Suite (La Dolce Vita)

La Dolce Vita opened in 1960 and gave Fellini and Rota their widest audience; the film was condemned by the Vatican newspaper and took the Palme d'Or in the same year. Rota's music behaves as source music almost throughout — nightclub numbers, twist and cha-cha, an organ in a church, brass along the Via Veneto — so that the score seems to belong to the world on screen rather than to comment on it. The recurring theme, in its slightly cheap dance-band scoring, carries the film's judgement of the life it shows more precisely than the dialogue does.