Federico Fellini's LA STRADA (Italy, 1954) at the Ritz and the Classic - John Baxter's appreciation

One of the bits and pieces  of info assembled for the Cinema Reborn 2020 catalogue and website was this note by John Baxter on Fellini’s Oscar-winning classic La Strada.  It was originally intended to be screened on 35mm in Canberra only. The film will  now screen at the Ritz Randwick  and Elsternwick Classic  in a beautifully restored digital copy on Monday 13 July at 7.00 pm. Click on the theatre names to book. 

LA STRADA (Federico Fellini, Italy, 1954) – With Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina

 

Giulietta Masina

           
The wonder of La Strada – “The Way” or “The Road” – is not that it is so good, but that it was made at all.  At a time when documentary-style NeoRealism dominated Italian cinema, Fellini told a story which reflected his own dream-based vision of the world as a theatre of wonders, inhabited by extraordinary people. Childhood in rural Romagna made him familiar with itinerant showmen like the phoney strong-man Zampano (slang for a kind of sausage, shaped like a pig’s foot)  and his dreamy helper – or slave?- Gelsomina,  but putting them on screen aroused the enmity of such realists as Zavattini and Visconti.  Riots followed its prize-winning screening at Venice, with rival supporters brawling in the streets. Anthony Quinn thought so little of the film that he sold his share before it was even released.  La Strada’s success disconcerted Fellini, particularly since most of the praise went to his wife Giulietta Masina.  

Conceived as a Pierrot Lunaire-innocent, the character of Gelsomina became in her hands a shrewd and observant individual, with a quality of watchful dignity. We watch her emerge from Zampano’s shadow  into the film’s tragic heroine, an emblem of man’s inhumanity to women.  Not above jealousy, Fellini foiled attempts by producer Dino de Laurentiis to make sequels featuring the character: Gelsomina on a Bicycle was suggested. He also resisted her suggestions about music, proposing a piece by Corelli, until Nino Rota presented him with a nameless tune, marked tranquillo, on a single sheet of hand-ruled music paper. “Do you want this?” he asked off-handedly.  The first recording alone of Gelsomina’s plaintive trumpet theme sold two million copies.