Word: half-wit
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...Barbara Allen, is a bit stolid on occasion, but she has the proper amount of scorn and sinfulness. Gary Zukav gives the part of Barbara's father an Andy Griffith reading, which somehow seems out of place, but he is funny. So is George Blecher, as Barbara's half-wit brother...
...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...
Wrote Sir Hugh: "This is the culmination of a whispering campaign put about, I am sure, by my brothers. They say to any newspaperman who will listen that I am a sort of wild half-wit brought up on the Cornish moors . . . They suggest that I was shuffled off overseas because I was clearly unfit to follow their pursuits of the law and politics." Actually, insisted Sir Hugh, he had won as many scholastic honors as an undergraduate at Cambridge as his brothers had when they were up at Oxford. "As to the gypsies," wrote the Cyprus governor, "well...
...first in impact. It is the tale of a feeble-minded old man and of the noose he hangs up for his prodigal son to hang himself with if he should return. The prodigal does return, but does not hang himself--which seems too bad, because his ironic old half-wit father has tied his hidden fortune to the far end of the hangman's rope. Why he should want to help his detestable son instead of killing him is unexplained, but he fails totally. So, in a most frustrating manner, do his son, his daughter, and her husband...
...atmosphere of bare tenseness and frustration is powerful and constantly well-organized by Richard Cattani, the director. Although he has a slight weakness for exaggerated effects, such as the sudden turning on and off of emotion in the half-wit's granddaughter, he is usually calmly imaginative. Such touches as the long pause when the brothers-in-law are left alone together and such tableaus as the final sunset scene are most effective...