Marcello Mastroianni uncredited extra in "Marionette" (1939) when he was fourteen, and made intermittent minor film appearances until landing his first big role in "Atto d'accusa" (1951). Within a decade he became a major international celebrity, starring in "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (1958); and in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" opposite Anita Ekberg in 1960, where he played a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome's high society. Mastroianni followed "La Dolce Vita" with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block
La Dolce Vita the angelic Paola; they are framed by a prologue (Jesus over Rome) and epilogue (the monster fish) giving the film its innovative and symmetrically symbolic structure. The evocations are: seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven virtues, seven days of creation. Other critics disagree, Peter Bondanella argues that "any critic of "La Dolce Vita" not mesmerized by the magic number seven will find it almost impossible to organize the numerous sequences on a strictly numerological basis". The critic Robert Richardson suggests that the originality of "La Dolce Vita" lies in a new form of film narrative that mines "an aesthetic of