The young and the restless, Fellini style

Along with “8 1/2 ,” the New Beverly Cinema will screen Federico Fellini’s first masterpiece, “I Vitelloni” (1954), on Friday and Saturday. It is an ineffably poignant, semiautobiographical reverie that fully unleashed Fellini’s shimmering poetic style, echoed perfectly in a plaintive score by the director’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 left his hometown of Rimini at 18 in 1938 for Florence, where he found work as a proofreader and cartoonist for a comic magazine -- an experience he would draw upon for his cartoon hero in “The White Sheik” (1953). 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. They are fast friends who are turning 30 yet still living at home and unemployed, indulged by their bourgeois families.

All five are bored and frustrated. They talk about leaving town, but their indolence is reinforced not just by their cosseting families but by the obvious truth: As charming as seaside Rimini is, not much is going on.

Franco Interlenghi’s reflective Moraldo is Fellini’s alter ego, the most perceptive of the group yet seemingly ensnared by loyalty and affection for his friends. Indeed, this most poetic of films is suffused with a depiction of emotional ties that Fellini respects profoundly while revealing how they can entrap a person 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. 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.

Conspiracy theory

John Hankey’s “JFKII: The Bush Connection” is provocative to say the least. Using materials familiar to researchers of the assassination of President Kennedy, Hankey makes a series of tantalizing connections between the rich and the powerful -- “a world where personal connections is everything.” Drawing on materials that suggest that JFK was shot from the front -- from the famous grassy knoll in Dallas where some bystanders claim they heard a shot fired -- Hankey argues that Kennedy was a victim of a conspiracy that has never been uncovered. (His candidate for a grassy knoll gunman is Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt.)

From this point Hankey poses a barrage of questions and challenges to the Warren Commission report to suggest that Kennedy was brought down by a vast web of powerful conservatives and that George H.W. Bush and his banker father, Prescott, were close to all of them. Hankey invites viewers not only to draw their own conclusions but also to check out his sources.

In a ‘60s groove

Because the American Cinematheque’s Mods & Rockers: The Return of Groovy Movies of the Shagadelic Sixties (which runs July 8 to 17 at the Egyptian and July 8 to 10 at the Aero) is occurring at the same time as Outfest, some advance notice is in order -- especially in regard to the fairly obscure “Lord Love a Duck,” which will be double-billed with the better-known all-star “The Loved One.”

Although the late George Axelrod overreached in trying to direct as well as adapt -- with Larry H. Johnson -- Al Hine’s novel “Lord Love a Duck,” the 1966 film is an instance of the large attempt being worth more than the small success. What makes the film so ambitious is that, while charting a high school girl’s progress toward beach picture stardom, it satirizes life as it is lived by many Southern Californians and thereby exposes the crassness and shallowness of the American dream. Axelrod zeroes in on such timeless targets as sexual inhibitions and hypocrisy, teen tribal customs, parlor psychoanalysis and drive-in religion. The heroine is played by Tuesday Weld, whose every wish is made true by her Merlin-like mentor (Roddy McDowall).

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Screenings

New Beverly Cinema

* “8 1/2 “ and “I Vitelloni”: 7:30 p.m. Friday, 2:25 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: 7165 Beverly Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 938-4038

7 Dudley Cinema

* “JFKII: The Bush Connection”: 10:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Sponto Gallery,

7 Dudley Ave., Venice

Info: (310) 306-7330

Mods & Rockers series

* “The Loved One” and “Lord Love a Duck”: 5 p.m. July 10

Where: Egyptian Theatre,

6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM, americancinematheque.com