With its tale of a peripatetic band of low-rent theater types, Variety Lights incorporates many, if not most, of Fellini’s signature themes.
88
USA TodayMike Clark
USA TodayMike Clark
Federico Fellini's first film (co-directed with Alberto Lattuada) would make a compatible living room double bill with FF's 1986 Ginger and Fred...Pleasing all the way through. [17 Mar 1989, p.3D]
Before there was such a thing as a “Fellini” movie, “Variety Lights” established what that would look like as he moved up the ladder in Italy’s movie industry, through humor and melancholy.
80
Los Angeles TimesKevin Thomas
Los Angeles TimesKevin Thomas
Like a preliminary sketch for a vast and splendid mural, it unfolds Fellini's wonderful vision of life in all its joy and sadness, hope and fear, triumph and defeat, that emerges fully in the later movies. [20 May 2004, p.E13]
80
The New YorkerPauline Kael
The New YorkerPauline Kael
It's a very simple and, in some ways, tawdry film, but Fellini shows his extraordinary talent for the dejected setting, the shabby performer, the fat old chorine, the singer who will never hit the high note.
As a straightforward comedy-drama about the vicissitudes of the principals in a small-time tab show or traveling vaudeville troupe, this is wholesome corn. But it is highly palatable fare, which, in its story line, hews more to the type of films subsequently made by Mr. Lattuada.