[Fellini's Roma is] another quasi-documentary: of what the city meant to him as a provincial youth, how it seemed when he arrived, what it seems to him today.

Not a bad commission for a picture, and anyone who has never seen a Fellini film might be struck by the fertility and easy skill of this one. Unfortunately not many of us have the requisite ignorance of Fellini. We keep seeing remakes here of what he has done before. The scenes of youthful longing are varied only slightly from those in The Clowns, which even then were not as good as in I Vitelloni. The burst of outdoor communal eating in Rome is only a domesticated modern version of the feasts in Satyricon. Fellini's "typage" (Eisenstein's term)—the ability to select unusual faces that are self-explaining, that serve their functions without dossier—used to be a kind of wonderful caricature; here the method caricatures itself because it is so repetitious and because there is no main substance to which it can contribute. The brothel scenes are the nadir in this matter; the use of raddled faces of cheap whores is always the last infirmity of a social commentator's art. Besides, after La Saraghina in 8 1/2, Fellini has said everything he has to say on the subject—which is precisely his problem on most subjects.

He hasn't even enough resource and observation to fulfill his own commission for this film. Desperate for material, he tacks on a long parodic ecclesiastical fashion show near the end, saying that he and his camera crew are going to visit an old lonely princess who lives in a huge palazzo. The fashion show is her dream. Why her dream in this picture?—except that it gives Fellini one more chance for clerical mockery, complete with drifting mist, and dramatically shifting lights? Besides, why would a pious woman have dreamed this satirical dream?

He pads the picture with some rainy-day traffic sequences—blurred auto lights in the mist, for heaven's sake, from Fellini! (Together with a brief recap of the traffic jam from the beginning of 8 1/2.) And things are so low with him that the only way he can think to finish is to follow a bunch of nighttime motorcyclists as they vroom through the city. (p. 149)