LA STRADA (1954) B/W 94m dir: Federico Fellini

w/Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart, Aldo Silvani, Marcella Rovena, Lidia Venturini

An altogether beautiful movie, both touching and amusing, magnificently acted by Masina and Quinn. A brutal, itinerant performer (Quinn) takes in a pathetic but rather nutty waif (Masina), and her devotion to him is repaid with insults and indifference.

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films: "Fellini seems most concerned with an analysis of the feminine condition represented by the 'woman-as-object,' as passive as a pebble, created for no other purpose than to make love and food. Gelsomina's [Masina] search for her own identity is central to the film. Fellini told me he knew he had achieved his aim when he received a letter from a woman who said, in substance: 'My husband treats me like a Gelsomina. We went together to see La Strada and he cried and asked my forgiveness.' Fellini's ending has been discussed at length but this letter would seem to prove that the important aspect of it is Zampano's [Quinn] tears. Zampano is a symbol of all men for whom women are predestined household drudges, the counterpart in the home of the exploited workers.

"It is this theme that lies at the heart of La Strada 's success with the public, for it profoundly moved the majority of women and exasperated many men. Far from betraying neorealism [the film was attacked by left-wing critics as a betrayal of that movement], Fellini enriched it by guiding it along a new path."

The following contains information you may not want to know before viewing the film for the first time:

From the Criterion website (www.criterion.com), this 2021 essay, "La strada: Beauty and the Beast," by Christina Newland:

"There’s a well-worn Brian Eno quote about the Velvet Underground’s first album: that only thirty thousand people bought it, but every one of them formed a band. That seems analogous to the paradigm-shifting effect of La strada's release. Not long after the movie opened stateside at the now-demolished Trans-Lux theater on Fifty-Second Street in New York, in the summer of 1956 (following a 1954 Italian premiere), a generation of American filmmakers, critics, and moviegoers finally took notice of an Italian director whose first three movies --- Variety Lights (1950, codirected with Alberto Lattuada), The White Sheik (1952), and I vitelloni (1953) --- were well-liked enough but had never caught fire in the United States. As the New York Times put it then: 'Fellini’s talents as a director have not been displayed to advantage heretofore in these parts.'

"La Strada is the movie that changed that. Bob Dylan would later credit the film as one inspiration for 'Mr. Tambourine Man' (and many of his other songs seem to contain similar references); so, too, did Kris Kristofferson for his 'Me and Bobby McGee' --- both musicians transfixed by the film’s sorrowful vagabond spirit. Directors as diverse as Krzysztof Kieslowski, Akira Kurosawa, and Martin Scorsese have said that seeing the film at the time of its release had an enormous impact on them, not only directly but also as an indicator of a sea change in what cinematic art could achieve.

"While Fellini’s previous films began to pencil in his worldview, La strada's perspective is drawn in ink. It doesn’t feel like an experiment, or playful in the autobiographical manner of I vitelloni; it is a vision that blooms as an allegory. A film of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation, and its own clandestine sense of humor, La strada contains philosophical and spiritual dimensions, and a unified visual poetry, that qualify it as Fellini’s first masterpiece.

"The film occasioned his ascent to stardom throughout the world and burned itself into the collective mind’s eye, also making Fellini’s lead actor, and wife, Giulietta Masina, famous. Its success paved the way to a future in which an entire lexicon was invented for the director; new releases would be advertised with his name on the marquee, and Felliniesque became a part of the cinema vernacular. Nearly seventy years later, with countless plaudits and volumes devoted to the film and its maker, it still presents an invitation --- or a challenge --- to the viewer, asking us to place pat moral judgments to one side. La strada --- in its poetry, its ambivalence, its durable tenderness --- is evergreen.

"It begins when a traveling-circus strongman, Zampano (Anthony Quinn), arrives with a delivery of bad news. Stern and unsmiling, with beetle brows and a square-shouldered physique that towers over nearly everyone else in the frame, he looks unmoved as he shares word of his assistant’s death with her weeping family. Needing a replacement, Zampano buys the dead girl’s sister, Gelsomina (Masina), from her impoverished mother with the same regard as someone buying a loaf of bread.

"So begins an episodic journey through the carnival circuit of rural Italy, made from daubs of rough black and white and lightly mobile, almost creeping pans, with none of the 'cinema of excess' Fellini is usually associated with. Zampano does a repetitive performance of breaking a heavy chain with his chest muscles for an audience; Gelsomina clowns and plays drums and trombone beside him, a dancing monkey of sorts to a cruel organ-grinder. Zampano is a man who has forsaken his humanity without thought, left it somewhere as carelessly as he might leave behind an old pair of boots. He is walking evidence for the truth of the Socratic dictum about the unexamined life.

"As Gelsomina, Masina shifts moods infinitesimally in response to Zampano’s cruelties, registering microexpressions of apprehension or delight, often evolving from moment to moment. The Chaplinesque nature of Masina’s aesthetic and performance was noted by numerous writers of the time, down to her oversize man’s coat and hat and her often bemused facial expressions. With her clown’s paint and overdrawn eyebrows, mouth corners pulling downward as though on marionette strings, Masina’s is a face that remains carved in the memory.

"An innocent untouched by worldly knowledge from outside the impoverished shack of her upbringing, Gelsomina is a liability in fifties Italy. There’s not much to suggest that the young woman should ever amount to anything, to do more than live and struggle and die. She is sweet and nearly mute and implicitly as trusting as a child. (Masina was, to some extent, playing herself as a ten-year-old; Fellini, after seeing photos of his wife as a girl, asked her to look to her own childhood for inspiration.) When Gelsomina meets the Fool (Richard Basehart) --- another circus performer, who does dangerous tightrope stunts with a grin --- he passes a vital piece of wisdom on to her.

"In his famous parable of the pebble, the Fool tells Gelsomina that her purpose is to love Zampano, regardless of any slight. Every individual pebble must have a purpose, after all, he says. If not, everything might be pointless. That things may, in fact, be pointless is an idea that seems glaringly unthinkable in the moral universe of La strada, such is its capacity for grace and redemption. And yet just such a void would be frenziedly embraced by the protagonists of Fellini’s later films. The spiritual emptiness precipitated, in part, by the new modernity of the late-fifties 'economic miracle' in Italy hadn’t quite made its way into Fellini’s cinema yet with La strada, but a few hints are there. In one instance, a neon-lit sign for a bar takes up the foreground of a shot of a religious procession in a town piazza. Fellini lingers on the juxtaposition for a few extra seconds. Such small signifiers look ahead to later preoccupations --- namely, a clash between the hedonism of the new postwar Italy and the provincial values of a more traditional order.

"Although Fellini was an artist who would become associated with the serrated edge of sixties glamour --- and whose films La dolce vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) would be so specific to their time and place --- Fellini’s setting for La strada is curiously timeless. It’s a work with a haunting, fablelike quality, a narrative that might as easily be about medieval jesters were it not for the intrusion of motorcycles and automobiles. Its floating sense of loose time, its gentle pans across the landscape as Gelsomina clowns and entertains local children, all feel a world apart from modernity.

"For his part, Fellini was pleasantly surprised by the adoration for his film in the U.S. He won the first-ever Best Foreign-Language Oscar in 1957 for La strada, cementing the movie’s status as a must-see and guaranteeing it periodic reissues and long runs at repertory cinemas well into the sixties.

“'When I was in the States with [Masina] after La strada,' Fellini later said, 'people didn’t know whether to smile at her or kiss the hem of her garment. They saw her as someone halfway between Saint Rita and Mickey Mouse.' Even Walt Disney himself wanted to turn the enigmatic Gelsomina into animation, a surefire gold mine for Fellini that he emphatically resisted.

"Two years earlier, La strada's reception in Italy had not been quite so warm. Instead, it became a critical and political flash point in what scholar Peter Bondanella calls the 'crisis of neorealism.' Although the film’s flea-bitten, itinerant setting, populated by convincingly down-and-out working-class Italians, would appear to match the movement’s aesthetic, many Marxist critics felt the film did not sufficiently engage with the neorealist movement’s ideological aims. The film was too poetic; too suffused with old religious themes; too individualist. Guido Aristarco, an influential Italian Marxist film critic, called La strada's ideology 'wrong.' He seems to have confused the movie for a math problem, and judged it as such.

"In response to the heavy criticism leveled at the film, Fellini said that he felt there were 'more Zampanos in the world than bicycle thieves,' and suggested that he was concerned not simply with material lack but with spiritual and emotional bereavement. As his defender the critic Andre Bazin wrote, Fellini was interested in 'the phenomenology of the soul.'

"To a modern viewer, the 'crisis of neorealism' critique may feel like simply a product of its time and place. Today, La strada's greatness probably seems to many as self-evident as Fellini’s own. And yet, as ever, there are still those with Fellini hesitancy. In general, the director’s popularity --- and La strada's --- has trended downward among the critical establishment, if certain 'greatest films' polls are to be believed. A long-overdue negotiation to upend and reconsider the traditional film canon --- in which Fellini and his work have loomed large for many years --- may be part of the cause. Among some younger cinephiles, Fellini has gained a reputation as a daunting canonical filmmaker with the flavor of a chauvinistic worldview.

"I also wonder if contemporary viewers and critics inclined toward psychological realism may balk at Gelsomina’s continued willingness to martyr herself, her almost bovine acceptance of abuse and debasement, and her dogged loyalty to Zampano, which veers into self-annihilation. One might argue that Fellini’s woman-as-spiritual-savior trope feels dated, gendered in all the old, bad ways. But Fellini’s is not a cinema of the literal or logical; it is one of magic, of tricks, and of allegory. It’s crucial not to lose sight of the director’s consistent application of symbolism and myth to each of his characters in turn. Just as Masina plays a broad type, so, too, does Quinn, as an abominable exaggeration of men’s lesser qualities.

"Gelsomina, a creature of luminous simplicity, suffers as though she was born to do so. And in the spiritual sense, that may be true; her suffering is purifying. There is no delusional rationalizing of an abused woman, no justification; she knows Zampano cannot love her, that even his tiny slippages of kindness must inevitably be followed by another act of savagery. She loves him not despite his being a monster but because he is one. She may be victimized, but she is not pathetic; her self-awareness is what makes the distinction.

“'It makes no difference. I’m of no use to anybody, and I’m sick of living,' says Gelsomina to the Fool. She finds her purpose in caring for the impossible brute, but eventually she must give in to the vagaries of this choice. Gelsomina has retained her loyalty in part because of the Fool’s parable, and his seemingly absurd advice to her. As she tells Zampano, 'I wanted to run away, but he told me to stay with you,' hinting at the fact that any prescribed wisdom she has been given is also laced with its own sort of severity. Late in the film, when a stranger recounts her death to Zampano, the story seems to be less that she has died from exposure to the elements than from exposure to the masochism that the Fool encouraged in her, and to the final indignity of Zampano’s abandonment.

"And it is Zampano --- more than once throughout the film referred to as a beast or an animal --- whom Fellini leaves us with in the finale, forcing the audience to ruminate on his potential for redemption as he slumps drunkenly on a beach, his large frame limp, seeming to want the sand to swallow him. In Quinn’s archetype of quick-tempered machismo, and in Zampano’s final capacity to shed tears for his abandonment of Gelsomina, we may be seeing Fellini’s own self-reproach. (The director was a noted adulterer, after all, and said he could identify with Zampano.) This would hardly be the director’s last cinematic expression of guilt.

"Compare and contrast this anguish with the nearly beatific face of Masina in the last images of her, with her shorn hair and huddled posture. Gelsomina may look tiny and impotent beside the mountain of a man she is bound to, but there’s a certain peacefulness about her. 'If I don’t stay with you, who will?' she repeats as a refrain. In Gelsomina, we see a woman who asks us, across the chasm of more than half a century, what moral absolutism achieves.

"Gelsomina’s unconditional love for Zampano is the very last resort, the only chance of transforming his misshapen soul. That he realizes it too late, or only in fits and starts, is the profound tragedy of existence; Fellini is perennially concerned about our constant fumbling for mutual understanding.

"Via the absurd figures of the Fool and the Clown, there is an essential wisdom that emerges from La strada, something that casts doubt on the literal-minded, the dogmatic, and the morally righteous view, in the 1950s as today. There are, after all, few cinema beasts as beastly as Zampano. And wretched though Gelsomina may be, she is elevated by her compassion, not her martyrdom. Even left traumatized and freezing on a roadside, she remains steadfast. In the literal sense, this seems outrageous, debased, superhuman. In the Fellinian sense, it is the most human of all gestures."

Produced by Carlo Ponti, LA STRADA won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.