DVD Review: La Strada

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini’s 1954 black and white film La Strada (The Road) is one of those films that is midway between his early neo-realism and his later magical realism, with touches of both aplenty. It made stars of both him and its female lead, his wife Giulietta Masina, won the 1954 Venice Film Festival’s top award and the 1956 Best Foreign Picture Academy Award, yet there is something missing from it.

It is a good film, arguably a very good or near-great film, but it is definitely not a great film. It lacks the intellectual and artistic depth that the couple’s next famed collaboration, Nights Of Cabiria, three years later, would have. In a sense, those critics who have called it a simple fable are correct, but even the greatest of fables cannot compare with the greatest of novels, especially those modern masterpieces, for a novel takes an in-depth 360° spin around life, and within life, whereas fables and this film often rely too strongly on archetypes, schmaltz, and sentimentality.

It is not a reworking of the Beauty And The Beast tale, either, for it’s not really a love story, but a loveless story, in the sense of the human denial of love. Granted, it’s a mark of Fellini’s consummate filmic skill that one is so easily emotionally manipulated, to the point that most viewers even care about the wretched Zampano at the film’s end. But, mastering puppetry is not the same as producing good art. If it was, the old Lassie American TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s would be right alongside "The Odyssey" and Guernica in the pantheon of great human artworks. Yet, Fellini is so great a filmmaker that even where his art is not top notch it can inspire admiration for its excellence.

While watching this film, two other films stuck out in my mind, not including Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria, and that was one of Kirk Douglas’s earliest starring roles in the 1949 boxing film Champion, where the importance of a beachside setting, and the ultimate come-uppance of a brute are also central themes, and also Woody Allen’s neglected 1999 gem Sweet And Lowdown, another road picture where an egoistic male character, played by Sean Penn, lets the woman he loves, but cannot admit he does, slip away from him, then has a violent emotional reaction to end the film.

La Strada shows Fellini almost in utero, or in the birth canal, on his way out to becoming the later showman Fellini of the 1960s and 1970s, as symbolism creeps into his seemingly neo-realistic tale of a wannabe circus strongman character, Zampano (Anthony Quinn), the man with ‘lungs of steel’, whose schtick is popping an iron chain with his chest’s expansion, but is really just a low level street parody of such, and the mentally deficient young woman, Gelsomina (Masina), he buys from a poor Italian family for about $10, or ten thousand lire. We soon find out that she is the second daughter that the brute has purchased from them. The older sister of Gelsomina, Rosa, never seen in the film but whose presence has a profound impact, was earlier purchased and died. We never learn how, but suspect that it had something to do with Zampano’s rage at a possible affair she had with a character the film later introduces, Richard Basehart’s nameless Fool, a high wire performer who needles Zampano relentlessly, recklessly, and always gets the dumb brute reaction he desires.

Article Author: Dan Schneider

Dan Schneider is the founder and webmaster of Cosmoetica: the best in poetica.

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