Editor’s Note: This column was first published on October 4, 1961, in The Daily Illini and was one of Roger Ebert’s first published movie reviews.

There is in “La Dolce Vita” a great deal to be puzzled about, and a great deal to be impressed by, and perhaps a great deal which we as Americans will never completely understand. Yet it is a fine motion picture. And we have the feeling that even those students who sat through its three hours with a measure of boredom came away convinced that something was there. It is this something, this undefined feeling being hammered at beneath the surface of the film, which gives it power and illumination. And it is this hidden message which contains the deep and moral indictment of the depravity which “La Dolce Vita” documents.

In technical excellence, the film surpasses every production this reviewer has seen, except a few of the Ingmar Bergman classics. Photography and the musical score are together almost as important as the dialogue in conveying the unmistakable attack on “the sweet life.”

This attack is also made clear in frequent symbolism, although sometimes the symbolism becomes too obvious to fit into the effortless flow of the total production. For example, in the final scene where merrymakers gather around the grotesque sea monster which represents their way of living, and then the protagonist is called by the “good” girl but cannot understand her, the symbolism is very near the surface. Yet this tangible use of symbols might account in part for La Dolce Vita’s fantastic success. Too often the “new wave” fails through symbolism that is simply too subtle for most movie-goers.

Acting Startlingly Realistic

The acting itself is startling realistic, and for a very good reason: many of the players are portraying themselves. The greatest surprise – and one of the greatest successes – in the film is the Swedish sex goddess Anita Ekberg, cast as a “typical” American motion picture star. She plays the part with a wild, unthinking abandon which far surpasses her previous roles in “B” pictures designed primarily to exploit her impressive physical attributes.

But there can be no real award for the best actor or actress in the film, just as in a sense it does not seem to be a film so much as a simple record of “the sweet life.” The characters, in their midnight parody of happiness, are all strangely anonymous. Only their life, their society, comes through – with a sad, burnt-out vividness that sputters briefly through a long night and then dies in the morning on the beach, dies with the sea monster who has blank, uncomprehending eyes.

In the film, the wild but bored house party comes just before the dawn. It is this party in all its depravity, which has become one of the most widely known segments of the film. Yet it is probably the one area of “the sweet life” which misses the mark for many American audiences. The scene is meant to show a last, desperate attempt to find something beneath the whirlpool of animalism which finally engulfs them all. Yet as the girl lies still beneath the mink stole, bored and restless eyes look away – still looking.

Final Meaninglessness

We are afraid that too many Americans might consider this scene as a sharp, immediate event. Its message, of complete and final meaninglessness, might not come through to an audience which may not find such things particularly every day. And so, despite the almost extreme good taste with which this scene was filmed, we are afraid that many of the thousands who queued up before the theater had rather elementary motives.

This is excusable. We wonder how many years it has been since a film as intellectual and meaningful – and as basically moral – as “La Dolce Vita” has attracted such crowds here. We suspect it has been a very long time. The greeting it is getting is a tribute to one of the finest motion pictures of our time.

***

Robert Lewis Shayton, the able radio-television critic for the Saturday Review, has contributed a little column to SR’s back-of-the-book this week which raises many interesting questions.

Shayton relays the information that Fred Friendly, who produces the “CBS Reports” series, kept a film report on the John Birch Society “in the can” for a variety of reasons.

Chief among these, Shayton writes, was that a spool of “bugged” recording tape from a secret Birch meeting was to play an important part in the program. Three or four minutes of the electronic eavesdropping, played on the air, could have provided ample material for immediate government action against the Society, Friendly indicated to Shayton.

Yet Friendly refrained from using the tape because of the effect it might have on the overall importance and impact of the “CBS Reports” series. He feared use of eavesdroppings might tarnish the program’s good reputation.

Such qualms have never bothered such journalists as Drew Pearson, who is often caught with his “bugs” on the wing. The discovery of one of Pearson’s tiny microphones was the occasion, not so long ago, for several more papers to enter his fold. Pearson, however, performs a unique role among syndicated columnists: he does not editorialize so much as he reports, and often his reports are valuable just because of the information someone was trying to keep quiet.

Yet Friendly is right about the use of such methods for “CBS Reports.” At the time — last spring — the John Birch Society was much more feared than it is today, and Friendly can be excused for believing at the time that a running of bugged tapes might be a service to the country. Using such an excuse, however, would have been unsound. By destroying the Birch Society’s public image, CBS might possibly have been doing a good thing. Yet in the long run, using such sources could only be harmful. Television has a much wider effect than does Pearson, and such a public endorsement of a relaxing of ethics could have been harmful to the role of journalism as a fair-playing reporter.

And the Birchers didn’t really need that last blow to founder in their own alarm, after all.

***

“The Life of Ernest Hemingway” on NBC Sunday night was much less effective than a similar sound-and-photograph documentary on Will Rogers last spring. It lacked, for one thing, the saving grace of humor which often rescues tiresome “tributes” to great men, dead or otherwise. And the program was too much about his life and too little about his books to form any significant conclusion. Even in the case of the colorful public figure like Hemingway, the books left behind in black and white are all that can really be measured; the personality behind them is unimportant except to a hero-worshipper or a scholar. This is the J.D. Salinger view, but we subscribe to it.

We also disliked the narrator’s patronizing use of the nickname “Ernie,” his over-zealous defense of ALL of Papa’s works, and the soap opera voices chosen to relate the wisdom of “Ernie” and his friends.

Personally, we would have given anything to hear three or four critics sit down around a table in the television studio and just talk about Hemingway for an hour or so. They might have gotten something said. NBC didn’t.