Where to watch La Dolce Vita (1960)
La Dolce Vita is not currently available to stream, rent or buy in US.
Over several days and nights in Rome, a journalist drifts through celebrity parties, romantic entanglements, religious spectacles, and encounters with artists and family. Torn between the glamorous social world and aspirations for a more meaningful life, he searches for purpose while becoming increasingly absorbed by the superficiality around him.
Cast: Anita Ekberg, Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Valeria Ciangottini, Riccardo Garrone, Ida Galli, Audrey McDonald
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Trivia & production notes
- Fellini initially wanted Paul Newman for the lead role but rejected him as too conventionally handsome, deciding instead that Marcello Mastroianni had the right ordinary face for the part.
- When Mastroianni asked to see the script before accepting the role, Fellini handed him blank pages with only a sketch of a man swimming with a large phallus surrounded by dancing mermaids.
- Set designer Piero Gherardi constructed over eighty different locations for the film, including a replica of Saint Peter's dome with its staircase, all built at Cinecittà Studios.
- The famous Trevi Fountain scene was shot during winter over the course of a week, requiring Mastroianni to drink an entire bottle of vodka before Fellini could film him in the cold water.
- Fellini initially planned a subplot with Academy Award-winning actress Luise Rainer as an older writer named Dolores, but scrapped the entire storyline when the character grew too exaggerated during rewrites.
- The character of Paparazzo, a news photographer, inspired the word paparazzi, now used in multiple languages to describe invasive celebrity photographers.
- The name Paparazzo likely derives from papataceo, an Italian word for a large and bothersome mosquito, though co-screenwriter Ennio Flaiano claimed he took it from a character in George Gissing's 1901 travel book By the Ionian Sea.
- Fellini said the fashionable women's sack dress inspired the entire film because the voluminous garment could conceal an empty, squalid interior beneath an outwardly gorgeous exterior.
- Co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli modeled the character of Steiner, an intellectual who kills himself, on Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, whose suicide in 1950 Pinelli attributed to emotional sterility from over-intellectualism.
- The film's scenes of the sea monster being pulled from the ocean were shot at Passo Oscuro, a real resort town on the Italian coast about thirty kilometers from Rome.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article La Dolce Vita, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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