Winner of over fifty prizes, including the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, La Strada established Fellini’s international reputation. (He has said, “La Strada is really the complete catalogue of my mythical world, a dangerous representation of my identity, undertaken without precautions.”) Giulietta Masina gives a famous performance as the waif Gelsomina, sold by her mother for a plate of pasta to the brutish Zampano (Quinn), a strong-man circus performer. Gelsomina’s fidelity to the man who seduces, abuses, and then rebuffs her leads to tragedy when he murders a tightrope artist. Critics have long debated whether La Strada, as a “spiritual fable with symbolic characters” (Pauline Kael), constitutes a break with the tradition of Italian neorealism, but the debate seems irrelevant to audiences who remember the performances of the three leads, Nino Rota’s haunting music, and the wrenching final sequence with Quinn alone in the dark on the beach. “For all its sentimentality, this overshadows virtually everything Fellini has made since La Dolce Vita” (Geoff Andrew).