La strada

Infobox_Film
name = La strada


caption = Original theatrical poster
director = Federico Fellini
producer = Dino De Laurentiis Carlo Ponti
writer = Screenplay:
Federico Fellini Ennio Flaiano Tullio Pinelli
Story:
Federico Fellini
Tullio Pinelli
starring = Anthony Quinn Giulietta Masina Richard Basehart
music = Nino Rota
cinematography = Otello Martelli
Carlo Carlini
editing = Leo Cattozzo
distributor = Trans Lux Inc.
released = September 6, 1954
(premiere at VFF)
September 22, 1954
(Italy)
July 16, 1956
(United States)
runtime = 104 minutes
country = Italy
language = Italian
budget =
amg_id = 1:27992
imdb_id = 0047528|

"La strada" (English: "The Road") (1954) is an Italian neorealist film, directed by Federico Fellini. The movie is a drama about a naive young girl (played by Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina) who is sold to a brutish man in a coastal town in Italy.

"La strada" won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1956.

Plot

Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), a clownish young girl, is sold for 10,000 lira by her impoverished mother to Gypsy carnival strong man Zampanò (Anthony Quinn), who makes a living by drawing a crowd to a square, expanding his chest to break a chain, and then passing the hat.

Zampanò is physically and emotionally cruel, and viciously trains Gelsomina as his sidekick. She has a bird-like quality, delicate and strangely beautiful, as well as a prophetic ability to predict the weather, yet she is unable to avoid the brutish Zampanò's fits of rage and violence. Nonetheless, she retains an indefatigable child-like optimism. She considers herself an artist because she learns to play the snare drum and trumpet, do a bit of dancing, and play a clown.

Along the road, the pair encounters "Il Matto"/"The Fool" (Richard Basehart), a circus acrobat and clown who teaches Gelsomina that there might be more to life than her servitude to Zampanò.

Despite this lesson, he talks her out of leaving Zampanò. The "Fool" and Zampanò have a long-standing enmity, and when Zampanò kills the "Fool" in a rage, it breaks Gelsomina's spirit.

When Zampano realizes this, he leaves her on the side of the road. Years later, when he learns of her death in a local village, he experiences remorse for the first time in his life and he breaks down crying uncontrollably on the beach.

Cast

* Anthony Quinn as Zampanò
* Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina
* Richard Basehart as Il 'Matto' - the Fool
* Aldo Silvani as Il Signor Giraffa - Mr Giraffe, circus owner
* Marcella Rovere as La Vedova - the Widow
* Livia Venturini as La Suorina - the Nun

Production

Background

Fellini has stated that the idea of the character Zampanò came from his youth in the coastal town of Rimini. A pig castrator lived there who was known as a womanizer: according to Fellini, "This man took all the girls in town to bed with him; once he left a poor idiot girl pregnant and everyone said the baby was the devil's child." [Fellini, Federico. "Fellini on Fellini", Delacorte Press: 1974, p. 11.]

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." [Fellini, Federico and Pettigrew, Damian (editor), "", Harry N. Abrams: 2003, pages 89-90.]

Filming locations

The picture was filmed in Bagnoregio, Viterbo, Lazio, Ovindoli, L'Aquila, and Abruzzo; all in Italy. [IMDb, filming locations, ibid.]

Music

The theme music, composed by Nino Rota, contains a wistful tune which appears in the story line as a melody played by the Fool on a miniature violin, and later by Gelsomina after she teaches herself to play the trumpet. At the end of the movie, Zampano learns of Gelsomina's death when he hears a young woman singing this melody in a town he travels through, and he asks her where she learned it.

Distribution

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, 1954 and won the Silver Lion. It opened wide in Italy on September 22, 1954, and in the United States on July 16, 1956.

Critical response

Writing for Genoa-based "Il Lavoro nuovo", Italian critic Tullio Cicciarelli interpreted the film as "an unfinished poem, but one deliberately unfinished for fear that its essence be lost in the callousness of critical definition, or in the ambiguity of classification. "La strada" cannot be classified nor does it sustain the weight of rational discussion and comparison (when the film was shown at the Venice Film Festival, many critics saw in it suggestions of Chaplin). The film should be accepted for its strange fragility and its often too colorful, almost artificial moments, or else totally rejected. If we try to analyze Fellini's film, its fragmentary quality becomes immediately evident and we are obliged to treat each fragment, each personal comment, each secret confession separately." [Cicciarelli's review first published in "Il Lavoro nuovo" (Genoa) on October 2 1954. Cited in Fava, Claudio, and Aldo Vigano, "The Films of Federico Fellini", p. 83.]

In his review for "Il Secolo XIX", critic Ermanno Contini praised Fellini as "a master story-teller. The narrative is light and harmonious, drawings its essence, resilience, uniformity and purpose from small details, subtle annotations and soft tones that slip naturally into the humble plot of a story apparently void of action. But how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always clearly evident, not always interpreted with full poetical and human eloquence: it is suggested with considerable delicacy and sustained by a subtle emotive force." [Contini's review first published in "Il Secolo XIX" (Genoa) on September 8 1954. Cited in Fava, Claudio, and Aldo Vigano, "The Films of Federico Fellini", p. 83.]

On "La strada"’s release in France in 1955, critic Dominique Aubier wrote in "Les Cahiers du cinéma" that the film “belongs to the mythological class, a class intended to captivate the critics more perhaps than the general public. Fellini attains a summit rarely reached by other film directors: style at the service of the aritist’s mythological universe. This example once more proves that the cinema has less need of technicians - there are too many already - than of creative intelligence. To create such a film, the author must have had not only a considerable gift for expression but also a deep understanding of certain spiritual problems." [Aubier’s review first published in "Les Cahiers du cinéma" , No. 49, July 1955. Cited in Fava, Claudio, and Aldo Vigano, "The Films of Federico Fellini", p. 83.]

Awards

Wins
* Venice Film Festival: Silver Lion, Federico Fellini; 1954.
* Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists: Silver Ribbon; Best Director, Federico Fellini; Best Producer, Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti; 1955.
* New York Film Critics Circle Awards: NYFCC Award Best Foreign Language Film; 1956.
* Bodil Awards: Bodil; Best European Film, Federico Fellini (director); 1956.
* Academy Awards: Oscar; Best Foreign Language Film; 1957.
* Blue Ribbon Awards, Japan: Blue Ribbon Award, Best Foreign Language Film, Federico Fellini; 1958.
* Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain: CEC Award, Best Foreign Film, 1958.
* Kinema Junpo Awards, Japan: Kinema Junpo Award, Best Foreign Language Film; 1958.

Nominations
* Venice Film Festival: Golden Lion, Federico Fellini; 1954.
* British Academy of Film and Television Arts: BAFTA Film Award; Best Film from any Source, Italy; Best Foreign Actress, Giulietta Masina; 1956.
* Academy Awards: Oscar; Best Writing, Best Original Screenplay; Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli; 1957.

Adaptation

A musical based on the film, also named "La Strada", opened on Broadway on December 14, 1969 but closed after one performance.

References

Notes

Bibliography

* Fava, Claudio G., and Aldo Vigano. "The Films of Federico Fellini". New York: Citadel Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8065-0928-7

External links

*
*
* [http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/04/12/175922.php "La strada"] DVD review at Blogcritics
* [http://www.brokenprojector.com/wordpress/?p=40 "La strada"] at Broken Projector
* [http://www.filmreference.com/Films-So-St/La-Strada.html "La strada"] at Film Reference

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title=Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
years=1956
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after="Nights of Cabiria"