Film Masters Spotlight - Fellini's Road Movie Masterpiece Bristles in "La Strada"

A traveling performer Zampano (Anthony Quinn) pays 10,000 lira to a hard-up mother of eight to secure a young girl named Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) as his performing sidekick. Her older sister Rosa recently died while on the road as Zampano’s former assistant. Gelsomina, who is innocent in way of the world, becomes Rosa’s substitute, but life on the Italian road with the misogynistic busker isn’t easy! For the most part, Zampano is brutish and uncouth, with no hint of tenderness to his younger ward. When Gelsomina meets a tightrope artist they call Il Matto aka “The Fool” (The Clown), Gelsomina suddenly finds a charming friend who even advises her to stick it out with morose Zampano, who’s bitterly cross with Il Matto’s constant teasing. One fateful, bitterly cold day, Zampano finds Il Matto fixing his car on the road. They fight, and the unexpected happens!

Director Federico Fellini’s “La Strada” – “The Road” – is surprisingly contemporary in thematic pertinence. In fact I was quite surprised to find this masterpiece easily watchable. There have been two versions on where the Italian film master got his idea from: one, after a pig castrator in Fellini’s coastal town of Rimini (where he grew up) who “took all the girls in town to bed with him”; second, was from a scenario related to him by his scenarist Tullio Pinelli in one of his road trips 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.”

Fellini's strength comes from his ability to deftly tell a story. When he was a child, he spent his leisure time drawing and staging puppet shows. He would field stories from children's magazines. He got his visual inspiration of Gelsomina from Opper's Happy Hooligan. In the last three weeks before finishing "La Strada", Fellini suffered early signs of clinical depression for which he undertook brief therapy.

“The Road” - La Strada - won Oscar’s 1956 Best Foreign Language Film, as well as Venice Filmfest’s Silver Lion.

Spoliers!

Anthony Quinn personifies the misogynist male who conveniently walks away from what would be his responsibility – as when he decided to abandon the shocked Gelsomina. In the twilight of his life, memories of the once-innocent girl has haunted Zampano’s waking hours. Guilt, after all, is not the easiest to walk away from.

If only contemporary movies were made like this...

Zampano and Gelsomina

Richard Basehart and Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina and The Clown/The Fool, respectively.

Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn

Federico Fellini

Fellini's Nostalgic Ride in "Amarcord"

In 1973, at the age of 53, Italian master film maker Federico Fellini decided to take us on a nostalgic ride to the town of Rimini where he grew up. In a delectable blend of surreal,

farcical and baroque images, we are introduced to a bevy of colorful characters that populate this beloved 1930's town: sexually-curious Titta (the delightful Bruno Zanin), town bombshell Gradisca (the voluptuous Magali Noel), annotating lawyer (Luigi Rossi) who keeps breaking the fourth wall to chat with the audience, Titta's parents and mad uncle, the crazy motorcycle rider, the bossomy store keeper, and several other zany characters.

There isn't a well delineated structure in terms of plot, but Fellini lovingly places his characters like pawns on a chess board as homage to the people he once knew. Each has their place in this thoughtful piece of narrative.

My favorite scenes involve the playful Titta: his confession with a priest (where he debates with himself if he has to tell the priest of his "touching himself", deftly enumerating his sources of temptation; the scene where Titta finally gets the big-boobed store keeper to himself - see first photo above). There are more unforgettable images: the festive opening scene where puffballs are seen drifting across town; the foggy night; the wintery dance scene, the lunatic relative climbing a tree, the fascists marching into the town square, etc.

The film features a dynamic movement, though they don't necessarily follow a narrative string. Emotions are overtly expressed; there is a covert rhetoric in the characters' manner of delivery. These are hallmarks of the baroque movement, encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church from the 16th to the 18th century; and religiosity is evident in the character's way of living.

"Amarcord" aka "I Remember" is considered to be Fellini's most accessible film, and if anyone decides to start taking on the European Masters, this should be his first foray into Federico Fellinni's works. It won Oscar's Best Foreign Language in 1975.

The town bombshell Gradisca take s a lazy stroll with her friends.

Federico Fellini

Fellini with wife Giuletta