Movies

December, 1972

Fellini's Roma is a cinematic pearl, one of those gems that so often result when the germ of an idea lodges itself in the phantasmagoric imagination of Federico Fellini. Those who view Fellini's showmanship as a mere shell game may label Roma a documentary about the Eternal City--but we prefer to compare it with the etchings of Hogarth or Toulouse-Lautrec. (For a play-by-play sampling, see Playboy's October pictorial.) Spurning even the loose story structure of Satyricon, Fellini disguises his v...