General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

I Vitelloni

I Vitelloni (Italian for "the big calves", rendered in English as "The Young and the Passionate" or "The Bullocks") is a 1953 Italian-French comedy-drama directed by Federico Fellini, following five idle young men in their late twenties who drift through life in a small Adriatic seaside town, sustained by their families and by dreams of success they never pursue.¹^•² It was Fellini's second film as a solo director, after The White Sheik (1952), and his first commercial success.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	1953; Italy/France co-production, black and white, 104 minutes¹
Director and writers	Directed by Federico Fellini; story by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli; screenplay by Fellini and Flaiano¹
Key crew	Cinematography Otello Martelli, Luciano Trasatti, and Carlo Carlini; music Nino Rota; editing Rolando Benedetti; production design Mario Chiari¹
Principal cast	Franco Interlenghi (Moraldo), Alberto Sordi (Alberto), Franco Fabrizi (Fausto), Leopoldo Trieste (Leopoldo), Riccardo Fellini (Riccardo), Leonora Ruffo (Sandra)⁴
Production	Peg Film (Rome) and Cité Film (Paris); distributed in Italy by ENIC; censorship visa 15005 of 17 September 1953⁵
Recognition	Oscar nominee for best original screenplay³
Reception	100% Tomatometer from 29 critics and 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore 87 on Metacritic⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The story opens at the end of summer at the Kursaal, a seaside pavilion, where Sandra (Leonora Ruffo), sister of the timid Moraldo and fiancée of the womanizer Fausto, is crowned Miss Sirena 1953. During the ceremony she faints: she is pregnant by Fausto, the group's leader and "spiritual guide", who tries to run away from responsibility. Persuaded by his father, by Moraldo, and by a faint sense of guilt, Fausto marries Sandra and leaves for Rome on his honeymoon, while the other four kill their time at the cafe, the billiard hall, and the betting shop.¹

Each of the five has his own thread. Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste), an aspiring playwright, writes yet another comedy and flirts with the neighbors' maid; Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini), lazy and indolent, dreams of a singing career; Alberto (Alberto Sordi), the eternal buffoon kept by his sister Olga, scolds her for keeping company with a married man; and the thoughtful Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) befriends a boy who works at the railway station. Back from his honeymoon, Fausto takes a job as a clerk in a shop of sacred furnishings sold by Mr. Michele, a friend of his father-in-law, and promptly pursues Michele's wife.¹^•⁵

The scandal and dismissal that follow strain the two families, and Fausto, now a father, persists in his philandering with Moraldo's complaisance. His final betrayal drives Sandra to flee with the baby, prompting an anguished collective search. After a reconciliation, probably temporary, Moraldo alone finally leaves, boarding a dawn train for the city, while the remaining vitelloni resume their idle rounds on the beach.¹^•⁵

Autobiographical basis and production

The film draws on Fellini's memories of his youth in Rimini, the seaside town of his childhood, and is generally read as semiautobiographical: the unnamed coastal town is a transfigured Rimini, and Moraldo's departure for the city mirrors Fellini's own escape to Rome.⁷^•⁸ Fellini's brother Riccardo appears in the cast as Riccardo.³^•⁹ Fellini had already written the screenplay for La Strada and wanted to make it at any cost; the price was satisfying his producers with a comedy that would not alienate the public.¹⁰ The film was made quickly, and although it rests on a real social type, Fellini did not set out to make a neorealist film, and the vitelloni of the story are entirely fictional characters.¹⁰^•¹¹

Style and place in Fellini's career

I Vitelloni sits between The White Sheik (1952) and La Strada (1954), and marks a step forward in Fellini's ability to enter his characters' psychology; it points ahead both to the social satire of La Dolce Vita (1960) and to the canvases of nostalgia and the artist's nature in 8½ (1963) and Amarcord (1973).¹² In technique it may be the least "Felliniesque" of his major films, using fewer of the odd foreshortenings, unexpected close-ups, and dreamlike gargoyles of his later vocabulary, with camera work that is at times uncharacteristically static.¹²

Structurally, the film experiments with a new kind of storytelling: rather than narrating a single plot, it describes an environment through large episodic blocks, and the film has no plot of cause, running from the end of one summer through winter and carnival to a dawn departure.¹¹^•⁹ The critic André Bazin, a leading theorist of Italian neorealism, observed that the scenes establishing logical relations and dramatic articulation serve only as continuity links, while the long descriptive sequences, the nocturnal walks and the senseless strolls on the beach, are the truly revealing scenes: Fellini's characters disclose themselves not in action but in their endless milling around.¹³ Gilles Deleuze later drew on the film in his discussion of "the crisis of the action image", reading it as constructed around the lack of connection between events and their insignificance to those who experience them.¹⁴

Reception and influence

The film was Fellini's first international success and an Oscar nominee for best original screenplay.³ Bazin noted that although nothing in it seemed designed to impress itself on the viewer's memory, no famous actors and almost no story, the term "vitelloni" became a common word, designating an international human type, and that each year some of the best films recalled Fellini's own.¹⁵ The word entered ordinary Italian speech for such idle young men.⁹

Its influence on later filmmakers is wide and partly self-declared. Martin Scorsese has named the film as a source for Mean Streets (1973), and the ensemble-of-aimless-young-men shape recurs in George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), and Fellini's own Amarcord (1973); critics have also traced the lineage to The Last Picture Show and Breaking Away.⁹^•¹⁶^•¹⁷ A scholarly survey of the film's descendants, spanning Spain (Calle Mayor, Los Chicos), Italy (Leoni al sole, I basilischi, I delfini), and the United States, finds that they reinterpret Fellini's theme of an unrealistic youthful condition marked by the inability to face the tasks of adulthood.¹⁷

Critical reception has remained strong. On the film's 2003 re-release, Metacritic recorded a Metascore of 87 based on ten critic reviews, all positive, with Leonard Maltin among those arguing it is no less than Fellini's masterpiece.⁷ Rotten Tomatoes lists a 100% Tomatometer from 29 reviews and a 90% audience score.⁶ Reviewers have singled out Nino Rota's score, the first of his great collaborations with Fellini, and the film's blend of the wistful and the comic.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released before 2000

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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