I Vitelloni (1953) on Netflix
Five idle friends drift between cafés and pool halls in a small Adriatic town. Fausto Moretti, their womanizing leader, is pressed to marry Sandra Rubini after she faints at a beauty pageant.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.8/1023,498 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
On the Adriatic coast, summer ends with a downpour over a beachside beauty pageant, where Sandra Rubini takes the title Miss Mermaid and collapses. The town whispers that she is expecting a child by Fausto Moretti, and his respectable father, Francesco, presses him into a wedding. The couple honeymoons in Rome. Fausto's friends, all in their twenties and living off their parents, fill their days in cafés and pool halls. Moraldo, Sandra's brother, is the youngest of the group; he watches Fausto's interest in other women and dreams of a life in the city. Riccardo wants to sing and act, Alberto daydreams, and Leopoldo writes a play for the stage actor Sergio Natali. Home again, Fausto takes a stockroom job in a religious-articles shop.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about I Vitelloni (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Vittorio De Sica was Fellini's choice to play the aging actor Sergio Natali, and accepted when the role's homosexual overtones were outlined, asking only that it be written with "a great deal of humanity". He then rejected the offer, worried about being marked as actually gay, and Achille Majeroni was cast instead.
- Fellini cast Alberto Sordi in a major role despite Sordi's reputation as box-office poison and against Pegoraro's express wishes, and Pegoraro's skeptical distributors demanded a clause in the contract banning Sordi's name from theatrical posters.
- Shooting on I Vitelloni was an "itinerant production" tailored to Alberto Sordi's variety show schedule, so Fellini and his troupe followed the actor from town to town across Italy; while touring in the Big Ruckus, Sordi rehearsed his role and filmed during his hours off.
- Distributors demanded a title change, judging I Vitelloni incomprehensible to a general audience and a liability for a risky venture, but Fellini refused, having chosen the title after an elderly woman called him a vitellone to show disapproval of one of his pranks.
- One of Fellini's most imitated films, I Vitelloni inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri and Lina Wertmüller, and influenced Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, George Lucas's American Graffiti and Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire.
- In 2008 I Vitelloni was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's list of 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of films said to have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978.
- I Vitelloni was Federico Fellini's first film with international distribution; it did reasonable box office in Britain and North America while performing "huge in Argentina".
