However, poor little Masina is like a beaten dog.
Second, Quinn is a selfish, boorish and violent man who mistreats his assistant throughout the film-both verbally and physically. First, Masina plays a slow-witted lady who isn't much of a cook, so her value to Quinn seems minimal at first. BUT, when I just saw it again, I thought it was a masterfully made film! The film begins with Anthony Quinn buying a lady (Giulietta Masina) from her poor mother! Quinn (who is dubbed throughout the film) plays a traveling strongman and he needs a woman to be his assistant. When I first saw the film, I didn't like it and was overwhelmed by the depressing aspects of the movie. Masina is mesmeric and the final scene, with Quinn’s Zampanò briefly gazing up at the sky, is mysterious and unbearably moving.I've gotta admit that I unfairly gave this film a poor review a while back.
Fellini is doing the reverse: he creeps up behind the vulgar trombone honk of ordinary life and plays a heartrending tune on the violin. At one stage, the Fool tries to coach Gelsomina in a simple comedy routine: he will play a sentimental tune on the violin and she will come up behind him and undercut him with a silly parp on the trombone. They then briefly work in a circus, where they fatefully encounter a cheeky Fool (Richard Baseheart) who is to change their lives.
The nuns had told her that they have to keep moving from convent to convent so they don’t form an attachment to worldly things, and poor Gelsomina’s face had lit up, having glimpsed a state of grace in her own poverty and endless travel. Kindly, innocent nuns allow them to stay overnight in a convent, where Zampanò bullies Gelsomina into helping him steal some silver. The thuggish Zampanò abuses poor Gelsomina like a child he hates and she poignantly accepts her fate. Fellini allows this buried tragedy to fester under every succeeding minute of the movie. Apparently, Gelsomina’s sister Rosa used to work with Zampanò, but she has died in circumstances never made entirely clear. He intends to train her as his assistant for his cheesy “strongman” act, taking to the road, sleeping in his rackety caretta motorbike-van, travelling through scrublands and waste grounds of postwar Italy and doing their routine in town squares. Guilietta Masina gives an artlessly Chaplinesque performance as Gelsomina, the elder daughter of a poor family – simple, solemn, bordering on what might today be called learning difficulties – who is sold by her mother for 10,000 lire to a lumbering, hatchet-faced strolling player called Zampanò, unforgettably played by Anthony Quinn. The crowd scenes are extraordinary: simply, the faces Fellini finds to put on screen, children and animals coming serendipitously into shot. I t is 16 years since Federico Fellini’s 1954 masterpiece La Strada was last rereleased in British cinemas and now is another chance to be blown away by this film’s power, its simplicity, its humanity, its theatricality, its heart-wrenching operatic pathos.