felixoteiza I only watched IV to see Leonora Ruffo again, years ago, without knowing I'd be getting the best of Fellini as a bonus. Now, I'm not an expert, but I disagree with the idea that in IV he paid his dues to Neo-Realism, so he would be taken seriously by the cinema elite. To me, IV is the most surrealistic film he ever did. The melodrama here is just a wrapping. These people are not real, they are only memories; ghostly shadows of past existences living in some kind of Purgatory. All this is happening only in Fellini/Moraldo's subconscious mind. How do I know that? Think Marx. Marx would have scratched his head watching this. Where's the economy here, what kind of activity these people live off?--he would have asked. We see clerks and shopkeepers, but no real economic activity as such going on; no production or exchange of goods. This isn't the real world--he would have concluded. Now, in some Westerns or adventure flicks this economic anchor is given by cattle driving cowboys (Open Range) or by gold prospectors (Treasure of S.M.) but in metaphoric works such as High Noon that element is mostly absent. That is a way of recognizing a subjective theme, the first hint an artist gives that he's not really dealing with physicality but with abstractions. These guys are just projections of Fellini's identity onto the world, even if he probably never acted like a Fausto or an Alberto when young. What IV implies is that he could have acted like any of them; or that he thought he could, or wanted, to act like them. That's something people who interpret dreams say also: when for ex. you dream of courageous Uncle Joe, isn't about him you're really dreaming but about your own courageous side, using UJ as a reference. These guys are simple archetypes which Fellini-Moraldo wanted, feared, expected, to become one day. So, no melodrama here, no tribute to Neo-Realism; this is a Fellini as matured in its surrealism as he ever was. The true nature of these guys as archetypes is further proved by the fact that they may have served as models for characters in later films (and I would add to the list The 70's Show, with Kelso as Fausto; Eric as Moraldo, Fez as clueless Poldo and Hayden as a rather disenchanted Alberto.) Consider too that you don't evoke characters in dreams to make them work as laborers, clerks, but to make them act out your fantasies and fears, etc. Fausto et al may have been slackers, as Moraldo remembers, but even in that case they are brought here as simple references; to expose the lazy, idle, days of his own youth. There's also the kid.For some time I wondered why Fellini would have included the Guido subplot. Then it struck me: the kid is Moraldo himself, the child he leaves behind when he goes away. See how comfortable Guido feels there, wondering why (adult) Moraldo would want to leave--and notice how he manifests himself right when Moraldo sees his sister finally married and his own departure as imminent. That's called decoupling. What gives it away anyway is the camera angle in their first scene, by virtue of which the boy doesn't appear as coming from the distance but instead as descending upon Moraldo, like an angel. And see how warmly they greet each other, as if they had been friends forever. Also, nobody but Moraldo sees or hear him until the end. The train conductor ignores him when closing the door; yet minutes later, with Moraldo gone, another conductor--or the same--strokes his hair. It's obvious: both can't be seen at the same time, as they are different aspects of the same individual.Fellini never ceased to amaze me with his capacity to get masterpiece bits out of the most ordinary things in life--like the incident prone car trip here, for ex. Great acting by all here, you can't really single out any particular performance. And I can't finish without mentioning the deeply nostalgic, beautifully moody, Rota score. The strong accord of the beginning, jump starting the movie, always makes me jump on my seat. 10/10.

Ilpo Hirvonen I vitelloni was Federico Fellini's third film and marked a turning point in his career. It ended an era and opened a new, completely different one. For those who see Fellini at his finest as a satirist I vitelloni is a masterpiece; the director's finest work. In I vitelloni social and satiric perceptions are brilliantly combined. The person gallery of the film is also brilliant and rich; it's a story of five young men who just won't grow up and leave their childhood behind. Moraldo is an outsider who spends his time day-dreaming, Fausto is the leader of the group and is in a relationship with Moraldo's sister Sandra. Leopoldo is a literature buff and a playwright without a future, Alberto is a childish character who lives on his mother's welfare, and Riccardo is a slightly over-weighted actor-singer.Federico Fellini always loved his characters and the characterization of I vitelloni is gratifying and humane. Fellini accepts his characters with their flaws but still doesn't let them get away from his moral judgments. It's truly a humane film, bitter and sad, melancholy and wistful; it's a combination of poetry and realism, dramatic and comical ingredients, which make it an integrated beautiful film.The film is very tragic, no doubt about it, but the tragicalness isn't in bottomless yearning or ultimate misery; but in precisely considered expressions and images. The 'morning' scene after the carnival is a marvelous example of Fellini's talent to depict a certain state of emotion; the tired man with a hangover, and the shadow of the mask. The beauty in this all is that the film is characterized by tragic rhythm but the tragicalness never reaches its climax - there is no storm nor thunder. It is an emotional, tragical, theme that plays through the film and by not reaching its climax the tragicalness feels even more distressing and mirthless, and is far more dramatic; in creating this atmosphere Federico Fellini truly showed his ultimate mastery.

jzappa As a Fellini film, I Vitelloni makes far less use of the curious fast-sketch scenes, surprising close-ups, proficient handling of associations between foreground and background that shaped so much of Fellini's baroque lexicon, and there are fewer of the brutes and fantastical characters that habitate his most noticed output. In places the camera-work is unusually fixed. But notwithstanding its comparatively common approach, "The Guys" takes the first absolute dive into many of Fellini's major subjective obsessions: delayed maturity in men, marriage and infidelity, the life of insular communities counter to the city, the despondent occult of bare nighttime streets, the seashore, the movies themselves. The movie hangs us on the horns of an impenetrable quandary that is the gist of Fellini's movies. That quandary takes slightly varying routes, however eventually suggests as if to branch from the strain between childhood's feeling of awe and promise, with its whirlpool of youthful reliance and collapse if the individual can't mature, and likewise the matter-of-fact and pragmatic grasp of life's obligations and setbacks, which carries its own whirlpool of likely ridicule, bitterness and degradation.This pressure identifies its most direct interpretation in the echoing images of the misuse of the incomprehensible, provocative or pure by those whose self-image or appetite for power has confused them about what is most valuable. The vitelloni are a kind of bucolic Rat Pack, living off mothers, sisters and fathers, dressing snazzily, chasing women and trifling their days away in a small seaside town supposedly patterned on Fellini's home town. Alberto Sordi and Leopoldo Trieste are excellent here, together with Franco Fabrizi, who bears a bizarre likeness to young Elvis Presley. Franco Interlenghi plays the pensive one and the only one on a quest for understanding the life they lead. Riccardo Fellini, dead ringer for his older director brother, is considerably more elusive as a character. Against their vainglory and apathy is postured the durability and wariness of the town's older men, who have seized the conventional duties of middle-class family life. Yet respectable as that may be, these solid citizens—predictable, content with their lot, stuck in choked interior settings—are barely made to appear an encouraging recourse.The closest I Vitelloni comes to any genuine representation of assurance or affirmation is the character of the station boy with whom Interlenghi passes time intermittently during his night-time roaming. I Vitelloni is replete with refined and handsomely delivered dramatic and comic moments: Sordi standing next to Fabrizi and blocking Sandra as they pose for the wedding photo; Trieste in a vainglorious rapture reading his banality-riddled play to the weathering actor Natali as the latter makes a glutton of himself and the vitelloni flirt with the female members of the actor's ensemble. Overall, Nino Rota's score strikes its own distinguishing poise between crassness and agonized reminiscence. Disinclined to endings that wrap things up too tidily, or that iron out the drama in a clear-cut fashion, despite being essentially a practical structuralist, Fellini gives us an image unfamiliar to a lot of favored filmmakers: the ending of a story shown not as a destination, instead as an adapted farewell.

Rindiana Fellini's first masterpiece may not be as well-known as later classics, but it's just as wonderful, fortunately lacking the maestro's later (sometimes overbearing) tendencies to turn to caricature and the grotesque.The director's humanity and the resulting poetic images in beautiful black-and-white photography enrich a basically neo-realist plot and turn it into something magical. We not only care for these five young men, we become them, parts of them, at least.This is deeply emotive film-making.9 out of 10 sad days at the seaside