Albert Johnson, the beloved film scholar and teacher who shared many a plate of pasta with Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, wrote: “Fellini has acknowledged (Masina's) enormous creative intuition, which defined the boundaries between talent and genius. In Nights of Cabiria no other performer could have perfected her work-it is the masterpiece of her collaboration with Fellini, and an exemplar of the actor-as-artist.” In this film Cabiria (Masina), the prostitute who first comforted a hapless husband in Fellini's early film The White Sheik (1952) comes into her own, and holds her own even though she is continually exploited, robbed, and physically abused by the very men she loves. Masina turns a film about prostitutes, pimps, and johns into an ironically radiant statement about the indestructibility of the human spirit.