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Features: DVD, Widescreen, English, Spanish, Subtitled
One of the most influential and popular works by Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita follows the "sweet life" of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) who covers the glitzy show business life in Rome. In constant search of the next big scandal, he is continually seduced by the decadent life led by Rome's pampered rich.
Editor's Note
In Federico Fellini's seminal film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into "the sweet life" of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.
Plot Summary
Director Federico Fellini's portrait of a hedonistic 20th century Rome centers on a handsome journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) in constant pursuit of the extravagant, the sensational, and the absurd, who works for a scandal sheet and becomes intimately involved with the decadent high-society individuals his publication so often maligns. The immoral lifestyles he witnesses nearly paralyze him with shock and outrage, yet he struggles with his complicity.
| Features | 40 Page Collector's Booklet | | Audio: Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound | | Audio: Italian Dolby Digital Mono | | Audio: Italian Dolby Digital Stereo | | Disc 1 Bonus Features: Commentary By Noted Critic And Film Historian Richard Schickel; Introduction By Acclaimed Director Alexander Payne | | Filmographies | | Disc 3 Features: Documentary On La Dolce Vita Composer Nino Rota; Interview With Anita Ekberg (2004); Interview With Federico Fellini From France TV (1960); Marcello Mastroianni Speaking About La Dolce Vita On France TV (1960); Discussion With Fellini's Closest Friend And Colleague, Rinadlo Gelend, On La Dolce Vita Themes; Footage With The Last Surviving La Dolce Vita Screenwriter, Tullio Pinelli. | | Five 5'' x 7'' Collectible Photographs And 11'' x 7'' Collectible Poster | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, Spanish | | Widescreen Version Enhanced For 16:9 TVs |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Koch International |
| Release Date: 11/8/2005 |
| Running Time: 174 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1960 | | Catalog ID: 3051 | | UPC: 00741952305194 | | Number of Discs: 3 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: Italian | | Available Audio Tracks: Italian | | Available Subtitles: English, Spanish | | Video: B&W |
Aspect Ratio | | Anamorphic Widescreen 1.78:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Oscar (1962) |  | Piero Gherardi, Winner, Best Costume Design, Black-and-White | | | Federico Fellini, Nominee, Best Director | | | Federico Fellini, et. al., Nominee, Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen |
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| | Professional Reviews | Los Angeles Times
"...One of the key works of the modern cinema. A brilliantly conceived epic fable..." 04/10/1992 p.F15Chicago Sun-Times
"...The movie leaps from one visual extravaganza to another....The movie is made with boundless energy..." 01/05/1997 p.5 Los Angeles Times
"With its shimmering, beguilingly familiar Nino Rota score, Otello Martelli's ravishingly lighted black-and-white cinematography and its endless processions of the foolish, the grotesque, the jaded and the merely young and beautiful, LA DOLCE VITA is truly unforgettable." 04/30/2004 p.E4 Entertainment Weekly
"[A] peerless, protean act of visual choreography." 09/24/2004 p.89-90 USA Today
"[T]his remains a mesmerizing spectacle with gonzo casting." 09/24/2004 p.10E Premiere
"[A] piercing depiction of moral failure with a palpable sense of desolation at its core." 11/01/2004 p.103 Sight and Sound
"[Fellini] highlights the triviality and absurdity of a culture in which every banality uttered by a star obsesses the press..." 12/01/2004 p.76 San Francisco Chronicle 10 of 10
La Dolce Vita is the great Fellini film. It received universal acclaim upon its release in 1960, and in retrospect it's the work that best represents its director. In this one masterpiece, Federico Fellini achieved the ideal balance -- between social observation and unconscious imagery, between artistic discipline and freedom, and between the neo-realism of 1950s Italian cinema and the orgiastic flights of his later work. In its time, it shocked people. The Catholic Church condemned it. It was considered a dirty movie because it was frank about sex and included nudity, albeit brief. With such a buildup, it couldn't miss with American audiences. Partly for a dose of high culture and partly for the thrill of it all, Americans flocked to La Dolce Vita in its initial 1961 release. Divine decadence may have been restricted under the Hollywood Production Code, but foreign filmmakers operated under no such constraint. And so the big-city art houses became places where artistic yearning and unwholesome curiosity met -- and both came away satisfied. - Mick LaSalle
Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself. - Roger Ebert
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