Italy, France, 1953
Directed by Federico Fellini
With Franco Interlenghi (Moraldo), Alberto Sordi (Alberto), Franco Fabrizi (Fausto), Leopoldo Trieste (Leopoldo), Riccardo Fellini (Riccardo), Leonora Ruffo (Sandra)

They are five of them: Moraldo, Alberto, Fausto, Leopoldo and Riccardo. They are the local celebrities of their hometown, a small Italian seaside resort: they are the Vitelloni, the big calves, which means something like the big lazy (more precisely, in the dialect of Romagna, a vitellone is a deprecating word describing a young man who does not work and wallows in mediocrity).
Maybe they are more of them. They are introduced to us by a narrator whose voice is regularly heard but who remains himself unseen, unless he is the fellow who tags along the group while Fausto is on honeymoon in Rome, keeping the number of Vitelloni shown on screen at five; it also could be that these two men are different and that they are not alone in the city.
Their way of life is another uncertainty. Despite the narrator’s information, question marks remain on the personal life of each of the five young men. Their income (amount and source) is unknown, their daylight activities remains a mystery most of the time and their private thoughts are rather inarticulate. They talk and wine the night away and barely cross the path of their fellow citizens the rest of the time. They seem unconcerned by the rules reality usually forces upon people, from workplace to family life. They live a parallel life.
It is set on a stage, with the town as a big entertainment place. In the opening sequence the whole town is attending a popular ceremony, the election of Miss Mermaid. The central sequence depicts the party taking place at the local theater for the Carnival. Later a decisive moment comes with a performance by a famous actor at the same place. Each time, the Vitelloni are at the forefront of these public expressions of unshackled joy. These are occasions when they can commune with the rest of the town while satisfying their own penchant.
This life doesn’t escape tragedy. The Miss Mermaid ceremony is interrupted by a thunderstorm and is followed by an incident: the newly elected Miss, Sandra, faints. After examination, a doctor finds she is pregnant. As she was dating Fausto, the young man is doomed to marry her fast and find revenues. On a lighter but weirder note, the meeting between Leopoldo who is an aspirant playwright and the famous actor gets nowhere as Leopoldo refuses to walk on the beach by a stormy night to keep talking with the artist who is left bemused and amused. The most dramatic fall from grace comes at the end of the official Carnival party. It is the dawn and Alberto is fed up with the music. He gets out of the theater and seems not only drunk but also distraught. He snaps at the remarks of Moraldo and wonders bitterly how useful his life is. When he gets home, his sister is leaving to follow her lover, abandoning her mother and Alberto who is completely helpless.
But their life remains somehow safe. The long adventures of Fausto in the second part of the movie shows a man trying to change his habits but who is not up to snuff. Ever a philanderer, he lives with his wife Sandra and her parents, vowing to fulfill his obligations but desperately unable to ignore the charms of other women. His conduct with the wife of his employer leads to the loss of his job, which he never enjoyed or even took seriously in the first place. He then steals his former boss without figuring out all the consequences, including the failure of his idea. Only when a disheartened Sandra flees with their child does Fausto seem shaken enough to alter his behavior. They make up and go back home – still her family’s home – and you wonder how long Fausto will remain disciplined.
At least he had to consider change. Other members of the gang don’t even show a modicum of self-examination or a willingness to break their habits. Alberto never looks for a job even after the departure of his sister while Leopoldo keeps dreaming about a writer’s career without looking for any opportunity or for the right tools. As the narrator says, it is not difficult to imagine their future.
Yet, a break from the present is attempted, which appeals to our imagination. Moraldo has seemed a more distant figure within the group, prone to dream and looking at things standing outside his reach and the frames. He is loyal to his friends and especially to their spiritual leader, Fausto, even when he is unfair and insensitive to Sandra who is Moraldo’s sister. But it is with a complete stranger that he shares unexpected conversations and spends the nights on a bench: a boy working at the railway station, proud of his job and curious about the world. The possibilities of this outer world feed the disquiet Moraldo increasingly feels. Unlike Leopoldo, Moraldo would like to get the means to move his life in another direction. And at the end he does move, getting on a train one morning, out of blue, without a project. The sole person he bids farewell to is the young railway man.
Moraldo has simply become aware of the pretense the Vitelloni live. Their distorted sense of life has entangled them in a comfortable and numbing environment; they have created a routine of their own that, however different it seems from the reality-shaped life of the others, get them stuck in a parochial universe where under-achievement rules.
Federico Fellini’s camera circles around the group as they wander inside the walls of the unnamed town. Inside this cloistered world (only twice do our young adults walk in a landscape, first on the beach, next in the countryside, and each time it ends in disaster), gestures and mishaps are carefully recorded, even more than words, to show the weaknesses of the group and the individuals. Laughter comes easily as they blunder and err on the wrong side. There is no sarcasm, however. The place and the people seem familiar to the director who doesn’t want us to be blind to their flaws but who betrays deep sympathy for them and a world he perhaps knows too well.
This is still the era of neorealism. “I Vitelloni” doesn’t follow a predictable narrative and focuses on day-to-day incidents happening to ordinary people. It is only the third directed by Fellini, a distant supporter of the movement. But he’s creating images that already hint at a more fantasist, poetic, personal take on characters and topics. The Carnival sequence is the most obvious illustration, with Alberto dragging the papier-mâché head of a giant as he wanders in the street for instance, but even at the beginning the thunderstorm disturbing the ceremony, thanks to lighting and camera motions, lends an eerie atmosphere to the café and the assembly. Fellini plays with the aesthetic rules and proposes a fresh vision giving a fair treatment to the improbable nature of his anti-heroes. And the comic nature of their adventures contributes to give the movie a lively and moving dimension, away from the stern neorealist depictions and closer to the Italian comedies that will be produced later.