Better than La Strada

Maybe it's because I am a Bergman fan and not really a Fellini person, but there is something about this film that places it ahead of that movie though this movie never gets as much acclaim. They both highlight the weird charade of people pretending to be happy and carefree while secretly trapped, but here the drudgery and bi-polar shifts from misery to hope seems more believable and tragic. The more I read about comedy it seems to stem from self-destructive or depressed people, so this film seems that much more poignant. That end to La Strada looks pretty sappy in comparison. I'm not sure what that film was even saying. I mean it is almost too cathartic. In La Strada the chick can at least die, here the people can't even kill themselves to escape the purgatory (except the bear, who is the one performer there against its own freewill, of course).

Not to mention Harriet Anderson is twice the actress that Giulietta Masina is.