Fellini at the dawn of his golden age

To mark the 50th anniversary of “I Vitelloni,” the Nuart will present a one-week run of a new 35-millimeter print of Federico Fellini’s first masterpiece. Fellini’s first two films as a director, “Variety Lights” (1950), which he co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, and “The White Sheik” (1952), are comic delights, but it was this ineffably poignant semiautobiographical reverie that unleashed fully Fellini’s shimmering, flowing poetic style, echoed perfectly in a plaintive score by Fellini’s potently evocative collaborator, Nino Rota.

Released two years later in U.S. art houses as “The Young and the Passionate,” “I Vitelloni” (which literally translates as “big calves,” idiomatic slang for “big loafers”) would establish Fellini’s international renown.

Fellini had actually left his hometown of Rimini at 18 in 1938 for Florence, where he found work as a proofreader and cartoonist for a comic-strip story magazine -- an experience he would draw upon for his cartoon hero in “The White Sheik.”

The passing of 15 years between his departure and his making of “I Vitelloni” was crucial to the compassion and detachment with which he views the five layabouts of his film’s title, fast friends who are turning 30 yet who are still living at home and still unemployed, indulged by their provincial bourgeois families.

Possessed of varying degrees of self-awareness, all five are bored and frustrated and talk about leaving town, but their inclination to indolence is reinforced not just by their cosseting families but also by the obvious truth: As charming as seaside Rimini is, nothing much is going on. Their story is set in motion by the key figure among the friends, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi).

He has foolishly impregnated his naive, pretty girlfriend, Sandra (Leonora Ruffo), and tries to run away but is forcefully brought to the altar. With his fleshy, pretty-boy looks -- he suggests an Italian Elvis -- Fausto is a lazy, incorrigible playboy.

As easily moved by emotion and guilt as by lechery, Fausto, in his misadventures and innate resistance to responsibility and convention, will provide the film with its major story line.

Then there’s Alberto (Alberto Sordi), a buffoonish mama’s boy who sorely disapproves of his sister’s romance with a married man, yet it is she who works long hours in a print shop to support him and their widowed mother.

The one man among the five who seems to apply himself, Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste), toils away writing plays of dubious merit, and the arrival of a famous old actor (Achille Majeroni) as the headliner of a tawdry touring revue (right out of “Variety Lights”) sparks hopes that the great man will lend him a helping hand -- he will, but not in the way Leopoldo anticipates. This sequence, at once hilarious and stinging, is quintessential Fellini.

The least complicated of the five is the easygoing Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini, the director’s brother), a tenor already growing stout. From the start it’s clear that Franco Interlenghi’s reflective Moraldo is Fellini’s alter ego, the most perceptive of the group yet seemingly ensnared by deep loyalty and affection to his friends.

Indeed, this most poetic of films is suffused by a depiction of emotional ties that Fellini respects profoundly while revealing how they can entrap an individual as surely as a ball and chain. Perhaps most of these men will at last resign themselves to a routine existence of satisfying their basic needs for food, drink, companionship and sex -- if, except for Fausto, they don’t marry. Yet Moraldo, like Fellini, is blessed -- though at times he may feel cursed -- with enough imagination to grasp that there’s more to life than this and that sometimes fulfilling dreams means leaving behind all that one has ever known and loved.

*

‘I Vitelloni’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Adult themes and situations, presented discreetly so that the film is suitable for mature early teens.

Franco Interlenghi...Moraldo

Alberto Sordi...Alberto

Franco Fabrizi...Fausto

Leopoldo Trieste...Leopoldo

Riccardo Fellini...Riccardo

A Kino International release of a Corinth Films and International Media presentation. Director Federico Fellini. Producers Jacques Bar, Mario De Vecchi, Lorenzo Pegoraro. Screenplay by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. Cinematographers Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli, Luciano Trasatti. Editor Rolando Benedetti. Music Nino Rota. Costumes Michele Bomarzi, Margherita Marinari. Production designer Mario Chiari. Set decorator Luigi Gervasi. In Italian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Exclusively at the Nuart through Thursday, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 281-8223.