"From the imaginative point of view, the Fellini is a masterpiece of its kind. I hasten to add that it is a very dreadful kind. I should not like to send anyone to see the picture unprepared. [In] La Dolce Vita ... [s]ome of the scenes are the most sickening exhibitions of human degradation and depravity ever shown on a public screen. They are intended to he so, for Fellini is a rebel who feels bitterly about the spurious sweetness of the dolce vita. The leading character is a gossip-writer on a scandal sheet ... smelling out sensation. Wherever the scent is rankest, there he goes, with a pack, of other velping photographers at his heels. The wildest of wild orgies, a fake miracle, suicide following a father's murder of his sleeping children, the public striptease of a middle-aged woman to celebrate the annulment of her marriage, all these find our hero in attendance. Why should anybody choose see it? Because it is a work of deep imagination, signed with an artist's individual hand. The black-and-white photography is masterly. Everything Fellini's camera touches springs to urgent life. He can pour life suddenly Into an empty street, illumine some hitherto unnoticed figure and make it live and breathe. No comer of the huge screen is ever wasted. Space left blank is as deliberately significant as space filled."