La Strada (English: "The Road") is a 1954 Italian road tragedy film directed by Federico Fellini and co-written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film tells the story of Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), a simple-minded young woman bought from her mother by Zampanò (Anthony Quinn), a brutish strongman who takes her with him on the road.
Fellini described La Strada as "a complete catalogue of my entire mythological world, a dangerous representation of my identity that was undertaken with no precedent whatsoever". As a result, the film demanded more time and effort than any of his other works, before or later. 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. It won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957. It was placed fourth in the 1992 British Film Institute directors' list of cinema's top 10 films.
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."
Plot
Gelsomina, an apparently somewhat simple-minded, dreamy young woman, learns that her sister Rosa has died after going on the road with the strongman Zampanò. 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 (about $20), and her daughter tearfully departs the same day.
Zampanò makes his living as an itinerant street performer, traveling in a covered "Motocarro" three-wheel-motorcycle-truck, entertaining crowds by breaking an iron chain bound tightly across his chest, then passing a hat for tips. In short order, Gelsomina's naïve and antic nature emerges, with Zampanò's brutish methods presenting a callous foil. Presenting her as his wife, which she is not, 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. However, even in her wretchedness she manages to find beauty and wonder, aided by some local children.
thumb|left|Italian [[Moto Guzzi Triporteurs|"Motocarro" three-wheel-motorcycle-truck, similar to the Vardo (covered wagon) used by Zampanò]]
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 Zampanò 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 Zampanò with a pail of water, Zampanò chases after his tormentor with his knife drawn. As a result, he is briefly jailed, and both men are fired from the travelling circus.
Before Zampanò's release from prison, Il Matto proposes to Gelsomina that there are alternatives to her servitude and imparts his philosophy that everything and everyone has a purpose – even a pebble, even she. A nun suggests that Gelsomina's purpose in life is comparable to her own. But when Gelsomina offers Zampanò marriage, he brushes her off.
On an empty stretch of road, Zampanò 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 Zampanò walks back to his motocarro with a warning for the man to watch his mouth in the future, Il Matto complains that his watch has stopped, then stumbles into a field, collapses, and dies. Zampanò 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 and succumbs to madness, constantly repeating "The Fool is hurt." Zampanò makes a few small attempts to console her, but in vain. Fearful he will no longer be able to earn a living with Gelsomina, Zampanò 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 had kindly taken her in. However, she had wasted away, did not speak much and the only thing she did was to play the melody on the trumpet.
Eventually one day, she went to sleep and never woke up. Zampanò gets drunk, gets in a fight with the locals, and wanders to the beach, where he breaks down in tears.
Cast
thumb|Quinn and Masina in a film scene.
- Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina
- Anthony Quinn as Zampanò
- Richard Basehart as Il Matto ("The Fool")
- Aldo Silvani as Giraffa, the circus owner
- Marcella Rovere as the widow
- Livia Venturini as the nun
Production
Background
thumbnail|right|Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina.<br />"Masina's character is perfectly suited to her round clown's face and wide, innocent eyes; in one way or another, in [[Juliet of the Spirits, Ginger and Fred and most of her other films, she was always playing Gelsomina." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times ]]
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." These feelings evolved into certain images: snow silently falling on the ocean, various compositions of clouds, and a singing nightingale. 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. 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, 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."
The idea for the character Zampanò 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." 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":
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."]]
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 Zampanò, but Fellini refused these choices. 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." On Sundays, Fellini and Basehart drove around the countryside, scouting locations and looking for places to eat, sometimes trying as many as six restaurants and venturing as far away as Rimini before Fellini found the desired ambiance and menu.
Production started in October 1953, but had to be halted within weeks when Masina dislocated her ankle during the convent scene with Quinn. With shooting suspended, De Laurentiis saw an opportunity to replace Masina, whom he had never wanted for the part and who had not yet been signed to a contract. This changed as soon as executives at Paramount viewed the rushes of the scene and lauded Masina's performance, resulting in De Laurentiis announcing that he had her on an exclusive and ordering her to sign a hastily prepared contract, at approximately a third of Quinn's salary.
The delay caused the entire production schedule to be revised, and cinematographer Carlo Carlini, who had a prior commitment, had to be replaced by Otello Martelli, a long-time favorite of Fellini's. When filming resumed in February 1954, it was winter. The temperature had dropped to -5 °C, often resulting in no heat or hot water, necessitating more delays and forcing the cast and crew to sleep fully dressed and wear hats to keep warm.
The new schedule caused a conflict for Anthony Quinn, who was signed to play the title role in Attila, a 1954 epic, also produced by De Laurentiis and directed by Pietro Francisci. At first, Quinn considered withdrawing from La Strada, but Fellini convinced him to work on both films simultaneously—shooting La Strada in the morning and Attila in the afternoon and evening. The plan often required the actor to get up at 3:30 am to capture the "bleak early light" that Fellini insisted on, and then leave at 10:30 to drive to Rome in his Zampanò outfit so he could be on the set in time to transform into Attila the Hun for afternoon shooting. Quinn recalled: "This schedule accounted for the haggard look I had in both films, a look that was perfect for Zampanò but scarcely OK for Attila the Hun."
Despite an extremely tight budget, production supervisor Luigi Giacosi was able to rent a small circus run by a man named Savitri, a strongman and fire-eater who coached Quinn on circus jargon and the technical aspects of chain-breaking. Giacosi also secured the services of the Zamperla Circus, which supplied a number of stuntmen who could play themselves, including Basehart's double, a high-wire artist who refused to perform when firemen arrived with a safety net.
thumb|Screenshot from 1956 trailer. <br>Circus owner Savitri provided the old car that Fellini destroyed in the scene following Zampanò's killing of Il Matto.
Funding shortages required Giacosi to improvise in response to Fellini's demands. When filming continued into spring, Giacosi was able to re-create the wintry scenes by piling thirty bags of plaster onto all the bedsheets he could find to simulate a snowscape. When a crowd scene was required, Giacosi convinced the local priest to move a celebration of the town's patron saint on 8 April up by a few days, thus securing the presence of some 4,000 unpaid extras. To guarantee that the crowd did not dissipate as the hours passed, Fellini instructed assistant director Rossi to shout "Get the rooms ready for Totò and Sophia Loren" (two of the most popular Italian entertainers of the period), so nobody left.
Fellini was a notorious perfectionist, and this could be trying for his cast. At an American Film Institute student seminar, Quinn spoke of Fellini's intransigence over selecting a box in which Zampanò carries his cigarette butts, scrutinizing over 500 boxes before finding just the right one: "As for me, any of the boxes would have been satisfactory to carry the butts in, but not Federico". Quinn also recalled being particularly proud of a certain scene in which his performance had earned applause from onlookers on the set, only to receive a phone call from Fellini late that night informing him that they would have to re-do the entire sequence because Quinn had been too good: "You see, you're supposed to be a bad, a terrible actor, but the people watching applauded you. They should have laughed at you. So in the morning we do it again." As for Masina, Fellini insisted that she re-create the thin-lipped smile he had seen in her childhood photographs. He cut her hair by putting a bowl on her head and shearing off anything that wasn't covered up, afterwards plastering what remained with soap to give it a "spiky, untidy look", then "flicked talc into her face to give it the pallor of a kabuki performer". He made her wear a World War I surplus cloak that was so frayed that its collar cut into her neck. She complained: "You're so nice and sweet to the others in the cast. Why are you so hard on me?"
Under Fellini's agreement with his producers, budget overruns had to come out of his own pocket, cutting into any profit potential. Fellini recounted that when it became clear there was insufficient funding to finish the picture, Ponti and De Laurentiis took him to lunch to assure him that they would not hold him to it: "Let's pretend [the funding agreements] were a joke. Buy us a coffee and we'll forget about them." According to Quinn, however, Fellini was able to obtain this indulgence only by agreeing to film some pickup shots for Attila that Francisci, the director of record, had neglected to complete.
While shooting the final scenes on the wharf of Fiumicino, Fellini suffered a severe bout of clinical depression, a condition that he and his associates tried to keep secret. He was able to complete the filming only upon receiving treatment by a prominent Freudian psychoanalyst.
Sound
As was the common practice for Italian films at the time, shooting was done without sound; dialogue was added later along with music and sound effects. As a consequence, cast members generally spoke in their native language during filming: Quinn and Basehart in English, Masina and the others in Italian. Liliana Betti, Fellini's long-time assistant, has described the director's typical procedure regarding dialogue during filming, a technique he called the "number system" or "numerological diction": "Instead of lines, the actor has to count off numbers in their normal order. For instance, a line of fifteen words equals an enumeration of up to thirty. The actor merely counts till thirty: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. etc." Biographer John Baxter has commented on the usefulness of such a system: "It helps pinpoint an instant in the speech where he [Fellini] wants a different reaction. 'Go back to 27,' he'll tell an actor, 'but this time, smile.'" Since he didn't need to worry about noise while shooting a scene, Fellini kept up a running commentary during filming, a practice that scandalized more traditional filmmakers, like Elia Kazan: "He talked through each take, in fact yelled at the actors. 'No, there, stop, turn, look at her, look at her. See how sad she is, see her tears? Oh, the poor wretch! You want to comfort her? Don't turn away; go to her. Ah, she doesn't want you, does she? What? Go to her anyway!' ... That's how he's able ... to use performers from many countries. He does part of the acting for the actors."
Since Quinn and Basehart did not speak Italian, both were dubbed in the original release. Unhappy with the actor who initially dubbed Zampanò, Fellini remembered being impressed by the work done by Arnoldo Foà in dubbing the Toshiro Mifune character in the Italian version of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, and was able to secure Foà's services at the very last moment. Composer Michel Chion has observed that Fellini particularly exploited the tendency of Italian films of the post-war period to allow considerable freedom in the synching of voices to lip movements, especially in contrast to Hollywood's perceived "obsessive fixation" with the matching of voices to mouths: "In Fellinian extremes, when all those post-synched voices float around bodies, we reach a point where voiceseven if we continue to attribute them to the bodies they're assignedbegin to acquire a sort of autonomy, in a baroque and decentered fashion." In the Italian version of La Strada, there are even instances when a character is heard to speak while the actor's mouth is shut tight. in which what is heard on screen mirrors a particular character's perceptions, as opposed to the visible reality of the scene. As an example, ducks and chickens appear on the screen throughout Gelsomina's conversation with the nun, but, reflecting the girl's growing sense of enlightenment concerning her place in the world, the quacking and clucking of barnyard fowl dissolves into the chirping of songbirds. Thomas Van Order has identified dozens of changes made in the English version, classifying the alterations into four categories: "1. lower volume of music relative to dialogue in the English version; 2. new musical selections and different editing of music in many scenes; 3. different ambient sound in some scenes, as well as changes in the editing of ambient sound; 4. elimination of some dialogue."
Music
The entire score for La Strada was written by Nino Rota after principal photography was completed. This is one of three primary themes that are introduced during the titles at the beginning of La Strada and that recur regularly throughout the film.
In practice, Fellini shot his films while playing taped music because, as he explained in a 1972 interview, "it puts you in a strange dimension in which your fantasy stimulates you". For La Strada, Fellini used a variation by Arcangelo Corelli that he planned to use on the sound track. Rota, unhappy with that plan, wrote an original motif (with echoes of the "Larghetto" from Dvořák's Opus 22 Serenade for Strings in E major) with rhythmic lines matched to Corelli's piece that synchronize with Gelsomina's movements with the trumpet and Il Matto's with the violin.
Release
The film premiered at the 15th Venice International Film Festival on 6 September 1954 and won the Silver Lion. It was released in Italy on 22 September 1954, and in the United States on 16 July 1956.
In 1994, a new print was financed by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who has acknowledged that since childhood he has related to the character of Zampanò, bringing elements of the self-destructive brute into his films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
Reception
Critical response
Initial response
Tullio Cicciarelli of Il Lavoro nuovo saw the film as "an unfinished poem," left unfinished deliberately by the filmmaker for fear that "its essence be lost in the callousness of critical definition, or in the ambiguity of classification," while Ermanno Continin of Il Secolo XIX praised Fellini as "a master story-teller":
Others saw it differently. When the 1954 Venice Film Festival jury awarded La Strada the Silver Lion while ignoring Luchino Visconti's Senso, a brawl broke out when Visconti's assistant Franco Zeffirelli blew a whistle during Fellini's acceptance speech, only to be attacked by Moraldo Rossi. The disturbance left Fellini pale and shaken and Masina in tears.
The Venice premiere began "in an inexplicably chilly atmosphere," according to Tino Ranieri, and "the audience, who rather disliked it as the screening began, seemed to change opinion slightly toward the end, yet the movie didn't receive—in any sense of the word—the response that it deserved."
Reviewing for Corriere della Sera, Arturo Lanocita argued that the film "gives the impression of being a rough copy that merely hints at the main points of the story ... Fellini seems to have preferred shadow where marked contrast would have been more effective." Nino Ghelli of Bianco e Nero regretted that after "an excellent beginning, the style of the film remains harmonious for some time until the moment when the two main characters are separated, at which point the tone becomes increasingly artificial and literary, the pace increasingly fragmentary and incoherent."
Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich observed that Italian critics "make every effort to find faults with [Fellini's] movie after the opening in Venice. Some say that it starts out okay but then the story completely unravels. Others recognize the pathos in the end, but don't like the first half."
Its French release the next year found a warmer reception. Dominique Aubier of Cahiers du cinéma thought La Strada belonged to "the mythological class, a class intended to captivate the critics more perhaps than the general public." Aubier concluded:
The film ranked 7th on Cahiers du Cinémas Top 10 Films of the Year List in 1955. In his March 1955 review for Arts magazine, Jean Aurel cited Giulietta Masina's performance as "directly inspired by the best in Chaplin, but with a freshness and sense of timing that seem to have been invented for this film alone." He found the film "bitter, yet full of hope. A lot like life." Louis Chauvet of Le Figaro noted that "the atmosphere of the drama" was combined "with a visual strength that has rarely been equalled."
For Cicciarelli,