Critics reviews

Otherwise hardened and incredulous in so many ways, Cabiria remains open to fantasy, a testament to her dormant sanguinity and the buried hope that perhaps things can get better. She isn't asking for empathy, and it's not entirely her fault she briefly has faith in humanity. . . . Fellini once said that of all his characters, Cabiria was the only one he still worried about, yet by the film's end, seeming to forget the futility of it all, there she is, among a band of revelers, cracking a smile.

What is most endearing about this film is that Cabiria handles her misfortune in a childlike manner. She is quick to bounce back from defeat. Fellini does not convert her strife into a political manifesto. Nights of Cabiria is merely a depiction of one person’s circumstances, whether created through her own doing or by bad luck, and how Cabiria must continue to struggle for the attainment of a dignified life.

Some (including David Thomson) have scoffed at the “tart with a heart” and it’s true that her brand of happy-go-luckiness (as seen most vividly in the magical, nocturnal coda) won’t be to everyone’s taste: this is a film which isn’t ashamed to request an emotional engagement from its viewers.

Le Notti di Cabiria - like La Strada, like Il Bidone, and, in the final analysis, like I Vitelloni - is the story of ascesis, of renunciation, and, (however you choose to interpret the term) of salvation. The beauty and the rigor of its construction proceed this time from the perfect economy of its constituent episodes.

Fellini orchestrates his story in waves of simple, pure emotion, telegraphed with silent screen gusto by Giulietta Masina. With her Noh eyebrows and white bobby socks, Masina is the missing link between Charlie Chaplin and Shirley MacLaine.

...The character who started out as a picaresque heroine winds up as a kind of essence, an essence that can survive and even prevail over disillusioning stories. In this way Cabiria is a metaphor for the childlike gullibility or faith that makes Fellini's dreamlike cinema possible, even when a film's narrative underpinnings come loose.

“Nights of Cabiria” is transitional; it points toward the visual freedom of “La Dolce Vita” while still remaining attentive to the real world of postwar Rome.

Fellini's warm, comic and heartbreaking portrait of Cabiria, a woman alone, now has a fullness of spirit that earlier viewers may never have missed given that the film was so rich to begin with. The view of life now presented, however, is more complete and satisfying.

In the course of her eventful travels, Cabiria undergoes the profound spiritual evolution that gives the film its lingering grandeur.

It's too much of a one-woman show, with Giulietta Masina's heroine achieving a sublime illumination while all the other characters linger in the darkness of deception and irresolution. Like La Strada... Cabiria has some of the limitations of an acting vehicle that sometimes loses its way on the road of life and forks out into the bypaths of a virtuoso performance.

Like "La Strada" and several other of the post-war Italian neo-realistic films, this one is aimed more surely toward the development of a theme than a plot. Its interest is not so much the conflicts that occur in the life of the heroine as the deep, underlying implications of human pathos that the pattern of her life shows.