Federico Fellini

La strada

La strada

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.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1954
  • 108 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #219

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

    New cover based on an original poster by Ebeling Hegewald

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Essential Fellini

Essential Fellini

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

Collector's Set

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

DVD Box Set

50 Discs

$650.00

Out Of Print

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

    New cover based on an original poster by Ebeling Hegewald

La strada
Cast
Giulietta Masina
Gelsomina Di Constanzo
Anthony Quinn
Zampanò
Richard Basehart
The Fool
Aldo Silvani
Giraffa
Marcella Rovere
Widow
Livia Venturini
Nun
Credits
Director
Federico Fellini
Story
Federico Fellini
Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay
Federico Fellini
Tullio Pinelli
With the collaboration of
Ennio Flaiano
Dialogue
Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography
Otello Martelli
Carlo Carlini
Editing
Leo Catozzo
Music
Nino Rota
Assistant director
Moraldo Rossi
Production director
Luigi Giacosi
Producers
Carlo Ponti
Dino De Laurentiis

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Explore

Federico Fellini

Writer, Director

Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini

One of Italy’s great modern directors, Federico Fellini was a larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique. While his most popular—and accessible—film, the darkly nostalgic childhood memoir Amarcord, is a great entryway into his oeuvre, 8½, a collage of memories, dreams, and fantasies about a director’s artistic crisis, is perhaps his masterpiece. In his early career, Fellini was both a screenwriter for neorealist pioneer Roberto Rossellini and a newspaper caricaturist in postwar Rome, competing influences he would bring together with startling results. After such early works as I vitelloni, Fellini broke away from neorealism’s political strictures with the beloved La strada, and from there boldly explored his obsessions with the circus, societal decadence, spiritual redemption, and, most controversially, women, in such films as Nights of Cabiria, Juliet of the Spirits, and And the Ship Sails On.

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