Federico Fellini has been given a blank check by his American admirers ever since 8 1/2 in 1962. Now, finally, in 1977 Fellini's Casanova is being returned for lack of fun(ds)…. A joyless, sexless, often pointless caricature of Casanova is hardly the current notion of making whoopee, and a running time of two hours and 45 minutes makes this puritanical pill even harder to swallow….

[In] the desperate world of filmmaking every artist must double as a con man, and Fellini has made fewer compromises with his personal vision than most of his contemporaries have. That may be the problem: He has made so few compromises that he has virtually ceased to communicate. For more than a decade he has been encouraged to exploit his personality, and his facility with satire and pathos, until now both his personality and his undeniable talent seem to have been depleted. Even his sense of humor...