La Dolce Vita (1961)

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La Dolce Vita describes the modern degeneration and sophisticated depressions of Roman urban life from the eyes of a journalist who pursues high society. The young journalist Marcello Rubini lives with the dream of creating a real work; however, he cannot give up the money and prestige provided by the newspaper he works for.

He spends his days in Rome’s most fashionable street, Via Veneto, chasing the next scandal. Marcello continues to live this son sweet life ğı to the end, which she does not actually enjoy, even when she is blown away in a world full of sex, drinks, parties and realms. His is a soulless and unexcited being.

La Dolce Vita Italian for “the sweet life” or “the good life”) is a 1960 Italian drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The film follows Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist writing for gossip magazines, over seven days and nights on his journey through the “sweet life” of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness. La Dolce Vita won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Costumes. The film was a massive box office hit in Europe with 13,617,148 admissions in Italy and 2,956,094 admissions in France.

Filming Locations

Most of the film was shot at the Cinecittà Stu­dios in Rome. Set de­signer Piero Gher­ardi cre­ated over eighty lo­ca­tions, in­clud­ing the Via Veneto, the dome of Saint Peter’s with the stair­case lead­ing up to it, and var­i­ous nightclubs. How­ever, other se­quences were shot on lo­ca­tion such as the party at the aris­to­crats’ cas­tle filmed in the real Bas­sano di Sutri palace north of Rome. (Some of the ser­vants, wait­ers, and guests were played by real aris­to­crats.)

Fellini com­bined con­structed sets with lo­ca­tion shots, de­pend­ing on script re­quire­ments—a real lo­ca­tion often “gave birth to the mod­i­fied scene and, con­se­quently, the newly con­structed set.” The film’s fa­mous last scenes where the mon­ster fish is pulled out of the sea and Mar­cello waves good­bye to Paola (the teenage “Um­brian angel”) were shot on lo­ca­tion at Passo Os­curo, a small re­sort town sit­u­ated on the Ital­ian coast 30 kilo­me­ters from Rome.

Fellini scrapped a major se­quence that would have in­volved the re­la­tion­ship of Mar­cello with Do­lores, an older writer liv­ing in a tower, to be played by 1930s Acad­emy Award-win­ning ac­tress Luise Rainer. If the di­rec­tor’s deal­ings with Rainer “who used to in­volve Fellini in fu­tile dis­cus­sion” were prob­lem­atic, bi­og­ra­pher Kezich ar­gues that while rewrit­ing the screen­play, the Do­lores char­ac­ter grew “hy­per­bolic” and Fellini de­cided to jet­ti­son “the en­tire story line.”

The scene in the Trevi Foun­tain was shot over a week in win­ter: in March ac­cord­ing to the BBC, in late Jan­u­ary ac­cord­ing to Anita Ekberg. Fellini claimed that Ek­berg stood in the cold water in her dress for hours with­out any trou­ble while Mas­troianni had to wear a wet­suit be­neath his clothes – to no avail. It was only after the actor “pol­ished off a bot­tle of vodka” and “was com­pletely pissed” that Fellini could shoot the scene.

La Dolce Vita (1961)

Directed by: Federico Fellini
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny, Nadia Gray, Annibale Ninchi, Valeria Ciangottini, Evelyn Stewart, Audrey McDonald
Screenplay by: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Production Design by: Piero Gherardi
Cinematography by: Otello Martelli
Film Editing by: Leo Catozzo
Costume Design by: Piero Gherardi
Music by: Nino Rota
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Astor Pictures Corporation
Release Date: April 19, 1961

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