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.

Unemployed and living off their parents, Fausto's twenty-something[5] friends kill time shuffling from empty cafés to seedy pool halls to aimless walks on desolate windswept beaches and perform childish pranks.

Moraldo, Sandra's brother and the youngest of the five vitelloni, uncomfortably observes Fausto's womanizing as he ponders his own existence, dreaming of ways to escape to the city.

Back from his honeymoon and settled in with Sandra, Fausto is forced to accept a job as a stockroom assistant in a religious-articles shop owned by Michele Curti, a friend of his father-in-law's.

Resolved to abandon the provincial monotony of his dead-end town, Moraldo boards a train, imagining his vitelloni friends sleeping and dreaming their lives away.

Having completed an early version of La Strada with co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli in 1952, Fellini offered their "modern fairy tale"[2] to producer Luigi Rovere, with whom he was still under contract.

Rovere had solid reasons for turning it down: La Strada was in no recognizable genre and Fellini's last film, The White Sheik, had been a critical and commercial flop.

In a show of solidarity, Rovere loaned the script to a Venetian professor of calligraphy turned film producer, Lorenzo Pegoraro, who admired The White Sheik.

The term has also been defined as a cross between the Italian words for veal (vitello) and beef (bovino), implying "an immature, lazy person without a clear identity or any notion of what to do with his life".

[9] In a 1971 letter, Flaiano offered a fuller definition: "The term vitellone was used in my day to define a young man from a modest family, perhaps a student—but one who had either already gone beyond the programmed schedule for his coursework, or one who did nothing all the time ...

[12] Making matters worse, Fellini also cast Leopoldo Trieste (the lead in The White Sheik) as the budding dramatist, and his brother Riccardo, a total unknown, to interpret his own role.

[11] Fellini topped things off by casting Franco Fabrizi as Fausto, an actor who had begun his film career in 1950 with Michelangelo Antonioni's Chronicle of a Love but had recently bombed in Christ Passed by the Barn.

[16] Supervised by production manager Luigi Giacosi, whom Fellini had first met on location in Tripoli during the war, and photographed by veteran cinematographer Otello Martelli, the rushes served as the basis of the masquerade ball, a major sequence.

[12] Working with several cinematographers over six months, Fellini developed a camera style based on slow tracking shots that "match the listless, purposeless lives" of his characters.

[17] The camera often dollies in to underscore dramatic events, most notably when Sandra falls ill at the beauty pageant; after the birth of her child; and when Francesco beats his son.

After praising Fellini's Venice triumph, Ermanno Contini of Il Secolo XIX outlined the film's weaknesses: "I Vitelloni does not have a particularly solid structure, the story is discontinuous, seeking unity through the complex symbiosis of episodes and details ...

The narrative, built up around strong emotions and powerful situations, lacks solid organic unity, and at times this undermines the story's creative force, resulting in an imbalance of tone and pace and a certain sense of tedium.

"[20] Arturo Lanocita of Corriere della Sera wrote: "I Vitelloni gives a graphic and authentic picture of certain aimless evenings, the streets populated by groups of idle youths ...

André Martin of Les Cahiers du Cinéma wrote that by "virtue of the quality of the narrative, and the balance and control of the film as a whole, I Vitelloni is neither commercial nor does it possess those traits that usually permit a work of art to be consecrated and defined.

It symbolizes solitude, the emptiness that follows communal joy, the bleak torpor that succeeds the swarming crowd; there are always papers lying around like so many reminders of what the day and life have left behind.

In his New York Times review, Bosley Crowther reported that Fellini, with "his volatile disposition and a desire to make a stinging filmm... does certainly take a vigorous whiplash to the breed of over-grown and over-sexed young men who hang around their local poolrooms and shun work as though it were a foul disease.

For the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle noted that I Vitelloni was "a film of sensitivity, observation and humor—a must-see for Fellini enthusiasts and a worthwhile investment for everyone else.

If you still remember that terrific drunk scene, Alberto Sordi's pre-Some Like It Hot drag tango or the way the little boy balances on the train track at the end, you should know that this picture plays as strongly now as it did in 1956 or whenever you first saw it.

"[30] A. O. Scott of the New York Times wrote that the film "shows all of Fellini's unrivaled virtues—his lyrical sense of place, his abiding affection for even the most hapless of his characters, his effortless knack for limpid, bustling composition—and very few of his putative vices.

[32] One of Fellini's most imitated films,[33] I Vitelloni inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri, and Lina Wertmüller, and influenced Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), and Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985), among many others, according to Kezich.