Many, perhaps most, of the world’s most beloved films revolve around children or childhood—or, as in the case of La strada, an innocent, childlike adult. It appears that a simple form of romanticism—romanticism as romance—is rooted in our most heartfelt experience. Even against our better judgment, we sometimes embrace the myth that the young and the innocent are the repository of our humanity.
In English, La strada means “the road.” Federico Fellini’s film—his finest, along with I vitelloni (1953) and Fellini Satyricon (1969)—conveys life on the road and the rootlessness of its three lonely main characters: Zampanò, a circus strongman; Gelsomina, his assistant; the tightrope acrobat called Il Matto, “The Fool.”
Worn and strange, their itinerant world finds one never at home, scarcely ever at rest. Encapsulating this world is an image early in the film. Zampanò has abandoned Gelsomina for a night’s pleasure. Sleepless, alone, she is on a dark, empty street down which, inexplicably, trots slowly a horse, riderless, saddleless, the sound of its hoofbeats, interrupting silence, a measured clock of the soul. This haunting epiphany creates a sense of time forlornly blending into vacant eternity. (It is the same kind of poetry that John Ford’s magnificent The Long Voyage Home (1940) achieves, especially at the end.) Sometimes in motion, sometimes dormant, wheels perform the same poetic function throughout La strada.
How have the three people come to live on the road? The boy known as The Fool has been led there by his nature; his is the congenital homelessness of capricious spirit. (Americans will find him suggesting an amalgamation of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.) Walking a tightrope for a living perfectly expresses The Fool’s prescient grasp of human mortality, which many of the rest of us prefer not to look at except as “an act.” This grasp of mortality, of course, implies a tenuous hold on life. (Visually, The Fool is introduced as a shadow—one of Fellini’s best, and quickest, shots.) The Fool’s flippancy, which is his main defense against mortal awareness, reflects also his powerlessness to direct his own destiny. The selfish brute Zampanò—where else would he be but the road? The alternative, surely, is prison, for normal society dares not risk taking him in. Finally, with Gelsomina, the issue is poverty. (All three of the characters barely eke out a living.) With other, younger children to raise, her mother, a widow, has had to sell to Zampanò, first, Rosa and then Rosa’s sister, Gelsomina, even though the rock-hard life Zampanò offers, coupled with his own uncaring nature, will likely result in Gelsomina’s death, as it did Rosa’s. Thus all three characters lack the protection of material, familial and social enclosure, not to mention the comfortable myth of self-determination. Barely surviving in an inhospitable cosmos, they are driven “Still like the thistleball, no bar,/ Onward, whenever light winds blow.”
They are like children out on their own: Gelsomina, slow, gentle, loyal; Zampanò, the bully who must always have his way; quick, smart-alecky, alert, The Fool, who befriends the friendless Gelsomina and teases Zampanò relentlessly. It is their rudimentary humanity, perhaps, as well as their hard life in a harsh universe, that suggests the Middle Ages; and this suggestion also unfixes the time of the piece to bring “[t]he eternal note of sadness in.”
However, one cannot speak of this film divorced from Italian neorealism, which specifies time and place. Begun in the 1940s during the war and flourishing right after, this movement in Italian cinema rejected as artificial the lives of the highborn and the powerful and embraced instead, with great sympathy, the poor, the marginalized, the powerless. The movement was both social and political; it sought to place human lives in the context of their unsettled times. La strada doesn’t precisely fit the movement. Rather, like I vitelloni, Fellini’s greatest work, and his marvelous La notti di Cabiria (1956), it’s an outgrowth of the movement, which it poeticizes and personalizes, replacing the social and the political with the romantic and the existential. In this, Fellini’s beautiful film resembles an even more beautiful one: Roberto Rossellini’s pathfinding Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), whose script, in fact, Fellini co-authored. (Mind you, some do view La strada politically; Georges Sadoul, for instance, writes: “Zampano is a symbol of all men for whom women are predestined household drudges, the counterpart in the home of the exploited workers.” But such considerations seem far afield of the mood and the tenor of the film.) Although the film’s “events,” such as they are, are chronological, the narrative as a whole, if a little less pronouncedly than the narrative of Rossellini’s masterpiece, is as impressionistic as it is linear. The characters here assume primary importance; they are not subordinated to a story without which they would cease to exist. Rather than inhabiting a potted plot, they inhabit the weary landscapes they pass through; and even a number of Fellini’s shots of these landscapes, potentially mesmerizing, are quickly and abruptly cut away from in order to preserve an emphasis on the human element.
What then holds this sort-of picaresque drama together? Two things: departing from dogma, the creation of its own myth of fall and redemption; a wistful trumpeted tune. The latter, Nino Rota’s cherished main theme (I can hear it now; I can hum it now), in fact threads the odyssey, from the time Gelsomina first hears it, to the time The Fool plays it on his fiddle, to the time Gelsomina herself plays it on her most prized possession, the trumpet Zampanò has given her for their act, to the time, five years after, abandoned by Zampanò, Gelsomina dies, when a woman hanging her laundry sings it, drawing Zampanò to the familiar sound, whereupon he learns the fate of Gelsomina and belatedly feels the loss of the one person who loved him. Thus is Zampanò, human at last, redeemed.
Few films are as full of memorable moments as La strada: Gelsomina’s leaving home, which, after explaining its necessity, her mother at the last hopelessly tries to prevent; at a rural wedding party where she and Zampanò perform, Gelsomina’s secret encounter with an odd, sick child—a harbinger of her own fate; Gelsomina’s being led to a religious street procession by the charming sight of three musicians piping as they walk single-file; her first view of The Fool on an outdoor tightrope and, after the heartstopping act, her second view of him, close up, through an automobile window; The Fool’s telling her that even a stone, that even she, fulfills some cosmic purpose; outside jail prior to Zampanò’s early morning release, The Fool’s bidding Gelsomina farewell (as a child I first learned ciao from this); Zampanò’s fisted assault on The Fool, who, irreparably hurt, before falling onto the grass notes that his watch has stopped—a piercing observation; Gelsomina’s grief over The Fool’s death, which, insupportable to him, causes Zampanò to abandon her, after which his once fluent strongman act is stiff and mechanical; and, after learning of Gelsomina’s end, Zampanò alone at night on the beach, weeping, and the stars he has (we feel, for the first time) looked up at blessing him and mourning along with him.
Throughout La strada, Otello Martelli’s drab, faded black-and-white cinematography immeasurably helps Fellini to create the melancholy poetry that is the film’s hallmark.
La strada has its faults; the evocation of the crucifixion of Jesus when, arms outstretched, The Fool’s body is being dragged, for example, certainly seems unnecessary. But this is such a deeply moving film, such a haunting experience, that one is inclined to be forgiving of its few nicks and blemishes.
In passing, let me note a tiny thing about the film that becomes indicative of the whole. In one scene Zampanò repeatedly slaps Gelsomina; she has left him, and he is compelling her return. Fellini has done a lovely thing. We do not hear the sound of the slaps. Thus by this omission does Fellini succeed in shortcircuiting any possible pathological pleasure at the spectacle of a man hitting a woman—in this instance, a woman being played by his own wife.
The acting in La strada is wonderful, including every bit part. The lead players—Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina, Anthony Quinn as Zampanò—are unforgettable. And best of all is Richard Basehart as The Fool. Possessed of impudence and quizzical spirit, here is one of the most moving tragicomic performances ever given by an American film actor. Seemingly both ageless and the epitome of youth, Basehart was in fact nearly forty at the time, and looking every bit of it, two years earlier, in Mario Soldati’s underrated The Stranger’s Hand. To be fully appreciated, Basehart’s incomparable Fool must be heard in the actor’s own distinctive voice, in the dubbed English version, although, of course, overall the Italian-language version is better. (Both are available separately—and together, in the Criterion DVD set.)
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Dennis Grunes 