At once glamorous and preachy, the film - which is still powerful - perfectly caught a 1960 zeitgeist torn between the embrace of booming post-war materialism and a sense of its hollowness. And seven years later, his life changed forever with La Dolce Vita, a worldwide sensation about modern decadence in which a journalist, played by Fellini's alter-ego star, Marcello Mastroianni, splashes around in the Trevi Fountain with sexy Anita Ekberg before getting all alienated and bummed. It's my favorite of his films - a smart, funny, sneakily touching portrait of five young men idling away their lives in a coastal town.įellini was hungrier than they were.
Indeed, he drew on his own life for his first, and often emulated masterpiece, 1953's I Vitelloni (which means something like The Lazy Calves). Thompson once termed the "enormous condescension of posterity." He's often treated as one of those artists that a less enlightened age than our own used to think a genius.īorn 100 years ago in the coastal city of Rimini, Fellini was a child of the provinces whose early films were anchored to the real world he knew.
His reputation now suffers from what the historian E.P. His maximalist showmanship - nobody ever left a Fellini film grumbling about the small portions - has fallen out of fashion. Lavishly Italianate in his earthiness, Fellini was cinema's great laureate of the id.īut over the years his reputation has dipped badly, especially among critics. Their panache inspired generations of directors, from Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-wai to Woody Allen and Guillermo del Toro. La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8½, Roma, Amarcord - these weren't merely films that all serious filmgoers raced off to see. Back then, he was an international brand name, and aside from Hitchcock, probably the most famous director in the world. The first foreign filmmaker I ever heard of was Federico Fellini. Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni and Swedish actor Anita Ekberg hold hands in a scene from Federico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita.Īmerican International Pictures/Getty Images