Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

I Vitelloni Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Svet Atanasov December 18, 2020

Federico Fellini's "I Vitelloni" (1953) arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Criterion. The supplemental features on the disc include vintage trailer; archival documentary feature; arhcival episode of the Belgian television program Second Look; and a gallery of production stills. In Italian, with optional English subtitles for the main feature. Region-A "locked".

Listen closely to the narrator’s voice as he begins to introduce the five young men that Federico Fellini’s camera will follow in I Vitelloni. If you do, you should be able to detect a very subtle sadness which will eventually place everything that you are about to witness in a proper context.

A provincial coastal town somewhere in Italy. On a rainy night, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi) quickly throws a few shirts and a pair of pants in an old suitcase and then asks his perplexed father to loan him 5,000 lire so that he can buy a train ticket. Looking overly excited, Fausto announces that he is going to Milan where he has been offered a job in a good firm. For a moment the old man seems willing to believe Fausto, but then realizes that he is lying and quickly becomes annoyed with his acting. The unexpected appearance of Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), who seems visibly surprised and saddened at the same time that his friend is leaving in the middle of the night, then reveals the real reason why Fausto is in a rush -- he is running away because his girlfriend, Sandra (Leonora Ruffo), who happens to be Moraldo’s sister, has discovered that she is pregnant. The old man goes berserk.

A few weeks later, Fausto marries Sandra and they head to the industrial North to officially begin a new chapter in their relationship.

While Fausto and Sandra are away, Moraldo, Alberto (Alberto Sordi), Leopoldo Vannucci (Leopoldo Trieste) and Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini), all of them still unemployed, continue spending time together and wondering what the future may hold -- unforgettable romance, unexpected prosperity, or more of the same provincial misery they have been putting up with for years. Leopoldo, the most practical dreamer in the group, quietly resumes his work on a future brilliant play that he intends to present to an aging and slightly loopy local actor.

Having experienced the civilized North and charged with enthusiasm for the future, Fausto and Sandra return home and immediately begin sharing their experiences with their friends. Then Fausto’s father arranges that he gets a lousy job in a local antiques shop owned by an old friend. At first Fausto does his best to be the exemplary employee his father expects him to be, but the dead-end job gradually changes his mind and he becomes a troublemaker again. While taking care of their newborn child, Sandra also discovers that he has successfully chased other emotionally available women in town.

If you miss the sadness in the narrator’s voice during the prologue, later on you will most likely conclude that I Vitelloni only highlights a few occasionally hilarious but meaningless rendezvous and lavish parties that its characters experience, which ultimately make it a fairly ordinary film. The rendezvous and lavish parties are indeed mostly meaningless, but they are part of a bigger picture that Fellini focuses on. The bleak future these characters face is actually the future of an entire generation of young people that lived in provincial towns across Italy after the end of WW2. If they did not migrate to Rome or Milan, their only options in life were to pursue a limited number of hard-to-get dead-end jobs and settle for miserable existence, or choose addiction and crime. Riccardo’s big drunken rant in the middle of the film is fueled by this very realization, which later enters the minds of his friends as well.

Martin Scorsese loves I Vitelloni and has often acknowledged the tremendous influence it had on him and his vision of Mean Streets. It is very easy to understand why. While growing up in New York, Scorsese spent most of his time on the streets interacting with Italian-American vitelloni who were facing the same bleak future the characters in Fellini’s film do. He developed his passion for cinema only after his parents, both low-wage workers in the city’s garment district, routinely took him to the local theater and its magic began redirected his life. Mean Streets is Scorsese’s take on the vitelloni experience in Little Italy, where for many a life of crime was the only alternative that made sense.

I Vitelloni Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Presented in an aspect ratio of 1.32:1, encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and granted a 1080p transfer, I Vitelloni arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Criterion.

The film has been fully restored and looks quite incredible on Blu-ray. I only have in my library this DVD release from Image Entertainment and after performing a few quick comparisons I can confirm that there are pretty dramatic improvements in all key areas. Depth and delineation are the two areas with the most obvious upgrades, but the new grading job makes a substantial difference as well. In fact, from all of the restored Fellini that I have seen thus far, I think that I Vitelloni might have the best overall grading job. It looks great on my system, exactly as I would hoped it would. The restoration credits mention reconstruction work, but I did not notice any big and unnatural drops in terms of density. The entire film looks very, very healthy as well. On the DVD release there is quite a few rough and aged spots, but on the new master the film looks virtually spotless. All in all, the new master that was prepared is a really strong and I am quite certain that it will remain the go-to source whenever a home video release of this film is prepared in the future. (Note: This is a Region-A "locked" Blu-ray release. Therefore, you must have a native Region-A or Region-Free player in order to access its content).

I Vitelloni Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There is only one standard audio track on this Blu-ray release: Italian: LPCM Mono (48kHz, 24-bit). Optional English subtitles are provided for the main feature.

The audio is clear and stable. However, there are quite a few segments where it feels like the high-frequencies are compressed a bit. My guess is that a digital tool was used to remove all perceptible hiss and hum (and other such imperfections) and, in the process, some of the high-frequencies were clipped a bit. The effect can also be quite easy to notice when Nino Rota's score has a role to play. Still, the overall quality of the audio track is very good.

I Vitelloni Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer - a vintage trailer for I Vitelloni. In Italian, with optional English subtitles. (4 min, 1080i).

• Vitellonismo - an archival documentary that examines the production and themes of I Vitelloni. It features interviews with actors Leopoldo Trieste and Franco Interlenghi, assistant director Moraldo Rossi, and Federico Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich, amongst others. The documentary was produced by Criterion in 2004. In Italian, with optional English subtitles. (36 min, 1080i).

• Second Look - presented here is an archival episode of the Belgian television program Second Look in which Federico Fellini discusses his background and early work. The episode was broadcast in 1960. In French and Italian, with optional English subtitles. (32 min, 1080p).

• Stills Gallery - a large collection of rare behind the scenes stills from the production of I Vitelloni.

I Vitelloni Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Even if you did not spend a good portion of your youth in a provincial town, I guarantee you would instantly relate to one of the characters in Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni. They are all dreamers, including the young and older women the men flirt and fall in love with, hoping that the right opportunity would come along and change their lives for the better. Its sobering revelation is that dreamers often -- or is it always -- waste their best years waiting for the change to happen, while they should be pursuing it and doing the hard work to make it happen. It is a terrific but slightly overlooked gem, possibly because it has always been overshadowed by Fellini's much bigger and better received films. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.