The variety show had a roaring year at the cinema in 1950. The film by Lattuada and Fellini would pay the price, earning very disappointing results at the box office, overshadowed by the competition of Vita da cani. The subject itself, the ragtag band of entertainers who tour around a duly lesser Italy with their mandatory adventure load of small dramas, has a taste of revelation for both: as the years went by, the women preferred by Lattuada in his films became more and more similar to potential variety act heroines, smooth round girls, troubling and automatically mischievous. For his own part, Fellini never stopped referring, whenever possible, to echoes and fragments of the variety show: just think of the company in I vitelloni, with its overblown, noisy, ambiguous head comic and its tired and easy dancing girls; of the streak of ferocious, popular and Romanesque ethnology contained in Roma, which has by now become a classic reference in that regard. Everything is born from this film.

Claudio G. Fava, I film di Federico Fellini, Roma, Gremese, 1981