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...