Retrospective: La Strada (1954)
Ted Prigge
A Film Review by Ted Prigge
Copyright 1998 Ted Prigge
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli
Starring: Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard Basehart, Aldo
Salvani, Marcella Rovere, Livia Venturini
"La Strada" is a simple fable about three people, and in the hands of
another director, it could have just remained that. It takes a really
good storyteller to bring tales like this to life, and as told by great
Italian director Federico Fellini, it's shockingly enough nothing short
of a masterpiece. Why is a film like this so amazing? Why does a film
dealing with circus folk and how they either help or hurt one another
come off as such a momumentous film and receive such high accolades from
critics and audiences alike?
They key, it seems, is not just that it has deep metaphors (deep if
you've never seen a Fellini film before) or that it has an abundance in
negative imagery that aesthetically deepens the film, but that it has
real emotional complexity. It knows how to really affect an audience,
and not via cheap strokes like many other films do. The characters seem
extremely real to us, not just representations of different parts of
humanity or something, and its this neo-realism that is absolutely
devastating to us when we watch. In his early career, before he turned
to surrealism (for which he is most famous for), Fellini made several
emotionally complex simple narratives like this, "I Vitelloni," and
"Nights of Cabiria." Amongst those before his supreme neo-realism
masterpiece, "La Dolce Vita," "La Strada" is his best.
"La Strada" opens and closes with scenes by the ocean and people
hovering around it in a crisis. In the beginning, it's where one of the
protagonists, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife), is when she
discovers that her one sister has died while in the hands of a
travelling circus strongman named Zampano (a pre-"Zorba the Greek"
Anthony Quinn). To make money for her mother, who is near broke, she
says that she will go with Zampano now to be his assistant as her sister
was, and Zampano agrees, giving Gelsomina's mother her other sister a
good deal of money for her.
Zampano has a simple bit: he wraps a chain around his chest, boastfully
tells the more "delicate" audience members to cover their eyes for they
may be blinded by the effect, and then breaks it with his muscles.
Gelsomina's job is to dress as a clown, play the drums, and say "Zampano
has arrived," and occasionally do a comic bit with him. While not
performing for whatever audience, he drives from town to town on a
motorcycle that drags a significantly larger wagon carrying all his
supplies and Gelsomina, whom he mistreats terribly. Part slave, part
potential love mate, she is beaten with thin branches when she doesn't
do exactly what Zampano tells her, is forced to cook even if she can't,
and one night, is told to wait on a corner for a couple minutes while he
takes off with a woman...then doesn't return until that morning.
As they wander around, Gelsomina's detestation for Zampano's cruelty
gradually rises, and around the half-way point, she runs off from him,
and wanders into another circus act, that of a man dubbed simply "The
Fool" (American actor Richard Basehart), who is doing a dangerous tight
rope act when Gelsomina first sees him. When Zampano finds her, he
drags her to the nearest circus, where he gets a job, and luckily for
her, The Fool is working there as well. In the film's most famous
section, Zampano and The Fool lock horns, as the latter taunts the
former humorously, as he recognizes Zampano's total lack of a sense of
humor and the fact that he mistreats the adorable Gelsomina, and when
the fight is finally broken, Zampano is taken away by the police and
locked up for the night, and both men are fired from their jobs.
The rest of the film deals with the aftermath of this experience, the
clash of all these three people, and how Gelsomina realizes that despite
all of Zampano's harshness towards her, she really does have feelings
for him, and in one of the film's best scenes, The Fool tries to get
Gelsomina to run away with him, but upon discovering that she does love
Zampano in a weird way, he tells her the best thing to do is stay with
him. The film turns uglier towards the end, and by the grand finale, it
has reached such an emotional peak that the final scene doesn't so much
come off as a metaphor but as an almost cathartic experience.
"La Strada" means "The Road," and the film turns into a road movie,
devoid of any real plot, and extremely episodic, as all of Fellini's
great films were (want to see a really episodic film? Watch "La Dolce
Vita"), and the feeling Fellini presents throughout is that of a
seemless wandering, the way the characters in this film are often
wandering around emotionally. While this is in theory a simplistic
film, Fellini makes this extremely complex, especially when The Fool is
introduced. What he does to Zampano is, in actuality, sadistic, and
perhaps he does get what he deserves later on in the story, but it's too
easy to come to that particular conclusion. Rather the fight scene and
whatever happens following it stem from a problem with both The Fool and
Zampano, who are both acting on their first emotions without really
considering the consequences.
The acting is one of the reasons this film is so good, because much of
what happens emotionally is what goes unsaid by the characters and can
only be shown by the actors playing them. Masina brings a sweetness to
Gelsomina which goes unparalleled, even by the likes of Chaplin and
Lucille Ball. She has the ability to affect us emotionally with so much
as a twitch of her eyes, and she can change from comedy to sadness (or
even both) in a split second. The shot of her dressed as a clown is the
supreme image of an ironically sad clown. Richard Basehart is hilarious
as The Fool, filled with so much energy that if he had only had a
higher, more annoying voice, and less funnier things to do, hell, he'd
probably be Jerry Lewis. His later scenes are touching and majestic,
proving him a great actor and a complex character after all.
But Anthony Quinn gets the toughest role. His performance as Zampano is
deft and emotionally troubling, and always starkly realistic. This was
long before he became an almost kitsch-y sensation, popping up as one
who could not be taken totally seriously, but here, as a young, buff
man, he's filled with anger and a strong presence that is, at first,
distancing. But as the film goes on, he gradually lets the audience in,
as he does Gelsomina, and by that final shot, where his emotional
journey seems to be at an end, as far as the movie goes, the film has
earned the right to be that powerful.
But it's really Fellini who raises this as high up as it could have
gone. His approach hardly belongs in the group of "Italian
Neo-Realism," since his fascination is not with using his characters to
critique social problem, as they usually are, but rather using his
characters to represent real people, and thus, all of humanity. Though
Zampano could easily be seen as an asshole, but Fellini never judges
him, and instead sees him as just a person on the edge with his true
feelings, as he does every character. His direction is marvelously
involving, with camera movements and edits that are so smooth that you
hardly notice them at all, and as such, the film is deeply involving, as
you were actually there with the characters, witnessing everything. If
any director had a way of sucking his audience into his film and
involving them in every way, it was Fellini.
MY RATING (out of 4): ****
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