Critics reviews

Inventively comic with melancholy notes around the edges, “The White Sheik” has, in common with all Fellini’s films, more going on than you may at first anticipate. If the film has a theme, it’s expressed by the fumetti editor, who says “Real life is the life of dreams,” something Fellini would return to frequently but never with more entertainment value than he does here.

A comic fable of mass-produced fantasy and fanatical devotion.

Through the course of her devastating awakening, it's easy to feel bad for Wanda. "Life is a dream," she dejectedly concedes, summarizing the core of Fellini's fancy, "but sometimes a dream is a bottomless pit." On the other hand, as enacted by high-tension Trieste, who had little prior acting experience, as opposed to Bovo, who had the year prior appeared in Vittorio De Sica's thematically comparable Miracle in Milan, Ivan's plight is equally tragic, albeit less heartbreaking.

Antonioni would expand this Roman caprice with La Signora Senza Camelie the following year, Federico Fellini here envisions the heroine's trajectory (mouse to harem girl and back) as warm Flaubertian satire.

I would argue that Welles' privileging of The White Sheik is entirely defensible, for a number of reasons — not least of which is the provinciality that forms its central subject, which Fellini identifies with as well as satirizes. Indeed, the film might even be seen as a distillation of Fellini's vision of innocence and corruption that preceded the more stylistically elaborated versions of it.

Agreeably abrasive in its attitude to illusions and the self-delusions that fuel them, vitriolically funny in evoking the world of the fumetti, Fellini lapses only briefly into his later mystico-sentimentality in the character of the prostitute (played, of course, by Masina)