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Fellini’s first personal film and arguably his first masterpiece, following the boys we first see on the loose at a beach resort back to their quiet provincial town, where we’re introduced to the girls they make fools of and the parents long wise to their ways. Group leader Fausto (Franco Fabrizi) has just been married off to his latest (pregnant) conquest; we spend a few moments observing what happens to the rest of the gang while he’s off on honeymoon in the city, and then what happens on Fausto’s return, when he’s forced into taking a job to support his family and his roving eye starts playing up again.

The somewhat crude English-language translation of the title - “Spivs” - suggests a film comparable to the British post-War spiv cycle, but Fellini’s actually inventing a scion of cinema later popularised by American movies: the episodic small-town ensemble pic, populated by young adults faced with the responsibilities of growing-up. Everything we’d later see in American Graffiti or SubUrbia is already here: the flailing attempts to impress the opposite sex; characters carefully delineated to represent different sections of its audience; the last-reel act of “heroism” in which those slackers prove their essential goodness; the poignant finale where one of the group gets the hell out of Dodge at the expense of those left behind.

Like later Fellini films, Vitelloni has great party and theatre scenes, but also manages the smaller dramas - sequences around kitchen tables or set in the early hours of the morning - that first or second-time writer-directors often make much of before bigger pay cheques encourage them to broaden their canvas and, in doing so, lose focus. The result is a film achieving near-perfect lightness of touch: it’s almost entirely inconsequential, but never less than thoroughly entertaining. As the actor passing through the boys’ town puts it, referring to a script he’d enjoyed reading by gesturing to first his head and then his heart: “There’s this… and this, too.”

 

Mike McCahill on 25th July 2005
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