Co-directed with established neo-realist Alberto Lattuada, 1950's Variety Lights marked the directorial debut of Federico Fellini. And, while it's unfair to underestimate the contributions of the venerable Lattuada, there's little mistaking this bittersweet story of life among low-rent Italian vaudevillians as the product of anyone but its better-known director. Playing a show-business vet who has fallen short of success for decades, the wonderfully expressive Peppino De Felippo stars as the director of a close-knit but struggling traveling revue whose routines include bits featuring a man and his goose and a parade of energetic if none-too-voluptuous women in bikinis. Carefully handled by Felippo's girlfriend (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's then-wife and the future star of La Strada and Nights Of Cabiria), they scrape by, even when occasionally forced to walk from gig to gig. When Felippo encounters an ambitious, if not especially talented, local beauty queen (Carla Del Poggio, Lattuada's wife), he's seized with desire, both for her and for his own advancement. The directors' deep affection for their characters, even the self-involved but essentially good-natured Del Poggio, comes through in every moment of this charming film, which places one foot in Italian filmmaking's neo-realist recent past and one foot toward Fellini's future, neatly anticipating the fruitful years before he became his own favorite subject. With a light touch and an unmistakable sadness, he and Lattuada use a group of not-so-beautiful losers as an illustration of human resiliency and a demonstration of how even perpetual disappointment has its comic side. That turns Variety Lights into a moving, funny, formative work that should be of interest to more than just Fellini aficionados.