La Strada

Federico Fellini's La Strada arrived in 1954 and won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the year the category was formally established. Fellini was thirty-four; his wife Giulietta Masina was thirty-three, and her central performance as Gelsomina is one of the great female performances of the 1950s, a register of clown-like physical comedy and devastating emotional candour that owes something to Chaplin and nothing to anyone else.

Zampanò (Anthony Quinn), a brutal travelling strongman who breaks chains across his chest as a roadside act, buys the simple-minded Gelsomina from her impoverished family for ten thousand lire. The two travel together across rural Italy (Gelsomina playing trumpet for the act, Zampanò drinking and degrading her) and slowly form a bond he cannot acknowledge until it is far too late. Richard Basehart, as the trapeze artist Il Matto who briefly travels with them, provides the fragile comic counterweight that the film hinges on.

The film marked Fellini's pivot from late-neorealism toward the more allegorical, character-based work that would define his mature style. Nino Rota's main theme (Gelsomina's trumpet melody) became, with the Sylvia/Trevi music, one of the most beloved film themes of the era. The closing beach scene, with Quinn finally undone, is one of the great endings in post-war cinema.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Masina's performance alone places the film in the canon, and Fellini's first masterpiece established the emotional vocabulary of the rest of his career. Sixty years on, it still breaks people.