La Strada (The Criterion Collection)
by Federico Fellini
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Aldo Silvani, Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Marcella Rovere, Richard BasehartDirector: Federico Fellini
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Carlo Carlini
Cinematographer: Otello Martelli
Writer: Federico Fellini
Producer: Carlo Ponti
Producer: Dino De Laurentiis
Writer: Ennio Flaiano
Writer: Tullio Pinelli
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 108 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-11-18
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of La Strada (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Stunning -- a real world-class picture
Summary: 5 Stars
After many long years I finally got to see Federico Fellini's LA STRADA (1954) in the Criterion Collection's DVD version, and I have been touched and overwhelmed by this timeless classic.
**[SPOILERS FOLLOW]** The plot is deceptively simple - basically a picaresque about those who follow "the road" (literal meaning of "la strada") through most of Italy and take what it offers them -- diversion, sex, lucre, brief companionship, but also loneliness, neglect and misunderstanding. This is played out in the interrelationship between the two main characters. For the equivalent of $200, "Zampano," a burly itinerant strong man (Anthony Quinn) "buys" from her mother the waiflike "Gelsomina" (a near-anagram of the actress' name, Giulietta Masina, director Federico Fellini's wife). Zampano is a one-trick pony whose standard routine is to burst a chain across his chest with his pectoral muscles. The Chaplinesque Gelsomina, gentle if something of a simpleton, tries her best to contend with this brute but clearly is unhappy at being forced to live as his common-law wife. It is emblematic of Zampano's lack of human feeling that he abandons Gelsomina to run off for the night with the town prostitute at one of their stops, and this sort of abuse and neglect rarely lets up.
The couple live on a strictly pass-the-hat basis and Zampano trains Gelsomina (as one would a dog) how to beat the drum, caper around and introduce Zampano. As she grows in show-business talent and creativity, Gelsomina starts to irk Zampano, who doesn't take a back seat to anybody. Things get even worse when the third major character enters this film: an acrobat named "Il Matto" (The Fool, played by Richard Basehart) who makes the couple's acquaintance when they join a fleabag traveling circus temporarily encamped on the outskirts of Rome. While his motives are not entirely altruistic, Il Matto is everything Zampano is not -- witty, articulate and lithe both verbally and physically. There also seems to be some pre-existing bad blood between him and Zampano. Il Matto positively relishes taunting Zampano to Zampano's inchoate rage until the audience suspects that he may cross Zampano one last, fatal time. In fact, Zampano in one scene goes after Il Matto with a knife, which earns him a couple of days in the pokey and gets him and Gelsomina fired from the circus. Meanwhile, in one pivotal night scene, Il Matto explains to Gelsomina that God has a purpose for everything, even a pebble, and lets Gelsomina figure it out that perhaps her purpose in life is to live with the strongman and try to civilize him. Gelsomina waits for Zampano until he gets out of jail.
So it goes -- until one tragic day when Gelsomina and Zampano come across Il Matto out in the country, victim of a flat tire. Zampano merely intends to give Il Matto a thorough beating, but accidentally kills the man. Zampano's way of dealing with this tragedy is to push Il Matto's car, with the corpse in it, over a cliff and then high-tail it to the north without reporting the manslaughter. The shock of seeing dead one of the few people in her life who took time to understand her unhinges Gelsomina, who can only say "The Fool -- is hurt" and not quite process his death or her uneasy position as Zampano's possession. Equally unhinged is Zampano at Gelsomina's near-madness, and once again he takes the easy and brutish way out and abandons Gelsomina along the road, on a wintry day while she is sleeping, with only a fire, some food and her clothes to keep her company.
Some years have passed between this climactic turn of events and the film's final sequence and denoument. Zampano once again is doing his strongman trick at a tawdry roadside circus when he hears a young woman humming the "signature" tune that has bewitched Gelsomina (and before that, Il Matto). He learns that Gelsomina died several years ago, after a brief illness. The last shot finds Zampano drunk, prostrate with grief, and bemoaning his fate at night along the seashore. He has killed two people and wishes himself dead. **[END OF PLOT SUMMARY]**
Volumes have and yet can still be written about this seminal film, which catches both Fellini and indeed the Italian cinema in general in a moment of transition in the mid-1950s. This (Criterion) edition contains a video introduction by Martin Scorsese and a running audio commentary by Indiana University professor Peter Bondanella, author of THE CINEMA OF FEDERICO FELLINI. Highly recommended. Among the professor's many insights are to note how much of the look of LA STRADA owes a debt to the Italian Neo-realist school of film, with its Marxist underpinning and its focus on the little people, revealed by a documentary look to much of the cinematography, with its trashed-up public squares, sterile postwar public housing, and impoverished population still wearing military surplus clothing nearly ten years after the end of World War Two. Yet Fellini's more lyrical strain is also apparent, thematically most obvious in the scene in which the Basehart character tells Gelsomina that everything on earth has a purpose -- including herself. As Professor Bonadella says, this is the outlook of Christian Humanist thought that made the reigning Neo-Realist Marxists very upset, but Fellini responded that there are more Zampanos in the world than bicycle thieves(!) and that he just wanted to tell a simple story.
The caliber of casting and acting in this film is top-notch, and nowhere more evident than in Giulietta Masina, whose mobile, expressive face contrasts severely with Zampano's stolid grimness. Nino Rota's musical score is sublime: lyrical, beautiful, and melancholy at the same time, especially in Il Matto's theme music, that becomes Gelsomina's, and lingers after her death, suggesting a continued spiritual presence. In LA STRADA we can also see some "Felliniesque" elements creeping into the picture, things like his love for the seashore, all kinds of theater including public fetes and celebrations, resonant and evocative late-night public squares, and the ludicrousness of the unexpected (such as three musicians playing and marching single-file through open countryside, or a riderless horse clomping through town in the middle of the night).
In short, LA STRADA is a nearly flawless film without a wasted image but with a few things to say about the human condition that left me sad but not depressed at its end. Whether budding or hard-core, Fellini fans will appreciate how stylistically and thematically the film falls in between the Neorealistic I VITELLONI and the more non-linear, occasionally surreal films to come (LA DOLCE VITA, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS [again starring Masina]). I hope you enjoy it as much as I! If so it will become one of your very favorites.
Summary of La Strada (The Criterion Collection)
LA STRADA - DVD MovieConsidered by many to be Federico Fellini's most beautiful and powerful film, La Strada was the first film to reveal the range of Guilietta Masina, whose poignant performance as the childlike Gelsomina recalls Chaplin's Little Tramp. The bubbly, waiflike Gelsomina is a simpleton sold to the gruff, bullying circus strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) as a servant and assistant. Treated no better than an animal, Gelsomina nonetheless falls in love with the brute Zampanò. When they join a small circus they meet Il Matto (Richard Basehart), a clown who enchants Gelsomina and relentlessly taunts Zampanò, whose inability to control his hatred of Il Matto (literally, "the Fool") leads to their expulsion from the circus and eventually to the film's fateful conclusion. Masina is heartbreaking as the wide-eyed innocent, whose generous spirit and love of life leads her to try to "save" Quinn's unfeeling, brutal Zampanò. Though the film resonates with mythic and biblical dimensions, Fellini never loses sight of his characters, lovingly painted in all their frailties and failings. Fellini's lyrical style reaches back to the simple beauty of his neorealist films and looks ahead to the impressionistic fantasies of later films, but at this unique period in Fellini's career, they combine to create a poetic, tragic masterpiece. --Sean Axmaker
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