 Welcome to St. Louis World Cinema. I'm the host of Speddy St. Louis. On this show, we discuss films of international importance and from all around the world. Today, I'm focusing on my favorite, well, one of my favorite directors, Friderico Fellini, and we're going to talk about his opus Lestrada starring his wife, Giulietta Massini, Anthony Quinn, and Richard Basart. I love this movie. My first Friderico Fellini movie was Giulietta's Spirits. I must have been about 14 or 15 when I watched it at Dartmouth Film Society in Hannover, Hampshire, and I loved the surrealism of the movie. It was probably one of my first non-Hollywood but also first European movie that explored techniques and utilized techniques that involved symbolism. I've loved Fellini ever since. I think that Giulietta's Spirits was my first Fellini. Lestrada was my second. La Dolce Vita might have been my third. E. Vitiloni was my fourth, and Omicode was my fifth. I really like that Friderico. So, Lestrada is a tale of Gelsamina, who is sold by her mother to the strongman, Zapano, who had Gelsamina's older sister Rosa travel with him for a year. I don't know what happened to Rosa. I think that she might have croaked or something, but he returns to the village and asks Gelsamina's mother if he can have her too. And he pays her 10,000 lira, which isn't very much money, but she has children to feed, so she sells her other daughter to the strongman. Last weekend, I watched the entire Leontalium on YouTube. I couldn't find another sub-titles, and if you watch it, and because I love the movie, and I knew the plot, I was willing to watch it without translation. So, if you do happen to watch it in Italian, you will think that the acting is sort of hammy, but Gelsamina is playing a simple-minded creature who is taken advantage by Anthony Quinn's British Ways. So they travel the road, that's what Lestrada means in Italian, burning money where they can. He teaches her how to play the trumpet and drum, and so as he breaks iron across his chest, she's his chorus while it's going on, and they pass the hat for money. Fellini conceded this idea through various ways. He started to think about his childhood want, his wife of five years, Julia Messina, who plays Gelsamina. He loved the pictures of her as a little girl, and then one night, commuting, he saw a man pulling a cart and a woman pushing it, and he started to think about the brutality, the brutality that occurred to people as they're trying to make their money traveling on the road. Now, this plot is very simple, but complex at the same time. At one point, Giulietta wanders away from her strongman's wagon and meets another traveler named Immato, the fool, played by Richard Bassard. They strike up a temporary friendship, but as winter's coming on, Gelsamina and Sopano get hired by the circus where Immato is working. Catastrophic events occur because of Anthony Quinn's jealousy towards Richard Bassard's character. I'll let you watch the movie to check it out. As a teenager who without any cynicism and my heart flow romance, I laugh throughout most of this movie. I can't believe I was so hard-hearted as a kid, but when you see Anthony Quinn do his thing and he's rough and rough and all tough, and then when you see Giulietta Massina play his simple-minded traveling partner, she's sort of, it looks kind of corny. And then Richard Bassard, he's hysterical. So the seriousness of the movie escapes me as a teenager. However, even as a teenager, when I saw the end of the movie, I was still, I don't understand why I was still sort of laughing, but I think the tragedies of life when you're younger don't seem like tragedies. They just seem kind of comic and bittersweetly funny. The screenplay is by Fellini and Tulio Pirelli and Enile Flaliano. The music was composed by Nino Rotem. It was released in Venice, September 6th, 1954, distributed by Paramount, and it did win the Silver Lion at Venice. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Paunti, it also starred Aldo Silvani, Mocello Vini, and Livano Venturini. Sorry, my Italian's a little bit rusty. When the three script writers showed this script to Luigi Ovea, who they wanted to produce it, he started crying. He read the whole thing, and Federico was, I've got it. And Luigi said, this is literature, it's not a movie. It's a masterpiece. It's ill, there will be trouble. You won't make a dime off it, but he said, you won't make a layer off it, which I kind of liked. While he was directing E. Visualoni, an autobiographical movie about his youth in a village, this is how he conceived the plot. So it was a long brewing process, this story. He was able to call his cast from a movie called Angels of Darkness, Dona Provide, directed by Giuseppe Amato. Valencia Cortese was married to Richard Basard at the time, was in the film. And Fellini saw Richard Basard, thought he would be perfect Amato because he reminded of Charlie Chaplin. I'm quoting a lot of this from a computer, by the way. And Basard was like, well, yeah, he saw E. Visualoni. Yeah, I'll be in your movie. Anthony Quinn, who plays a strong man, was handed literally for days by Federico. Please, you have to be my strong man. Many people were considered, for various reasons, Fellini did not want to use them. Finally, Quinn is at Ingrid Bergman and Reveal to Rosalina's house one night, watching E. Visualoni. And he was totally amazed. He was flabbergasted. He goes, this guy's been chasing me down for days trying to get me to be in this movie. So, of course, he was in the movie. Giulietto was in a brainer. Now, Dela Rentus, who was a producer, wanted to get rid of Giulietto. He didn't consider her suitable for the part of Zampano's Paramour. But when Paramount saw the rushes, he quickly decided to throw her a contract but paid her only a third of what Quinn was playing. Quinn, at the time, was also working for Dela Rentus, doing Attila the Hun. So he had the most gruesome commute. He had to get up at 3.30 in the morning and prepare for Fellini's movie and then drive to Rome to do Attila. And he said, I was haggard for Zampano. I looked haggard, which was great for Zampano's role, but not quite what we wanted Attila to look like. It wasn't okay that Attila looked haggard. Fellini also had a nervous breakdown during the end filming of the shoot, but he kept it a secret and was seeing a Freudian cycle analyst at the time. I think sometimes directors just throw themselves into stuff that they just keep going, going, going. They can't get out of it and they need all of their mental survival skills to survive their artistic process. One last thought. La Strada received the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The judges didn't really pay too much attention to Lucino Lucante's Senso. His assistant, Franco Zefarelli, who went on to direct the famous Romeo and Juliet, blew a whistle during Federico's acceptance speech and was then attacked by a friend of Fellini's, Maralda Rossi. Shades of Paris in the 20s when Cokto, Chibinski, Nijinsky, and all of them would cause fistfights over what was art and what was not when it came to theater and film. I think that that's it for me today. I hope you've enjoyed St. Louis' World Cinema. We're going to explore Federico some more in our next episode. And I hope you've enjoyed the show today. Please check out La Strada. You will enjoy it immensely. And while you're at it, also check out Eva Falloni on the Chord. La Dolce Vita. And what's that other one I love? La Strada. La Dolce Vita. Oh, Juliet of the Spirits. Until next time, darlings. Take care and stay away from those bad movies. Ciao.