Some films you remember for introducing a star: a performer whose very first appearance on screen makes you sure he or she will be part of your film-going future.
I came too late for Garbo. I missed Dietrich. But I was there with the British audience that first set eyes on Giulietta Masina in 1954.
You knew, at once, here was a remarkable personality - a shy, small-bodied, elfin creature with a button nose, a blonde fringe and a smile that ripened across her face like a splitting seed pod. She was then (and remained) married to Federico Fellini, director of La Strada.
In her, this man who loved the circus, found his perfect clown. Inevitably, she was compared with Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, Stan Laurel - I suppose because, in the film, she was cast as a cheerful half-wit (Marx and Laurel) sold by her mother to a circus strongman to help him in his act (an opportunity to put on Chaplin's glad rags).
To my mind, this is too simple a view of her talents. Masina has none of those clowns' daftness or indignation. Her own innocence is child-like, a thing of marvelling and trust. Her effects are small-scale. She hops through this film like a sparrow feeding on crumbs, sad and ageless, her old raincoat drooping off her shoulders like a pair of cropped wings. Fellini associates her with small things, tiny acts ? sowing seeds on wasteland where she and Zampano ( Quinn) are encamped, listening to the wind in the telegraph wires, launching a ladybird off her palm. A wonderfully weightless performance from a woman of 34.
Gelsomina, as she's named, travels through Italy with Zampano, who abuses her by day, deserts her by night. Fellini shot the entire film outdoors, blending a neo-realist view of Italy's backwoods villages with the simple poetry of a fairy tale. Events gain tragic thrust when the nimble-minded tightrope walker (Richard Basehart) in the little circus taunts Zampano, and the latter's vengeful rage destroys what hope of happiness Gelsomina might have found with the man who walks through the air, rather than the brute who crushes the earth.
It's one of Quinn's towering performances too - his last scene, howling out his grief on the seashore, is pitched in the key of a barbaric yawp that suits his over-demonstrative persona. But it's Masina you remember, her fragile wits lapsing into a sad-eyed whimpering as she lays herself down to rest (forever?) beside her tin trumpet. Few directors would risk such pathos today. But in the Fifties, it caught the raggle-taggle desperation of Western Europe, just eight years after the most terrible war in history, with a force that went to your heart, and broke it.
La Strada
Cert: PG
