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.
The film commentary by Peter Bondanella, author of The Cinema of Federico Fellini, is one of those dull, simply read, and heavily scripted commentaries that has no real insight or spark, and relies far too much on banal insights like comparing the film to The Beauty And The Beast, and tossing about clichés on how it deals with ‘madness and death’, although he does usefully note the film was recorded with no sound, and sound was only later dubbed in, with Italian actors voicing the Quinn and Basehart roles. Thus neither version of the soundtrack is ‘original’.
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
I think the Kael comment is kinda brilliant. I've never heard that said before.
2 - Harkiran
thank you. absolutely marvellous:)