I Vitelloni
(The Wastrels)

Screening on Film

Directed by Federico Fellini.
With Franco Interlenghi, Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi.
Italy, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 109 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

Partly autobiographical, I Vitelloni is a study of five young men adrift in the wasteland of their provincial home town on the Adriatic coast. Middle-class layabouts who live aimlessly by cadging off their families as they nurse vague ambitions and spend their days in pursuit of amusement and girls, the characters are trapped as much by their own moral bankruptcy as by the futureless society in which they have never quite grown up. Beautifully shot and performed, and governed by an inextricable mixture of affectionate sympathy and acid satire, I Vitelloni bares the neorealist roots Fellini would later shake off.