La Strada (#219)

With this breakthrough film, Federico Fellini launched both himself and his wife and collaborator Giulietta Masina to international stardom, breaking with the neorealism of his early career in favor of a personal, poetic vision of life as a bittersweet carnival. The infinitely expressive Masina registers both childlike wonder and heartbreaking despair as Gelsomina, loyal companion to the traveling strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn, in a toweringly physical performance), whose callousness and brutality gradually wear down her gentle spirit. Winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, La strada possesses the purity and timeless resonance of a fable and remains one of cinema’s most exquisitely moving visions of humanity struggling to survive in the face of life’s cruelties.

 

Restored by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with The Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

SPECIAL FEATURES

4K digital restoration, undertaken in collaboration with The Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack, featuring the voices of Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart

Audio commentary from 2003 by Peter Bondanella, author of The Cinema of Federico Fellini

Introduction from 2003 by filmmaker Martin Scorsese

Giulietta Masina: The Power of a Smile, a documentary from 2004

Federico Fellini’s Autobiography, a documentary originally broadcast on Italian television in 2000

Trailer

PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland