Word: strada
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most ominous shift in the tide of battle came not long ago when Director Federico (La Strada) Fellini shot a long sequence for his new film La Dolce Vita in front of the Café de Paris. Last year he would have used Doney's for his background. But the management of Caffé Doney is not panicking. Surveying his tourist-crowded tables last week, a Doney manager said disdainfully: "When people ask us where the Café de Paris is, we tell them...
...talent Giulietta Massina evinced in La Strada--her ability to switch quickly among three or four strong and simple emotions--suits her perfectly for this role, in which she must switch only from outside prostitute to inside virgin. In the best sentimental Italian manner, director Federico Fellini selects the most poignant situations and evokes from his actress the response of wistfulness devastated, time and again...
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...
...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...
...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...