TAIL POP
Federico Fellini's
LA STRADA (1954)
by Ed Morris
I
admit it. I originally got into foreign films to see undressed women.
It was 1966. I was 14. Hormones blazing, I’d read movie reviews
and zero in on ones that mentioned nudity. I soon saw these were invariably
foreign. No matter. Armed with forbidden knowledge, I’d trick
my mother to, say, take me down to the Vogue in Hollywood to see something
like Blow-Up.
But like someone who buys Playboy for the pictures and winds up reading the articles, I fell for those foreign films. They were so utterly different from the domestic product. Foreign films didn’t try to make sense. Foreign films were soft on the eyes. Soon, Hollywood films seemed numbingly literal and garishly lit.
Naturally, I continued hunting cheap thrills. In 1970, this led me to the Music Hall in Beverly Hills to see Fellini Satyricon. Amazingly, a female patron put the make on me after the movie ended. At the time I looked vaguely like one of the film’s leads.
Satyricon was my first Fellini film. I found it grotesque…an opinion I’ve reassessed in the intervening years. I later saw an article that agreed with me, and which asked how the man who created a masterpiece like La Strada could make such a horrible film as Satyricon?
Hooked by the word “masterpiece,” I found myself searching for La Strada, having no idea what it was about. Finally, it showed up on TV, late one night. With all the commercials, I think it finally ended about 2:30 in the morning. No matter.
La Strada’s plotline is certainly simple enough. Carnival performer Zampano (played by Anthony Quinn) takes a marginally retarded girl (Gelsomina, played by Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina) on the road to be his assistant and concubine. Into the mix comes Il Matto, “The Fool,” played by Richard Basehart. A high-wire artist, Il Matto is as cheerful as Zampano is a brute. Il Matto and Gelsomina fall for each other, but their romance stops short when he, in a moment of dangerous candor, tells her that Zampano loves her and needs her. Il Matto says Zampano is like a dog. Even when he wants to talk, he can only bark.
Buoyed by Il Matto’s words, Gelsomina decides to stick by Zampano. Then one day, he murders Il Matto in a fit of rage. Gelsomina reacts by retreating into a shell. Zampano can’t bring her out of it. With Gelsomina now useless as an assistant, Zampano abandons her on the road. In one of his few acts of kindness, Zampano leaves Gelsomina’s beloved trumpet by her side; a trumpet with which she plays her one tune.
Zampano continues alone. One day, he hears a peasant woman sing Gelsomina’s
tune. The peasant woman tells him that the girl who sang the tune
passed that direction a long time ago. The girl has since died. Devastated
by the news, Zampano gets roaring drunk. He goes to the beach. He
lies down in the tide.
Simple yes, but filled with a depth and power that is unknowable.
Fellini’s technique seems artless and perhaps even sloppy, but
a closer look reveals a director well aware of his craft. Action spills
in and out of the frame. Backgrounds contain extraneous goings-on,
something that forces us to understand that life generally plays out
in an indifferent world. The situation between Zampano and Gelsomina
gets closer to the essence of an abusive relationship than any I’ve
ever seen.
The scene where Zampano learns of Gelsomina’s fate kills me every time I see it. Instead of focusing on Zampano and the peasant woman as the woman tells her story, the camera mostly eyes the laundry the peasant woman hangs out to dry as she speaks. As the woman speaks, children laugh and run through the hanging laundry. Prior to the scene, Fellini has given us no clue as to how much time has gone by since the icy morning Zampano abandoned Gelsomina. Suddenly, as he listens to the tale, we realize that months, perhaps years, have gone by; precious time callously thrown away. The children’s play lets Zampano glimpse the happiness he might have known if he’d just been a slightly better person.
When La Strada was released in 1954, the Communists beat it up for betraying socialist, neo-realist tradition. The British press mostly dismissed it as sentimental claptrap. The Catholic Church loved it. They saw a tale of redemption. They saw the final scene as Zampano’s baptism. Hollywood awarded it the first ever Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. As for me, I went to the movies looking for sex. I ended up finding religion.
An LA native, Ed Morris has been a studio story analyst for many years, first at Universal (“where I made all my mistakes”) and then at Warner Bros. His projects stretch all the way from The Fugitive to The Matrix, Training Day and Syriana. He can be reached at ed.morris@warnerbros.com.