La Dolce Vita critic and co-founder of "Cahiers du cinéma", felt that "The New York Times" film critic Bosley Crowther praised Fellini’s Roger Ebert considered "La Dolce Vita" as Fellini’s best film, as well as his favorite film of all time and listed it consistently in his top ten films for the "Sight & Sound" Greatest Films poll every ten years. Ebert's first review for the film, written on October 4, 1961, was the first film review he wrote, before he started his career as a film critic in 1967. The film was also a touchstone for Ebert, in how his perspective of
La Dolce Vita because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside." Credit for the creation of Steiner, the intellectual who commits suicide after shooting his two children, goes to co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli. Having gone to school with Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Pinelli had closely followed the writer's career and felt that his over-intellectualism had become emotionally sterile, leading to his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950. This idea of a "burnt-out existence" is carried over to Steiner in the party episode where the sounds of nature are not to be experienced first-hand