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.The Sight & Sound Top Ten Poll: 1992 Retrieved 15 June 2012
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, a simple-minded, dreamy young woman, learns that her sister Rosa has died after going on the road with the strongman Zampanò. Zampanò 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.
Gelsomina finally 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, 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. 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. 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
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
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." 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. 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.
Casting
Fellini secured financing through the producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, who wanted to cast Silvana Mangano (De Laurentiis's wife) as Gelsomina and Burt Lancaster as Zampanò, but Fellini refused these choices. Giulietta Masina had been the inspiration for the entire project, so Fellini was determined never to accept an alternative to her. For Zampanò, Fellini had hoped to cast a nonprofessional and, to that end, he tested a number of circus strongmen, to no avail. 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. 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.
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. Anthony Quinn was also acting in the film, while Richard Basehart was often on the set visiting his wife, actress Valentina Cortese. When Masina introduced Quinn to her husband, the actor was disconcerted by Fellini's insistence that the director had found his Zampanò, 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." 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."
Fellini was particularly taken with Basehart, who reminded the director of Charlie Chaplin. 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. 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."
Filming The film was shot in Bagnoregio, Viterbo, Lazio, and Ovindoli, L'Aquila, Abruzzo.IMDb, La Strada filming locations. 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.Kezich, 149.