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You could argue that, before La Dolce Vita, Fellini was a fascinating Italian filmmaker — part gaudy circus ringmaster, part wistful childhood nostalgic. After La Dolce Vita, however, he belonged to the world. His cosmopolitan fever-dream of Rome as a nighttime city of sex, smoking, socializing, and spiritual emptiness was embraced everywhere as a vision both appealing and appalling. The film made Marcello Mastroianni an international star, coined the word paparazzi (named after the freelance celebrity shutterbug in the movie), and left viewers with the iconic image of the impossibly voluptuous, unattainable goddess Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Trevi Fountain.

The movie made Fellini’s name shorthand for the entire Italian film industry, which, with La Dolce Vita, shifted from gritty postwar neorealism to a two-decade wave of more surreal, psychological, sexually frank filmmaking. Half a century later, having been quoted and copied by everyone from Steve Martin to Woody Allen to Sofia Coppola, La Dolce Vita retains the power to delight and shock.

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