellini’s Rimini, with his brother in the cast and Moraldo as the director’s surrogate; as a document of postwar provincial Italy and of a class’s sons; and as a study of men and the women who keep them, which grows harder on return, as Olga’s departure, Sandra’s flight and Giulia’s humiliation come to look less like episodes in the men’s story than its real subject. The carnival and the ending reward formal study. What holds it is convergence: the readings largely agree that this is an affectionate satire of arrested youth, and return has deepened that account more than it has divided it.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Released in 1953, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s, a decade that holds Tokyo Story and Seven Samurai. The force is real: the film made the template of the ensemble film of aimless young men in a small place, plotless, episodic, comic and sad, ending in one departure, and it moved Italian cinema from neorealism toward a cinema of memory. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the word vitelloni entered Italian speech for such men; Martin Scorsese has named the film as a source for Mean Streets (1973); and the shape recurs in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) and Fellini’s own Amarcord (1973). The reach is wide but of one kind: the film redirected a genre, and did not reorganise what cinema could do.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film survives complete as released, and no lost version or cut that takes from it is known. Its presence has been continuous for seventy-three years, in repertory, teaching, Fellini retrospectives and home editions, though narrower than that of the widest films of its decade; the Fellini films most people know are later ones. The surface, the dress, the dance hall, the variety theatre and the town, is 1953, but the film is about what that town did to its sons, so it ages as history rather than as fashion, and the condition it shows has not aged. Photography and post-synchronised sound are of their period, the smallest charge. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-three years complete and in view would carry more, even with the narrower presence weighed, and the medium’s span holds the figure at 8.8.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in places: Martelli’s night exteriors, the empty piazzas and wet streets, the beach in winter and the storm over the contest; the carnival ball, staged and cut so that the gaiety curdles in one continuous movement toward dawn; Sordi’s Alberto, the performance that made him, vanity, cowardice and pathos at once and never begging the viewer; Fabrizi’s Fausto, charm held just short of contempt; Rota’s score, which carries the turn from farce to melancholy; the final travelling shot. The seams are many: Interlenghi’s Moraldo is inert where the film needs him to see, the narration is flat and explanatory, the comedy is sometimes slack and broad, the post-synchronisation is loose, and Riccardo is barely directed into a character. A strong making in its best sequences, not throughout.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Alberto’s raspberry at the road menders and the stalled car, pure farce, and Sandra’s flight with the baby, with Fausto searching the town and the beach at dawn. One law governs both: men who have never had to act, in a town where the season ends and they remain, and every act they attempt rebounds on them. The theft fails, the insult is punished, the hope of a play turns to fear, the marriage becomes a flight. Comedy and sorrow come from the same idleness, and the film lets neither take over. The law strains in two places, and both count against the whole: the Natali episode, whose grotesque and whose threat sit apart in tone, and Moraldo, who stands half outside the law as the author’s watcher, which is design but loosens the one physics.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The orders held in one structure: the family, in fathers, mothers, sisters, a marriage and a child, with the father’s authority as the last sanction; sexuality and fidelity; labour, in the shop, Olga’s wages, the road menders and the boy who works the railway at dawn, set against men who do not work; class, in the idlers’ contempt; religion, in the shop of religious goods, the angel, the nuns and the monks; art and its vanity, in Leopoldo’s play, the touring variety show and the old actor; the province against the city; the sea and the seasons. What holds it lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside, through behaviour; the state and history, with the war only eight years gone, are nearly absent; and the sacred is merchandise. It is a provincial chronicle’s scope, held together.

Score: 7.0 / 10