While Fellini and Masina benefited the most from this film, the movie really is Quinn’s character’s tale. We see Zampano grow the most, learning a little of human feeling, while The Fool remains the flirty wiseass till his end, albeit veined with cruelty and spite, and Gelsomina never grows beyond her quirky self. That Quinn, by then a solidly bankable Hollywood star, would take on such a complex role, often acting with just grunts, body movements, and his eyes, in such a despicable character, shows the faith he had in the young Fellini — then directing only his fourth full film. His performance dominates the film. Masina is very good, as the eternally mugging and plastic-faced Gelsomina, but there is a lack of depth to her character, even as there is the suspicion she is never as naïve as she portrays. In a remake, Gelsomina would probably be declared bipolar, and zonked up on pills. The full range of Masina’s acting abilities would have to wait a few years till the older and more world-weary role she had in Nights Of Cabiria.

La Strada has often been reduced by critics to either a simplistic Christian morality play, or conflated out to be some existential Greek drama involving the three main characters as representations of primal elements, or other such nonsense. The often stolid Pauline Kael once declared that Zampano was the Body, Gelsomina the Soul, and The Fool was the Mind. Well, duh, that’s true with almost any trio of characters in a story, and akin to telling us that Eden is Paradise, the Serpent Temptation, and Eve Innocence. It says all while saying absolutely nothing of depth nor clarity, but is too typical of what passes for real criticism these days. Yet, the three leads are clearly not so simplistically sketched. They are not mere archetypes, and the tale’s circular narrative - beginning and ending on a beach - is clearly something that places the film in a modernist context, not a wholly mythical one.

The DVD comes in two disks, and has English subtitles with the Italian soundtrack, and thankfully comes with an English dubbed soundtrack featuring the real voices of Quinn and Basehart. One failing is a minute or two of flubbed dubbing, and silence, a few minutes into the film, due to the original American cut being a minute or so shorter than the Italian version, thus there being no English language version. Some parts are silent and others are filled in with the Italian soundtrack. Similarly, in Nights Of Cabiria, there was an excised scene that was restored, but never properly dubbed, so it reverts to Italian.

The first disk has a thirteen-minute video introduction by Martin Scorsese, the original American trailer, and an insert essay by film scholar Peter Matthews. The second disk was not really necessary, for it only contains a 56-minute television documentary called Federico Fellini's Autobiography: Clips From His Life, by Paquito del Bosco, and could have been burnt onto the other disk. It is a standard sort of Euro-doc, very patchwork, and focusing far more on Fellini’s later works, especially La Dolce Vita.