I Vitelloni

I vitelloni (, literally "The bullocks" - Romagnol slang for "The slackers" or "The layabouts") is a 1953 Italian comedy drama film directed by Federico Fellini from a screenplay written by himself, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. It stars Franco Interlenghi, Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, Leopoldo Trieste, and Riccardo Fellini (the director's brother) as five young Italian men at crucial turning points in their small town lives. Recognized as a pivotal work in the director's artistic evolution, the film has distinct autobiographical elements that mirror important societal changes in 1950s Italy. Recipient of both the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion in 1953, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing in 1958, the film was also Fellini's first commercial success. In addition, it launched the career of its star Alberto Sordi, one of post-war Italy's most significant and popular comedians. In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978." Plot As summer draws to a close, a violent downpour interrupts a beach-side beauty pageant in a provincial town on the Adriatic coast. Sandra Rubini, crowned "Miss Mermaid 1953", suddenly grows upset and faints: rumours fly that she's expecting a baby by inveterate skirt chaser Fausto Moretti. Under pressure from Francesco, his respectable father, Fausto agrees to a shotgun wedding. After the sparsely attended middle-class ceremony, the newlyweds leave town on their honeymoon. Unemployed and living off their parents, Fausto's twenty-something friends kill time shuffling from empty cafés to seedy pool halls to aimless walks across desolate windswept beaches. During the interim, they perform childish pranks. Taunting honest road workers from the safety of a luxury car they never earned, they're given a sound thrashing when it breaks down.