Nearly 40 years after the film was made, the parable of redemption hidden beneath an apparently picaresque plot had become even more compelling and lyrical.” “La Strada is the movie that perhaps I loved the most.” “The theme for Fellini's spiritual fable is that everyone has a purpose in the universe.

It's the cardinal work of his career, the turning point from his Italian neorealist roots to the florid imagery and surreal narrative style that has come to be known as "Felliniesque." For skeptics who deplore the self-indulgence and grotesquerie of his later films, La Strada is the career high point preceding his ...

The neorealists saw the wasted land, the ragged people, but Fellini looked up and saw that there were stars. Not that he ignored the poverty of the period: "La Strada," which means "the road," takes place in a hovel on wheels.

Gelsomina, an apparently somewhat simple-minded, dreamy young woman, learns that her sister Rosa has died after going on the road with the strongman Zampanò. Now the man has returned a year later to ask her mother if Gelsomina will take Rosa's place.