Fellini's first two films were charming, but his third film operates from a more melancholic perspective that has the feeling of a postwar daydream. It's a story that hangs on the horns of childhood and maturity, focusing on a fraternity of five grown men still arrested in their development. All of them are unemployed, living at home, avoiding life's responsibilities, and forever in motion looking for ways to amuse themselves. They're like the local Rat Pack trapped in Neverland. An aimless gang of buddies who never learned to grow up, but instead spent their days chasing women, dressing elegantly, smoking stogies, carousing around town, and pretty much getting drunk on their own narcissism and lassitude. Without the rebellious energy this film pioneers, I'm willing to bet we wouldn't have films like MEAN STREETS (1973), GOODFELLAS (1990), or AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973). There's this chummy in-circle loyalty among friends that binds these films together.

Scorsese has openly admitted the profound influence I VITTELONI has had on his filmmaking, and it certainly shows.
 
He states:

"I Vitelloni was a major inspiration for my picture Mean Streets back in 1973 and continues to be so to this day. For me, it captures the bittersweet emotions of a moment that eventually comes for everyone, the moment you realize you can either grow up or forever be a child."

The film provides a snapshot into postwar Italy that really conveys a feeling of existential apathy. Released the same year as Bergman's SUMMER WITH MONIKA (1953), it shares in the same left-leaning, anti-establishment spirit of the times, showing how youth really struggled to adult and take responsibility of their lives. Like MONIKA, and later with Truffault's THE 400 BLOWS (1959), I VITTELONI becomes a staple of the broken youth genre that's essentially about the hard knocks of leaving youth behind. 

It's grounded in the long shadow of postwar neorealism, but the film's ending also seems to be saying goodbye to this tradition and making way for Fellini's more poetic energies. The ending brings us to a train station, with Moraldo (the only buddy from the gang) departing his provincial town. He has escaped the confines of his friends' failures and matured into adulthood. He's saying goodbye to his homeland and, symbolically, an older, more traditional Italy. Can Moraldo really just be a stand-in for Fellini himself? Someone who ultimately said goodbye to Italian neorealism and embraced a more surreal tendency to create works that bordered into magical realism? 

Given what I know about Fellini's trajectory as a filmmaker, I VITTELONI feels like a major turning point in the auteur's career, one that feels like a point of departure, or rite of passage, into a wider, more expansive cinematic universe.

Fellini Ranked