La Strada
| La strada | |
|---|---|
| File:LaStrada2.jpg Original theatrical poster | |
| Directed by | Federico Fellini |
| Written by | Screenplay: Federico Fellini Ennio Flaiano Tullio Pinelli Story: Federico Fellini Tullio Pinelli |
| Produced by | Dino De Laurentiis Carlo Ponti |
| Starring | Anthony Quinn Giulietta Masina Richard Basehart |
| Cinematography | Otello Martelli Carlo Carlini |
| Edited by | Leo Cattozzo |
| Music by | Nino Rota |
| Distributed by | Trans Lux Inc. |
Release dates | September 6, 1954 (premiere at VFF) September 22, 1954 (Italy) July 16, 1956 (United States) |
Running time | 104 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
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." [1]
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." [2]
Filming locations
The picture was filmed in Bagnoregio, Viterbo, Lazio, Ovindoli, L'Aquila, and Abruzzo; all in Italy. [3]
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." [4]
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 apparrently 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 sutained by a subtle emotive force." [5]
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
- ^ Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini, Delacorte Press: 1974, p. 11.
- ^ Fellini, Federico and Pettigrew, Damian (editor), I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon, Harry N. Abrams: 2003, pages 89-90.
- ^ IMDb, filming locations, ibid.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
Bibliography
- Fava, Claudio G., and Aldo Vigano. The Films of Federico Fellini. New York: Citadel Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8065-0928-7
External links
- La strada at IMDb
- La strada at AllMovie
- La strada DVD review at Blogcritics
- La strada at Broken Projector
- La strada at Film Reference
