Film Forum

2:45 ONLY

Directed by Federico Fellini | Written by Fellini & Tullio Pinelli with Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography by Otello Martinelli | Music by Nino Rota
Starring Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart

(1954) Bought from her mother to assist the act of Anthony Quinn’s brutish strongman “Zampanò,” Giulietta Masina’s simple-minded peasant girl Gelsomina is taught a haunting tune by a dreamy aerialist (American actor Richard Basehart) and assured that she too has a place in the world. An enormous international success and personal triumph for Masina, La Strada was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of its year.    

Restored in 4K by the Criterion Collection and The Film Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna’s L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from a 35mm dupe negative preserved by Beta Film GmbH. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE.

Reviews

Read J. Hoberman’s column on LA STRADA in The New York Times.

“A fable grounded in the elemental… the film that, for the rest of [Fellini’s] life, he held closest to his heart.”
– Martin Scorsese, Harper’s
Read the full essay.

“TRANSPORTED NEOREALISM TO A NEW PLACE... The moon-faced Masina all but patented the adjective 'Chaplinesque' with her repertoire of cute frowns and alert smiles, hopeful eye-rolls and pantomimed wonder.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

“LA STRADA APPEARS TO HAVE DEFIED TIME. One of the indelible foreign films of the 1950s, it brought a kind of poetry to the screen that dazzled audiences at the time and still works today... A melding of the neorealism in Fellini's past with the fable elements that were to dominate his future, La Strada is basically a three-character drama about the loneliness and the elusiveness of love. Using the grit of neorealism to combat any excessive sentimentality, Fellini...fashioned a story that is very simple on one level and anything but on another...The acting by Basehart, Quinn and Masina defines La Strada. Though all are excellent, it is Masina...who is most memorable. Part silent clown, part sophisticated child with a face that registers and magnifies every emotion, Masina's presence is one of the most magical in world cinema, and reason enough all by itself to make this revival worthwhile.”
– Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“For quite I while I had been wanting to introduce my younger daughter to the cinema of Federico Fellini, and the obvious place to start seemed to be La Strada. After all, here was a 'vintage Fellini': the circus and the seashore, piazzas at night and open-air weddings, humor and compassion in a world that is often hostile and grotesque, yet magical and full of apparitions, of surprise, where laughter and melancholy are intermingled. Also there are Nino Rota's musical score, Otello Martelli's black-and-white photography and, most of all, Giulietta Masina's memorable performance as Gelsomina... As the movie unfolded, I realized that I hadn't quite prepared my daughter for its emotional impact and its mesmerizing power. Nearly 40 years after the film was made, the parable of redemption hidden beneath an apparently picaresque plot had become even more compelling and lyrical.”
– Martin Scorsese, The New York Times

“La Strada is the movie that perhaps I loved the most.”
– Pope Francis

“The theme for Fellini's spiritual fable is that everyone has a purpose in the universe. Though the background is neorealist poverty, it is transformed by the romanticism of the conception... Even if one rejects the concepts of this movie, its mood and the details of scenes stays with one; a year or two later a gesture or situation suddenly brings it all back.”
– Pauline Kael