Myth Happens

I completely failed to post about La strada (1954) whenever it was before Readercon I finally saw the film from start to finish; I cannot remember now any of the notionally intelligent things I wanted to say about it, except that I loved it. It's paired itself up in my mind with The Seventh Seal (1957), another story that felt like watching cards dealt out from a stranger's deck of icons, spare and essential. This one is more commedia than mystery play; its characters have the simplicity of masks, but their faces are real. A strongman with one trick and a motorcyle, his assistant who looks as though human is not her natural shape. I confess myself blown away by Richard Basehart. He made a perfectly fine Ishmael in Moby Dick (1956), but as the wire-walker known as Il Matto—the Fool—he's absolutely amazing. He performs his act with the cardboard wings of an angel on his shoulders and a white tear painted on his cheek, spotlighted against the black sky in the miraculous grace of someone who never does touch the ground, but he's a trickster, mercurial and troublemaking, whose gentleness toward Gelsomina is as impulsive as his merciless taunting of Zampanò; he courts his own death and snickers and presents a fey silent clown of a girl with her soul in the form of a pebble even as he sets in motion the events that will destroy her, and in the end he, too, cannot escape the world. How in the hell did this man end up remembered for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? He and Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn are some of the most extraordinary things I've seen on a screen. And Fellini does numinous like gangbusters—not in the shove and fervor of a saint's day procession, but in the lone figure on the tightrope: a tin cup, a battered trumpet, a leather jacket cracking at the seams. Even with Marcello Mastroianni, I have trouble believing I'll love 8½ (1963) more. We'll see. First I'm sleeping. Tomorrow, complex social interactions.