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| Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn in La Strada |
Gelsomina: Giulietta Masina
The Fool: Richard Basehart
Giraffa: Aldo Silvani
Widow: Marcella Rovere
Nun: Livia Venturini
Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Production design: Mario Ravasco
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
Music: Nino Rota
Sad clowns have gone out of style, so to many of us today Giulietta Masina's Gelsomina seems more than a little cloying. But when La Strada was released, she was hailed as a master of comic pathos, as if she were the unacknowledged daughter of Charles Chaplin and Lillian Gish. Similarly, Federico Fellini's film now feels like an uneasy attempt to blend neorealistic grime and misery with a kind of moral allegory: Zampanó as Body, Gelsomina as Soul, and The Fool as Mind. So when Body kills Mind, Soul pines away, leaving Body in anguish. But La Strada has retained generations of admirers who are willing to overlook the sentimentality and latter-day mythologizing. It does remain a tremendously accomplished film, made under some difficulties, including constant battles by Fellini with his formidable producers, Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. If it sometimes feels like a throwback to the era of silent movies, it was virtually filmed as one, with its American stars, Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart, speaking their lines in English and the rest of the cast speaking Italian, and everyone later dubbed in the studio -- which leads to that slightly disembodied quality the dialogue of many early postwar films possesses.
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