La Strada

Most Hollywood films appear to be turned out by a faceless corporation, and this is one reason why foreign films are popular among those who seek the sense of an artist's mind behind the completed work. There is such a single central intelligence behind La Strada: that of Federico Fellini, who wrote the screenplay (with a collaborator whose name the ticket-taking girl at the Brattle could not divulge), and directed. The questions that La Strada raises, then, resolve around Fellini. For me they are two: What is he getting at, with this superbly made story of two most human subhumans, and, why did he elect to take so long about it?

The plot, with a little rearrangement, might easily serve for an Italian opera of the verismo school. It resolves around a second-rate traveling strong man and his strange, dull-witted assistant and concubine. A tightrope walker laughs at the strong man and is kind to his slave, and the strong man kills him. In the end the girl dies, and the strong man is left groveling in remorse on a deserted beach reminiscent of the one where he found her.

An opera--but a one-act opera. Fellini has made his movie with careful attention to every detail except the patience of his audience. But his sombre exhaustiveness gives La Strada an essential truthfulness in spite of the melodramatic violence. The stark, stony backgrounds, for instance, of which we see so much: no carpenter could have put them up, no paper-mache could duplicate them. They are real.

But Fellini is not the statistical sort of realist who would take the average of all the girls in all the second-rate circuses in Italy, and cast the leading role as close as possible to this ideal. In fact, it is safe to say that no woman in the world is remotely like Giulietta Masina; that may be one reason her performance carries such conviction. Masina's face, though never down-rightly funny, is always comic--and usually pathetic into the bargain. Even when not made up in clown-white, it is a clown-face. It seems to be changing, frowning, smiling, always with one eye on the reaction of its audience--perhaps this is the essential quality of the clown-face--but this becomes an attribute not only of the actress but of the character. She spends most of her time undergoing highly repetitive insults and injuries from her master, and only the uniquiness of Masina keeps the character's helplessness from becoming less pathetic than annoying.

Anthony Quinn as the strong man is a perfect brute: a genuine gorilla without ever a stroke of undue breast-beating.

The brute and his half-wit mistress are subhuman, because inarticulate. This it is almost to be expected that a movie which details their adventures truthfully and without claptrap should quickly become wearisome. This is pointed up by the brief appearance of the tightrope walker, who is gloriously articulate. La Strada takes on its fullest life when he is onscreen. He is like a nimble, lively Orpheus in a hell of groping and grunting, and Richard Basehart plays him brilliantly. Signor Fellini has created one character of un-crippled humanity, and for a few scenes has matter worthy of the scrupulous authority of his manner.