ABSTRACT
Without question, few films in the history of cinema have captured their era and exercised their influence more subtly than I Vitelloni (1953). Chaplin’s films operated through the miraculously universal character of the Tramp. Films like The Threepenny Opera (1931) owe their audience, and the mark they have left on an entire generation, in part to the partic ularly successful marriage of music and cinema. By contrast, nothing in I Vitelloni seemed capable of impressing itself on the viewer’s memory: no famous actors; not even, as in La Strada (1954), a poetically original and picturesque character around which the film is built; no story, or almost none. And yet the term “vitelloni” has become a common word: it now designates an international human type, and what is more, some of the best films each year remind us of Fellini’s own (most recently, La Nuit des maris).
