Francesco Maselli
I delfini

We are in a small provincial town like Ascoli Piceno in the early Sixties, and the film indeed talks about the "dolphins": the offspring of good families in the town, respected and honored for their wealth and good name. These young people spend their days doing nothing, talking and getting bored in search of something stimulating amidst alcohol, parties, and town gossip. Meanwhile, Fedora, a beautiful but poor girl, also enters their circle, portrayed by the magnificent Claudia Cardinale in the role of a girl who ends up corrupting herself. 

The story progresses along different threads, narrating the various stories among the pairs of characters, focusing particularly on the two characters who seem to want to break free from the swamp of conventions and provincial decency; in the end, however, everything remains unchanged and the characters remain prisoners of social constraints, the barriers imposed by the outside world: Cheriè, the countess to whom everyone looks up, tries to hide her ruin, and when the others discover it, they despise her, abandoning her; Fedora gives up love by marrying the town's rich playboy, played by Thomas Milian, and the other characters resign themselves to their destiny of petty bourgeois, remaining immersed in their miserable, empty lives. 

The film's characters, portrayed by excellent actors like Antonella Lualdi and Gerard Blain, seem borrowed from a Moravia book, who collaborates on the screenplay, in fact, the director will later shoot "Gli indifferenti," but they turn out too schematic, too stereotyped. The story echoes Fellini's "I vitelloni," but while in the latter the young men end up clashing with their existence, in I Delfini, the director seems to adopt a moralistic tone towards the characters: they are losers from the start since they are bourgeois. If the Vitelloni, staring at the sea, get lost in their questions, the Dolphins end up having a banal lovers' quarrel. The director thus seems to stick to somewhat banal patterns in the description of the characters, with a schematization of the rich and bad spending their days loafing and racing cars, and the good poor like the doctor helping others, thereby losing the opportunity for greater psychological introspection like Fellini or Antonioni. 

The film is the narration of different characters while following the various paths of small stories mentally narrated by Anselmo, the group's rebel who keeps futuristic and cubist reproductions in his room and wants to escape, ending up continuing to manage his father's business. 

On another level, the film demonstrates profound mastery in the technical use of the camera with complex shots and sophisticated use of black and white and photography that manage to convey an atmosphere of boredom, of dull calm and impossibility in these closed and elegant, precious but static and gloomy environments, contrasted with moments when blinding external light arrives to show the squeaks between the characters, resolved however in nothing: in fact, the merit of the film lies in the movement that seems to animate these characters, seems to disassemble them, only to return instead to an initial situation of stillness and immutability, as if nothing at the end had happened. Even the somewhat seductive and melancholic musical background seems to describe these elegant but sad and ever-identical existences like the buildings of the small town.