La Strada

Giulietta Masina gives one of cinema’s most memorable performances in Fellini’s La Strada, the director’s international breakthrough and his first unquestioned masterpiece. The film won a Silver Lion at Venice and the first of Fellini’s four Academy Awards for Best Foreign-Language Film. Masina (Fellini’s wife) is Gelsomina, a simple-minded peasant girl who is sold to a brutal circus strongman (played by Anthony Quinn) for a plate of pasta. Richard Basehart (of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea fame) co-stars as the Fool, a gentle tightrope-walker who befriends the beleaguered heroine. Although ostensibly neorealist in form, La Strada’s highly allegorical, profoundly spiritual quality marked a departure from the strict tenets of neorealism, and drew angry attacks from critics on the Left. The Catholic press, for its part, hailed the work as a genuinely Christian parable of suffering and redemption. "Rarely has a film expressed so completely its director’s sense of the wonder, fantasy, surprise, and mystery in the simple lyrical moments of life" (Peter Bondanella). "For all its sentimentality, this overshadows virtually everything Fellini has made since La Dolce Vita" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 107 mins.