[Juliet of the Spirits] is specious and hollow, in addition to being very boring; and its failures bring into focus what has been bothering me about Fellini's more celebrated successes: they are indebted less to true perception than to carnival showmanship….

In La Dolce Vita Fellini revealed himself to be deeply attracted by the very things he was pretending to ridicule or expose (upper-class orgies, intellectual parties, Catholic ritual and pageantry, Anika Ekberg's chest); and in "8 1/2" he dropped the mask of impersonality entirely, initiating some superficial explorations of the unconscious which, for all their disarming self-irony and technical dazzle, seemed to me little more than a cinematic acting out of his own autoerotic fantasies, resolved by an outrageously dishonest conclusion. In Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's artistic flashiness and moral ambiguity are even more conspicuous; and while the fantasies he invents are now supposed to belong to a middle-aged housewife, they are still more appropriate to a Hollywood producer with a gaudy mind, or a pubescent male weaned on girlie magazines. (p. 22)

The film is well-photographed, and some of its ideas are interesting as a series of visual balances—the conflict between sex and religion, for example, is illustrated by a contrast between a bevy of blowsy whores with smeared lipstick and exposed breasts, and a somber procession of hooded, faceless nuns in black habits. Still for all the obvious expertise, the conflict itself has no more depth than a secularized morality play; while the development of the action despite the manipulation of dream images, owes less to Strindberg than to soap opera. I am well aware that narrative line is of little importance in this film, but it is still disturbing to find what little plot there is so predictable and sentimental; and the climax, dependent as it is on Giulietta's defiance of a mother who is of marginal importance in the action, is simply arbitrary and contrived.

The film has even less validity as a study of character, for the female protagonist is convincing neither as a woman nor as a human being…. Giulietta is simply a sponge, soaking up visual experience, a passive witness to expert cinematography, whose responses and attitudes are commonplace in the extreme…. (p. 23)

Fellini's use of color … while vivid and daring at first glance, is ultimately too garish to serve his purposes…. [His] strategic error is to superimpose fantasy on romance; but there is not sufficient difference between the two styles, and he compounds his error by his choice of background music—a tinny ragtime score, dominated by saxophone and piano, which marks every action that should be real and convincing as a piece of romantic nostalgia. In short, where Fellini could once be trusted implicitly, his choices have not become eccentric, doubtful, and random, and one begins to suspect that he will sacrifice anything—form, character, coherence itself—for the sake of a sensational image or an ingenious effect. (pp. 23-4)

At the present moment, Fellini is using his camera as an expensive toy, and his love of luxury is accounting for a lot of fakery and sham. Unless he can learn to control his excesses, his films, I suspect, will continue to deteriorate until they become mere stimulants for the jaded appetites of precisely that world that he travesties and mocks. (p. 24)