The Road (La Strada) (1954)

La Strada

I am sorry to say it, but ”La Strada” is not my favorite movie ever. Not even close.

This movie was recommended to me and everything I have heard and read about it had prepared me for a movie that should knock the socks off me. Not to mention the ton of prizes and general recognition it has won. Sadly it did not click with me. In fact I find it hard to see what makes this movie exceptional and that makes me question what I got out of it. Somehow I feel that I missed something.

“La Strada” is about a street performer, Zampano (Anthony Quinn) and his sidekick, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina). Zampano bought Gelsomina from her mother for 10.000 lire and feels that he owns her. He is a brutal giant of a man and it is telling that his one act is to break a chain with his chest. Gelsomina is an odd character, dreamy and sensitive, but also supposed to be simple, naïve and submissive. In that sense I suppose they fit each other.

Zampano trains Gelsomina to assist him with simple chores and she makes people laugh dressed up as a clown. Together they travel around performing in the streets and at festivals large and small, living in Zampano’s cramped and smelly motorbike van.

Soon Gelsomina gets fed up with Zampano’s brutality and she wants to leave him. She is not successful and soon she is back under the boot. In fact this is repeated a number of times. She could have left with a circus, stayed with a convent or left with the Fool (Richard Basehart), but she always stay with Zampano. The Fool in particular offers a way out and though infatuated by him he also offers her the explanation why she is staying with Zampano. According to The Fool Gelsomina and Zampano need each other and that that is the purpose of their lives and so Gelsomina stays. 

Then eventually Zampano in one of his usual fits of fury kills the Fool and Gelsomina loses it completely. From then on she is completely stuck in an internal world of grief. Zampano gets sick of this and leaves Gelsomina on a cold day wrapped up in blankets. 

Years later Zampano finds out that Gelsomina eventually died of her grief and then also Zampano breaks down.

Ah well.

I understand that this is something about fatalism, about believing that somebody is meant for each other and about realizing that this is so. In this case Gelsomina comes to terms with her fate after talking with the Fool and the boneheaded Zampano only realizes this years later when he finds out she is dead.

I find this kind of fatalism both tragic and more than a little silly, though I know it is a core religious thought to find and settle on a meaning with the life you have. What I see in this movie is a woman kept in a slave like relationship by a brutal man who finds an outlet for his own frustrations in violence. He does not need Gelsomina, he needs a dog. Someone he can kick and yell at, but will remain faithful and lick him in the face no matter how it is treated. This is role he gives Gelsomina. 

Gelsomina on the other hand does not need Zampano. She needs something like the convent or the social network of the circus. People who will accept her as she is and treat her with respect. Yet she misses every opportunity to leave Zampano. The belief that she belongs to Zampano and that they need each other is false and simply an excuse for failure. Nothing ties them together. No children, no marriage, no law, nothing. She should have left him long ago and there were plenty of opportunities.

One can argue that Gelsomina is a simple person and it is hinted at that she should be to some extent retarded and that this is why she chooses the simple but stupid solution to stay with Zampano, but I do not buy that. At critical points she is very lucid indeed and fully aware who she is and what she is doing. She may be a dreamer, but stupid she is not. Instilling the fantasy in such a person that she should belong to Zampano seems to me the greater violation here and the Fool is the guilty one as well as Gelsomina herself. The scene where she leaves the convent and cries is heartbreaking because I know she knows that this is where she belongs.

So what is the message here? That fate is written and we better face up to it? Or that some people are abused in the name of fate? Or that we are supposed to feel sorry for people who believe in fate or, in extension of that, in bullies that are just too stupid to treat people properly?

Probably because of my lack of empathy for the people involved I did not feel engaged in this movie. Not like” The Bicycle Thieves” or “Roma, Open City”. This may be a Fellini thing. I recently saw “I Vitelloni” and that also left me cold. The Book writes that this is the directors most loved and accessible movie and that does not bode well for the many Fellini movies down the road for me. I can only hope the book is wrong.

There are positives though. Both Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina are doing an excellent job with their roles. Both are making quite unique personalities believable. Masina does things to her face and body language that makes her look like a natural clown and that is downright eerie.

 

I also think the production value is high considering the tight budget this movie was made on. They did well with their limited resources.

Ultimately however I think that somewhere between the dismal settings, depressing story and a point that eludes me (unless I am right that this is an unsympathetic story about fatalism) I just did not like this movie. I am all for social message films, but this one just made me angry with the characters and ultimately the director and that I doubt is the point.

The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

Den Barfodede Grevinde

This has been a crazy week. I have been in Istanbul to teach our software and in the evenings I have had two major projects to deal with. That means little sleep and almost no movie time. Fortunately there is waiting time in the airport and so I managed to squeeze in “the Barefoot Contessa” after all. Home again I have to connect the pieces into a whole movie and that actually happens to be what this movie is all about.

“Citizen Kane” was not made in vain. Certainly the team behind “The Barefoot Contessa” saw and studied that movie forwards and backward because structurally and thematically this is a total rip-off. Not saying this is a bad movie, not at all, but you cannot help thinking that they wanted to do a new version of “Citizen Kane”, but this time in color and about an enigmatic movie actress instead of a media mogul.  As far as I can see people have busied themselves guessing who the real actress may be, but my guess is that this is a collage of the fates of several different actresses. The lives of these actresses were rarely easy.

The story starts at the funeral of Maria Vargas, alias Maria D’Amata, now Contessa Torlato-Favrini (Ava Gardner), totally in parallel with Citizen Kane. We now get the story of her rise and fall told by and from the viewpoint of three people close to her and heavily involved in said rise and fall. With such a start we know that we are in for a tragedy and that sort of put a lid on the mood. It is a fatalistic movie because we know where it ends. What we do not know, at least not immediately, is that this is a beautiful tragedy and a very romantic one.

It is incidentally also my main complaint with the movie that the romantic element is played too far. This story gets a bit sticky at times and we have to buy that this otherwise hardboiled realist is at heart a naïve romantic the way we learn that Charles Kane at heart just longed for that lost childhood represented by the sled. I am struggling a bit with that. Well, fortunately this story is not entirely sappy and that is in part due to the borrowed storytelling technique and the quality of the actors.

The key people here are of course the narrators with the addition of a few others. Humphrey Bogart’s character, the director Harry Dawes start out narrating the first part and that is just genius. This is pure “Casablanca”, noir and romantic at the same time and his voice was made for narration. Dawes is in Madrid together with billionaire Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) and his PR guy Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien, second narrator) to scout a “new face” for the movies. The woman they find is Maria Vargas, a local flamengo dancer. Edward wants to go into movies and is setting up a team. He is weird to the extent of being a psycho and I guess this is a nod toward Howard Hughes. Somehow he is dealing with his issues by making movies. His character is interesting and I actually thought that he would play a larger role in the movie, but actually he is here mainly to show that his possessive nature has no effect on Maria Vargas. She cannot be owned. 

Maria is an odd mix of dreamer and realist. She is extremely independent and refuses all intimate contact with a barrier she raises to the world. She is like that with Edwards and his replacement, the South American playboy Alberto Bravano (an almost unrecognizable Marius Goring), her mother as well as the media and public in general. She is the ice queen. Yet she longs for and needs something else. One part of it is her prince, the one person who can unlock her and to whom she needs to raise no barrier. Another is a more physical thing. It is never really explained but it appears when she dances, when she goes to the gypsy camp, the mysterious lover (her cousin?) in the changing room or her flings in her marriage. I am not sure exactly what this is, but it could be a physical aspect of the prince or maybe just a physical outlet past her ice barrier.

The men around her takes different roles. Edwards want to possess her as one of his assets. Bravano wants her glamour. To Oscar Muldoon she is a tool, valuable but difficult to handle. Dawes actually seems to be the only one who actually attempts to understand her or at least have some success at that. This is partly ascribed to his director’s sixth sense and partly because he takes the role of the father figure. I actually like this role for Bogart. At this stage of his life (sadly so near the end) it fits him so much better than as first lover. Because of his insight he is quite protective of Maria. He alone know how fragile she really is.

When Maria finally finds in life what she is looking for it turns out to be fake and that leads to her fall. It is the great irony of the movie and also a lot of the romantic allure. Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi) captures her because he has that gift that most if not all woman wish for, the gift to see her soul and speak directly to it, almost as a mind reader (the rest of us men just raise our arms in frustration when for the n’th time we fail to read the minds of our women, something we are obviously supposed to be able to). Maria buys this totally and believe she has finally found her prince. Trouble is that the count is just smarter than the rest, his intensions are no different. Oh, he may love her, but only because she would look good at his side as contessa. Physically he is unable to love. For a woman where the physical part is so important this is no love at all. She also entirely fails to read him and disaster ensues. 

I think this is a very pretty movie and I would expect nothing less from the legendary Jack Cardiff and I would have been impressed by the storytelling technique had I not seen “Citizen Kane”, but even with that in mind it is very elegantly pulled off. Ava Gardner is very convincing and I actually had to look up if perhaps she had Hispanic roots (none that I could find) and I can only regret that the mid-fifties hairstyles and fashion made women look so auntie.

The selling point on the acting side however is Bogart. I never tire of him and he is put to good use here in a role different from how we are used to see him. 

The only stone in the shoe I can think of is that the romantic elements sometimes get too thick. Almost as if some of the characters, Maria in particular, could use a reality check. I know that is the purpose of the Dawes character, but he is not succeeding very well. Of course if he had there would be no story, alas, I find the romantic elements a little too forced.

I am sure this worked very well at the time and I did find it surprisingly watchable. Would I see it again? Not sure, but I know I was happy to see it this first time.

Animal Farm (1954)

Kammerat Napoleon

”All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”

Ain’t that the truth…

More and more frequently do I now encounter movies that I not only know of, but have also seen. “Animal Farm” is another one of those. I saw it back in high school in an English class and I figure that though it was an easier treat than George Orwell’s novel, it did make a big impression on me back then. The thing is this movies plays a very nasty trick. It lures you into thinking this is a classic Disney-ish feel-good cartoon and then turns the whole lot very dark and bad. Even as an adolescent you are not above feeling that hammer slamming you to the ground. Oh, I think that English teacher enjoyed that very much, he did have a wicked sense of humor.

“Animal Farm” is a British cartoon feature from the Halas and Batchelor studio about how the animals at Manor Farm kicks out the farmer and takes over the farm for themselves as a commune. This part is very happy and uplifting with Disney elements like the little clumsy duckling and the animals farming in their own quirky ways. Halfway in however the pigs who led the rebellion form a new ruling class, which is at first kind of sweet, but soon turn sinister and menacing when the pig Napoleon takes control using loyal dogs as power leverage and send them off to chase down and kill the rival Snowball. Goodbye Disney and goodbye kiddies, I do not think this is a movie for you.

As Napoleon’s rule turn more and more oppressive colors become dark and grayish and gone is any vestige of the previous optimism. This reaches a climax when the big horse Boxer, who was instrumental in practically all physical labor on the farm is sold to a glue factory for whiskey to the pigs. When the other animals thus learns that the pigs have become essentially human and more equal than others they rebel, but this time not in happy optimism, but in furious anger.

It is no secret that Orwell’s story is about the Russian revolution and the rise of Stalin. The movie was even intentionally funded as propaganda against the East bloc. The interesting thing here is how detailed and honest it is. A pure propaganda stunt would be very black and white with no redeeming elements to the opposition. Animal Farm is certainly painting a dark picture of Stalin, but it is actually all for the revolution itself. Farmer Jones (the tsar) had it coming with his mismanagement and brutality. The communist manifest is celebrated as a solution and Lenin as the old hog Old Major is a benign character. When the animal fight off the farmers trying to take the farm back (the White alliance) the animal are heroic, even the pigs, and the animals vigor in farming reflect the creative burst the Soviet union went through in the twenties, symbolized by Snowball (Trotsky). This is all very impressive of a film against communism to say that the people are all right and the idea is good.

Then the page turn and we see the two main points of the movie:

1.   That such an egalitarian society is a fantasy, that someone will eventually rise to dominate the rest, but by claiming to represent the people effectively gag the opposition
2.  That Stalin is an evil power monger who used his tools of strength to secure a power base to exploit his people.

When the farmers attack again (the German invasion in 41) the animals are still heroic, but lead not by joy and optimism but by the force of a tyrant. 

One by one all the things the animals fought for are gone. There is little food and no protection. Their ideals written on the barn disappears or ring more and more hollow the same way as communism devolved into an oppressive system to support the power elite. 

Although this is a blatant propaganda piece it is also scary how spot on it is. In 54 this may have felt like an exaggeration, but with our advantage of hindsight we can tell that the producers were not far off the mark. Halas was a Hungarian and he would therefore have some first or second hand experience with Stalinism and while the upbeat ending can be interpreted as a last ditch effort at crowd pleasing, it is also likely that Halas and sponsors hoped that the people of the East bloc would find inspiration to rebel. The Hungarians did indeed do so a few years later and the Czech again in 68, but it would take 35 before the prediction of the movie became reality with a literal breaking of the wall. Incidentally this may have been why our English teacher made us watch it back in 1990. 

While “Animal Farm” is decidedly not a children’s movie I do consider it both an important film and a very clever one. It grabs the attention of the audience and then twitches you around and forces you to see the awful truth as the producers sees it. It has an uncanny ability to force home its points and even if you disagree with those you have to admit that it is effective.