What we are seeing [in Il Bidone] is Fellini in a kind of Stylistic transition, and a search, too, for an adequate expression of the director's highly personalized vision of, as he has said, "the terrible difficulty people have in talking to each other—the old problem of communication, the desperate anguish to be with, the desire to have a real, authentic relationship with another person." Il Bidone … is the second part of what Fellini has called "my trilogy of solitude" and the religious theme which so permeates all his work is easy to trace through these three films: in La Strada, the anguish of Zampano on the dark beach; Augusto's ritual death on the hillside in Il Bidone; and [in Le Notte di Cabiria] Cabiria's symbolic resurrection, a sweeping re-affirmation of life. But this film is the weakest of the three; Fellini quite obviously knows what he wants to say, but he seems in Il Bidone unsure about exactly how to say it. (p. 55)

Around [an] essentially simple tale is woven the sur-neorealistic fabric of Fellini's own dream world which manifests itself in images of the seashore, of empty landscapes and fairgrounds, of lonely piazzas with a fountain bubbling, of empty streets, of big, expensive cars, of bizarre nightclubs and loud parties, of alienation and, ultimately, of life without resolution…. But there are scenes too which come close to disaster, which approach, tease and barely escape sheer bathos. Augusto's first meeting with his daughter is at once too pat and too abrupt to be entirely believable…. (pp. 55-6)

Social reality (the scene in the slum with the trio passing themselves off as government representatives of the new housing project), spiritual reality (the conflict between Augusto and the peasant girl …), metaphysical reality (Crawford's walk home, alone, New Year's morning across an empty piazza with two whores casually accosting him as he moves along the rainy street), all have been touched upon, but it is not until [the final scene when Augusto is stoned] that Fellini finally manages to probe any deeper than his brilliant surface. And by now it is almost too late. (p. 56)

Admittedly Il Bidone seems to be more underkeyed than the other two sections of the trilogy, but these several glaring abridgements only make it seem clumsy and uncertain.

Il Bidone remains an interesting addition to the Fellini canon and a flawed but vital second part of the trilogy. What we see in it perhaps most of all is the disquieting, almost painful struggle of one of the major film poets of our time to make a statement about which he seems uncomfortable, from which he seems almost at time to retreat. (p. 57)