Product Details

• Actors: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born, Salvo Randone, Mario Romagnoli
• Directors: Federico Fellini
• Writers: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi, Brunello Rondi, Petronius
• Producers: Alberto Grimaldi
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: Italian, Latin
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
• VHS Release Date: January 27, 1993
• Run Time: 128 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6301965752
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #210,324 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Trippy is as trippy does, even when you're talking about a movie set in ancient Rome. This 1969 Fellini opus was among the most visually arresting entries in a year when the psychedelic experience was trying to claw its way into every movie coming down the pike. But Fellini, in telling a negligible story about two young men tasting the various pleasures of Nero's hedonistic and priapic reign, aimed for images that jarred as well as seduced. He found humor in freakishness, contrasting beauty and ugliness while effortlessly passing judgment on the emptiness of a life devoted to sensation and personal freedom. More of a fever dream than a linear story, Fellini Satyricon crystallized the director's reputation as a visionary--but may have trapped him into spending the rest of his career (with the exception of Amarcord) trying to top himself in reaching new levels of outrageousness. --Marshall Fine

Product Description

"A truly literate and sophisticated film spectacle...by perhaps the greatest of all film artists" (Saturday Review), this Oscar(r)-nominated* masterpiece by Federico Fellini, the director of such world-renowned classics, as La Dolce Vita, La Strada and 8 1/2, isa "fabulous trip into a totally decadent civilization" (Playboy) delivering "a brilliant visual fantasy...unlike anything we have seen" (The Hollywood Reporter). Step into the bawdy, erotic and titillating world of Rome during the days of Emperor Nero, where two competing teachers play tricks on each other while vying for the same lover's charms. Paralleling the self-indulgence of modern society, these Roman citizens pursue their own gratification above all else, resulting in both intense pleasure and enormous despair displayed in visually seductive scenes that are shocking, unprecedented and brilliantly stunning. *1970: Director

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Reason Movies Exist, April 30, 2001

By 

Stephen McLeod (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fellini - Satyricon (DVD)

*Fellini-Satyricon* was the Maestro's first movie in which his name appears as part of the title. It is also his first color masterpiece, and one of the most fascinating and origninal films of the 20th century. Every Fellini movie is unique. He had no peers. *Fellini-Satyricon*, however, is a cardinal enry in Fellini canon (not to mention the canon of Italian cinema) because it is the perfection of the new style announced in *8 1/2* and the innauguration of a new visual extravagance that would inform all of Fellini's subsequent films.

The subject, 1st century Rome in all its florid, tumescent decadence, is lovingly transformed through Fellini's comic vision. The self-contained sequences, vignettes really, are not only fair translations into cinema of what is probably the first "novel" in Western literature, they also serve to reflect the fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence of antiquity. Scenes are fitted together like pieces in a puzzle where some of the picture is ultimately lost. This is emphasized by the visual references to broken frescoes, from which the characters seem to emerge and revert back into.

The DVD provides a sparkling, lush, diamond-sharp transfer with a choice of English or Italian soundtracks and English, French, Spanish subtitles.

A word about the dubbing: The English version is much better than the Italian version, for a number of reasons. 1) Fellini dubbed all his actors anyway because he used international casts. There is no such thing as a Fellini movie where the actors are actually speaking their lines in real time. For the most part, different actors were used for the dubbing. 2) The Italian actors used in the Italian dub are horribly miscast. There is just no way that those voices could come out of those people. Physically. The English actors are better. (If you watch their lips, you'll notice that Hiram Keller and Martin Potter are both speaking their parts in English). 3) You'll want to watch, not read, this film. 4) A good amount of the sound that comes out of the characters' mouths is either Latin, gibberish, or some admixture thereof, and, for the most part, what the characters are actually saying isn't all that important.

There are sadly, no extra features on this DVD. A commentary by surviving cast members would have been so great. Nevertheless, this is a DVD that anyone who loves movies should want to own. Highest recommendation!!!

45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Visually Stunning But Disjointed and Sterile, August 10, 2003

By 

Gary F. Taylor "GFT" (Biloxi, MS USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fellini - Satyricon (DVD)

If one rates a film on visuals alone, Fellini's SATYRICON would surely be completely off the scale: a phantasmagorical mixture of sensual beauty and the distasteful but evocative grotesque set in an ancient Rome that never was, never could have been, and yet which plays up to every extreme concept we secretly harbor about Roman decadence. The leading men are incredibly beautiful; the women are generally seductively depraved; and the broad vision that Fellini offers is easily one of the visually stunning creations ever put to film.

And yet, oddly, the film is sterile. The story is impossible to describe, a series of largely unrelated events in the lives of two impossibly handsome youths (Martin Potter and Hiram Keller) who begin the film by battling over the sexual favors of a slave boy (Max Born) who alternately unites and divides them until all three find themselves sold into slavery and flung from adventure to adventure, most often with sexual (and frequently homosexual) connotations. Clearly, Fellini is making a statement about the triviality and emptiness of a life lived for physical pleasures alone. But the film is jumpy, disjointed, disconnected; the sequences do not always arise from each other in any consistent way, leaving viewers with a sort of "what the ..." reaction when the film unexpectedly shifts without explanation. In consequence, SATYRICON is ultimately less about any philosophical statement Fellini may have had in mind than it is about sheer pictorial splendor and deliberate weirdness.

Whatever its failings, it is an astonishing film, and one that would have tremendous influence on a host of directors who followed in Fellini's wake--although all to often without his style and vision. Clearly Pasolini, director of such works as SALO, ARABIAN NIGHTS, and CANTERBURY TALES spent the better part of his largely unlamented life trying to out-Fellini Fellini; likewise, it is impossible to imagine how Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione arrived at the notorious CALIGULA without reference to Fellini's SATYRICON. Such efforts to expand on SATYRICON were merely more explicit and less interesting than the original, and I do not really recommend them--nor do I really recommend SATYRICON for any one other than Fellini fans, for with its oddly disjointed feel it is unlikely to please those raised on mainstream. Still, it is a powerful, remarkably beautiful, and completely unexpected film that must be seen at least once by any one with a serious interest in world cinema, and to those I recommend it without hesitation.

--GFT (Amazon.com Reviewer)--

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A film that transcends the limitations of storytelling, July 30, 2004

By 

John Gallone (Seattle, Washington USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fellini - Satyricon (DVD)

Satyricon, by Le Maestro, Federico Fellini, is simply one of the most enthralling films ever produced. From the phantasmagorial depiction of Roman life, to our two hapless protagonists, Fellini spins a tale of deceit, duplicitous alliances and fascinating intrigues. The visual imagines are dazzling and the stunning plot arcs from bungled kidnapping and incredible travels to retribution and redemption.
If you just don't 'get' this wonderful allegorical journey, do yourself a favor and watch it continually until you do.
Satyricon is a perfect example of the powerful potential of film to transcend the limitations of story telling along with an incredible display of Fellini's marvelous and seemingly limitless imagination.