Umberto D.-1952

Is old age that bad if enduring masterpieces could be teased out of it? Surely the Bard of Avon in King Lear sounded a warning note and made a case using the old king as an example, of the pitfalls of growing old without being wise. Ingmar Bergman showed what a motherlode the old age contained through his film Wild Srawberries. Vittorio De Sica has similarly created a masterpiece using a civil servant who has been left to fend for himself after the society squeezed everything worthwhile out of him. He has a piddling pension. It is ever shrinking and yet the governments dole is his by right but as for his needs for company and ancillaries he is on his own. In that twilight zone a dog is not just a dog but company that can light up his hours. Carlo Battisti as a retired civil servant, impoverished and isolated puts his all in that relationship. Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and director Vittorio De Sica gave Umberto Domenico Ferrari a certain dignity despite of lacking youth, family, friends, health, money, and home. But with little Flike, he could, clutching him to his breast, fretting over his well-being, ultimately begging the dog to come play with him he could go on as though life still continued to beat as with his infancy. But when it runs away the effect on him—on us watching—is devastating. “I have no hesitation in stating that cinema has rarely gone such a long way toward making us aware of what it is to be a man. (And also, for that matter, of what it is to be a dog.)”– André Bazin, 1952
‘It was the fourth film that Zavattini and De Sica made together after World War II, and the first to fail. Shoeshine (Sciuscià, 1946) and The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) had brought into focus, for domestic and international viewers alike, the intuitions, concerns, and methods of Italy’s best postwar filmmakers, and so had established neorealism as a movement. The impact on critics was enormous. “No more actors,” André Bazin wrote of The Bicycle Thief, “no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema”—or, rather, that the film is “one of the first examples of pure cinema.” The impact on audiences was equally strong, with both Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief winning the Academy Award for best foreign-language film’.( Seeing Clearly Through Tears: On the Smart Sentiment of Umberto D. by Stuart Klawans-22Jul03)
We have the first images of Umberto D. out of an impromptu street demonstration of old-age pensioners. The police disperse the crowd leaving the central character to take up the rest. Positioning Umberto between two characters of contrasting status we are given a hint of futility of culture since his intelligence or learning makes no contact or sympathy with his landlady with pretensions to bourgeois respectability. Despite being a gentleman, Umberto finds himself in concert with the housemaid who is uncluttered with book learning or culture. ( a nonprofessional actor, Maria Pia Casilio, discovered by De Sica when she was an apprentice seamstress). Flike is the only major character other than the landlady to be played by a trained performer, the canine actor Napoleone.
* Key Cast: Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova, Elena Rea, Lamberto Maggiorani, Alberto Albani Barbieri, Memmo Carotenuto,
* Awards: Best Story (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scie 1956), Best Foreign Film (New York Film Critics Circle 1955)
* Run Time: 89 minutes
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