La Strada (1954)

[Mark Tracy]

Fellinidescribed La Strada as "a complete catalogue of my entire mythological world, a dangerous representation of my identity that was undertaken with no precedent whatsoever".[1] As a result, the film demanded more time and effort than any of his other works, before or later.[2] The development process was long and tortuous; there were problems during production, including insecure financial backing, problematic casting, and numerous delays. Finally, just before the production completed shooting, Fellini suffered a nervous breakdown that required medical treatment so that he could complete principal photography. Initial critical reaction was harsh, and the film's screening at the Venice Film Festival was the occasion of a bitter controversy that escalated into a public brawl between Fellini's supporters and detractors.

Subsequently, however, La Strada has become "one of the most influential films ever made", according to the American Film Institute.[3] It won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957.[4][5] It was placed fourth in the 1992 British Film Institute directors' list of cinema's top 10 films.[6]

In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."[7]

Gelsomina, an apparently somewhat simple-minded, dreamy young woman, learns that her sister Rosa has died after going on the road with the strongman Zampan. Now the man has returned a year later to ask her mother if Gelsomina will take Rosa's place. The impoverished mother, with other mouths to feed, accepts 10,000 lire, and her daughter tearfully departs the same day.

Zampan makes his living as an itinerant street performer, entertaining crowds by breaking an iron chain bound tightly across his chest, then passing the hat for tips. In short order, Gelsomina's nave and antic nature emerges, with Zampan's brutish methods presenting a callous foil. He teaches her to play the snare drum and trumpet, dance a bit, and clown for the audience. Despite her willingness to please, he intimidates her, forces himself upon her, and treats her cruelly at times. She develops a tenderness for him that is betrayed when he goes off with another woman one evening, leaving Gelsomina abandoned in the street. Yet here, as throughout the film, even in her wretchedness, she manages to find beauty and wonder, aided by some local children.

Finally, she rebels and leaves, making her way into town. There she watches the act of another street entertainer, Il Matto ("The Fool"), a talented high wire artist and clown. When Zampan finds her there, he forcibly takes her back. They join a ragtag travelling circus where Il Matto already works. Il Matto teases the strongman at every opportunity, though he cannot explain what motivates him to do so. After Il Matto drenches Zampan with a pail of water, Zampan chases after his tormentor with his knife drawn. As a result, he is briefly jailed, and both men are fired from the travelling circus.

On an empty stretch of road, Zampan comes upon Il Matto fixing a flat tire. As Gelsomina watches in horror, the two men begin to fight; it ends after the strongman punches the clown on the head several times, causing the fool to hit his head on the corner of his car's roof. As Zampan walks back to his motorcycle with a warning for the man to watch his mouth in the future, Il Matto complains that his watch is broken, then stumbles into a field, collapses, and dies. Zampan hides the body and pushes the car off the road, where it bursts into flames.

The killing breaks Gelsomina's spirit and she becomes apathetic, constantly repeating, "The Fool is hurt." Zampan makes a few small attempts to console her, but in vain. Fearful he will no longer be able to earn a living with Gelsomina, Zampan abandons her while she sleeps, leaving her some clothes, money, and his trumpet.

Some years later, he overhears a woman singing the very tune Gelsomina often played. He learns that the woman's father had found Gelsomina on the beach and kindly taken her in. However, she had wasted away and died. Zampan gets drunk, gets in a fight with the locals, and wanders to the beach, where he breaks down in tears.

Fellini's creative process for La Strada began with vague feelings, "a kind of tone," he said, "that lurked, which made me melancholy and gave me a diffused sense of guilt, like a shadow hanging over me. This feeling suggested two people who stay together, although it will be fatal, and they don't know why."[9] These feelings evolved into certain images: snow silently falling on the ocean, various compositions of clouds, and a singing nightingale.[10] At that point, Fellini sketched these images, a habitual tendency that he claimed he had learned early in his career when he had worked in provincial music halls and had to draw the characters and sets.[11] Finally, he reported that the idea first "became real" to him when he drew a circle on a piece of paper to depict Gelsomina's head,[12] and he decided to base the character on the actual character of Giulietta Masina, his wife of five years at the time: "I utilized the real Giulietta, but as I saw her. I was influenced by her childhood photographs, so elements of Gelsomina reflect a ten-year-old Giulietta."[13]

The idea for the character Zampan came from Fellini's 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."[14] In 1992, Fellini told Canadian director Damian Pettigrew that he had conceived the film at the same time as co-scenarist 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 Zampan after the owners of two small circuses in Rome: Zamperla and Saltano.[15]

Fellini wrote the script with collaborators Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli and brought it first to Luigi Rovere, Fellini's producer for The White Sheik (1952). When Rovere read the script for La Strada, he began to weep, raising Fellini's hopes, only to have them dashed when the producer announced that the screenplay was like great literature, but that "as a film this wouldn't make a lira. It's not cinema."[16] By the time it was fully complete, Fellini's shooting script was nearly 600 pages long, with every shot and camera angle detailed and filled with notes reflecting intensive research.[17] Producer Lorenzo Pegoraro was impressed enough to give Fellini a cash advance, but would not agree to Fellini's demand that Giulietta Masina play Gelsomina.[16]

Fellini secured financing through the producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, who wanted to cast Silvana Mangano (De Laurentiis' wife) as Gelsomina and Burt Lancaster as Zampan, but Fellini refused these choices.[16] Giulietta Masina had been the inspiration for the entire project, so Fellini was determined never to accept an alternative to her.[19] For Zampan, Fellini had hoped to cast a nonprofessional and, to that end, he tested a number of circus strongmen, to no avail.[20] He also had trouble finding the right person for the role of Il Matto. His first choice was the actor Moraldo Rossi, who was a member of Fellini's social circle and had the right type of personality and athletic physique, but Rossi wanted to be the assistant director, not a performer.[19] Alberto Sordi, the star of Fellini's earlier films The White Sheik and I Vitelloni, was eager to take the role, and was bitterly disappointed when Fellini rejected him after a tryout in costume.[19]

Ultimately, Fellini drew his three leading players from people associated with the 1954 film Donne Proibite (Angels of Darkness), directed by Giuseppe Amato, in which Masina played the very different role of a madam.[21] Anthony Quinn was also acting in the film, while Richard Basehart was often on the set visiting his wife, actress Valentina Cortese.[21] When Masina introduced Quinn to her husband, the actor was disconcerted by Fellini's insistence that the director had found his Zampan, later remembering: "I thought he was a little bit crazy, and I told him I wasn't interested in the picture, but he kept hounding me for days."[16] Not long afterwards, Quinn spent the evening with Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and after dinner they watched Fellini's 1953 Italian comedy-drama I Vitelloni. According to Quinn: "I was thunderstruck by it. I told them the film was a masterpiece, and that the same director was the man who had been chasing me for weeks."[16]

Fellini was particularly taken with Basehart, who reminded the director of Charlie Chaplin.[21] Upon being introduced to Basehart by Cortese, Fellini invited the actor to lunch, at which he was offered the role of Il Matto. When asked why by the surprised Basehart, who had never before played the part of a clown, Fellini responded: "Because, if you did what you did in Fourteen Hours you can do anything." A great success in Italy, the 1951 Hollywood drama starred Basehart as a would-be suicide on a hotel balcony.[22] Basehart, too, had been greatly impressed by I Vitelloni, and agreed to take the role for much less than his usual salary, in part because he was very attracted by Fellini's personality, saying: "It was his zest for living, and his humor."[23]

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