277. La Strada (The Road) (1954)

Directed By Federico Fellini

Synopsis

A weird girl is basically "sold" to a brutal travelling strongman as his assistant. He mistreats her, she doesn't like it but bears with him, and when she has the possibility of escaping him she has a talk with a more human character which they met on their travels, The Fool, who makes her see that her place is next to the strongman, as there is no one else for him. She stays with him, until he kills The Fool by accident. She goes slightly crazier and he dumps her. Years later he learns of her death and cries on the beach.

Review

Yeah it's a good film, but I can't help but be disappointed with the majority of Italian films in the list until now. They have been sold to me by the intelligentsia as the greatest masterpieces of all time, and then I find myself much more touched by much obscurer directors like Yasujiro Ozu or Kenji Mizoguchi and slightly untouched by the Fellinis, Rosselinis and De Sicas of this world. I must have something for Japanese cinema.

That said there are glimpses here of things which Fellini would do in the future which are more interesting, moments of nightmarish surreality like when Gelsomina visits the sick child at the wedding.

Another that generally annoys me in Italian cinema is the insistence on dubbing, Anthony Quinn one of the characters with the greatest amount of speech is consistently dubbed, probably because his Italian wasn't that great, but a lot is lost in the performance. Still I have to tip my hat to the great Nino Rota for his soundtrack.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In 1992, Fellini told Canadian director Damian Pettigrew that he had conceived the film at the same time as co-writer Tullio Pinelli in a kind of "orgiastic synchronicity. I was directing I vitelloni and Tullio had gone to see his family in Turin. At that time, there was no autostrada between Rome and the north and so you had to drive through the mountains. Along one of the tortuous winding roads, he saw a man pulling a carretta, a sort of cart covered in tarpaulin... A tiny woman was pushing the cart from behind. When he returned to Rome, he told me what he'd seen and his desire to narrate their hard lives on the road. 'It would make the ideal scenario for your next film,' he said. It was the same story I'd imagined but with a crucial difference: mine focused on a little traveling circus with a slow-witted young woman named Gelsomina. So we merged my flea-bitten circus characters with his smoky campfire mountain vagabonds. We named Zampanò after the owners of two small circuses in Rome: Zamperla and Saltano.

Scenes from La Strada: