September 24, 2019 (XXXIX: 5) Vittorio De Sica: UMBERTO D (1952, 98m) The version of this Goldenrod Handout sent out in our Monday mailing, and the one online, has hot links.

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DIRECTOR Vittorio De Sica WRITING story and screenplay by Cesare Zavattini PRODUCED BY Giuseppe Amato, Vittorio De Sica, and Angelo Rizzoli MUSIC Alessandro Cicognini CINEMATOGRAPHY G.R. Aldo EDITING Eraldo Da Roma The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing (Cesare Zavattini) in 1957. CAST Carlo Battisti...Umberto Domenico Ferrari Maria Pia Casilio...Maria Lina Gennari...Antonia Belloni Ileana Simova...La donna nella camera di Umberto Elena Rea...La suora all' ospedale Memmo Carotenuto...Il degente all' ospedale VITTORIO DE SICA (b. July 7, 1901 in Sora, Lazio, Italy—d. November 13, 1974 (age 73) in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France) was an Italian director (35 credits) and actor (161 credits), a leading figure in the neorealist movement (23 writing and 8 producer credits). His meeting with Cesare Zavattini was a very important event: together they created some of the most celebrated films of the neorealistic age, like Sciuscià (Shoeshine) in 1946 and Bicycle Thieves (1948), both of which De Sica directed. Four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià and Bicycle Thieves (honorary), while Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (1970) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Indeed, the great critical success of Sciuscià (the first foreign film to be so recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and Bicycle Thieves helped establish the permanent Best Foreign Film Award. These two films are considered part of the canon of classic cinema. Bicycle Thieves was cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the 15 most influential films in cinema history. De Sica was also nominated for the 1957 Oscar for

Best Supporting Actor for playing Major Rinaldi in American director Charles Vidor's 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a movie that was panned by critics and proved a box office flop. De Sica's acting was considered the highlight of the film. He also won the Grand Prize of the Festival for Miracolo a Milano (1951), the OCIC Award for Il tetto (1956), and was nominated three times for the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. These are the other films he directed: Rose scarlatte (1940), Maddalena... zero in condotta (1940), Doctor, Beware (1941), Un garibaldino al convento (1942), The Children Are Watching Us (1944), Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953), The Gold of Naples (1954), Two Women (1960), The Last Judgment (1961), Boccaccio '70 (segment "La riffa") (1962), The Condemned of Altona (1962), Marriage Italian Style (1964), Un monde nouveau (1966), After the Fox (1966), Woman Times Seven (1967), A Place for Lovers (1968), Sunflower (1970), Lo chiameremo Andrea (1972), A Brief Vacation (1973), and The Voyage (1974). And these are some of his other film parts: The Clemenceau Affair (1917), Beauty of the World (1927), Company and the Crazy (1928), The Old Lady (1932), Love Passes By (1933), The Lucky Diamond (1933), Bad Subject (1933), The Song of the Sun (1934), Mr. Desire (1934), Lohengrin (1936), The Man Who Smiles (1937), Mister Max (1937), Naples of Former Days (1938), Departure

De Sica—UMBERTO D—2 (1938), They've Kidnapped a Man (1938), Department Store (1939), It Always Ends That Way (1939), Manon Lescaut (1940), The Two Mothers (1940), The Sinner (1940), The Adventuress from the Floor Above (1941), Doctor, Beware (1941), La guardia del corpo (1942), Our Dreams (1943), Responsibility Comes Back (1945), Roma città libera (1946), Lost in the Dark (1947), Heart and Soul (1948), Tomorrow Is Too Late (1950), The Earrings of Madame De... (1953), It Happened in the Park (1953), Bread, Love and Dreams (1953), Marriage (1954), The Anatomy of Love (1954), The Bed (1954), Modern Virgin (1954), The Gold of Naples (1954), Too Bad She's Bad (1954), It Happens in Roma (1955), The Miller's Beautiful Wife (1955), Roman Tales (1955), Scandal in Sorrento (1955), The Bigamist (1956), Nero's Mistress (1956), A Tailor's Maid (1957), The Guilty (1957), It Happened in Rome (1957), Count Max (1957), Casino de Paris (1957), Sunday Is Always Sunday (1958), Fast and Sexy (1958), Bread, Love and Andalucia (1958), The Girl of San Pietro Square (1958), Venetian Honeymoon (1959), Men and Noblemen (1959), Il Generale Della Rovere (1959), The Angel Wore Red (1960), The Battle of Austerlitz (1960), The Millionairess (1960), Love in Rome (1960), The Last Judgment (1961), The Wonders of Aladdin (1961), The Orderly (1961), The Two Marshals (1961), Lafayette (1962), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), An Italian in America (1967), The Biggest Bundle of Them All (1968), Dear Caroline (1968), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969), Twelve Plus One (1969), Cose di Cosa Nostra (1971), Snow Job (1972), The Adventures of Pinocchio (TV Mini-Series) (1972), Blood for Dracula (1974), and The Hero (TV Movie) (1976). CESARE ZAVATTINI (b. September 29, 1902 in Luzzara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy—d. October 13, 1989 (age 87) in Rome, Lazio, Italy) was an Italian screenwriter (118 credits) and one of the first theorists and proponents of the Neorealist movement in Italian cinema. He studied law at the University of Parma, but devoted himself to writing. In 1930 he relocated to Milan, and worked for the book and magazine publisher Angelo Rizzoli. After Rizzoli began producing films in 1934, Zavattini received his first screenplay and story credits in 1936. At the same time he

was writing the plot for the comic strip Saturn against the Earth with Federico Pedrocchi (script) and Giovanni Scolari (art) for I tre porcellini (1936–1937) and Topolino (1937–1946). In 1935, he met Vittorio De Sica, beginning a partnership that produced some twenty films, including such masterpieces of Italian neorealism as Sciscià (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), Miracolo a Milano (1951), and Umberto D. (1952). In 1952, Zavattini gave an interview to The Italian Film Magazine 2, republished in English as

"Some Ideas on the Cinema." The thirteen points Zavattini outlined are widely regarded as his manifesto to Italian neorealism. He was nominated for three Oscars throughout his career. These are some of the other films he wrote for: I'll Give a Million (1935), La danza delle lancette (1936), Doctor, Beware (1941), Don Cesare di Bazan (1942), Our Dreams (1943), The Children Are Watching Us (1944), The Testimony (1946), Roma città libera (1946), La grande aurora (1947), Guerra alla guerra (1948), The Walls of Malapaga (1949), Miracle in Milan (1951), The Overcoat (1952), Indiscretion of

an American Wife (1953), A Husband for Anna (1953), The Walk (1953), Angels of Darkness (1954), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1954), The Doll That Took the Town (1957), Men and Wolves (1957), Lipstick (1960), Two Women (1960), Blood Feud (1961), The Young Rebel (1961), Boccaccio '70 (1962), The Condemned of Altona (1962), Mysteries of Rome (Documentary) (1963), The Boom (1963), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), After the Fox (1966), Woman Times Seven (1967), A Place for Lovers (1968), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), and The Children of Sanchez (1978). G.R. ALDO (b. January 1, 1905 in Scorzè, Veneto, Italy—d. November 14, 1953 (age 48) in Italy) was an Italian cinematographer (14 credits). These are the films he worked on: Couleurs de Venise (Documentary short) (1946), La Terra Trema (1948), Heaven Over the Marshes (1949), Sins of Pompeii (1950), Tomorrow Is Too Late (1950), Domani è un altro giorno (1951), Miracle in Milan (1951), Othello (1951), Umberto D. (1952), Three Forbidden Stories (1952), The Wayward Wife (1953), Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953), Via Padova 46 (1954), and Senso (1954).

De Sica—UMBERTO D—3 CARLO BATTISTI (b. October 10, 1882 in Trento, Tyrol, Austria-Hungary [now Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy]—d. March 6, 1977 (age 94) in Florence, Tuscany, Italy) was an Italian linguist, actor (1 credit), and documentary filmmaker (1 credit), famed for his starring role in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. (1952). He studied linguistics at the University of Vienna and founded, along with Ettore Tolomei, the nationalist journal Archivio per l'Alto Adige in 1906. In the early 1920s he became professor of glottology of the University of Florence. Throughout his life he published numerous books and articles on a wide gamut of linguistic topics, ranging from phonetics to Italian dialectology to toponomastics and Vulgar Latin. In recognition of his accomplishments and expertise, Battisti was elected to the Italian national language academy, Accademia della Crusca, in 1925. In 1955 he directed the documentary Nozze fassane. MARIA PIA CASILIO (b. May 5, 1935 in San Pio Delle Camere, Abruzzo, Italy—d. April 10, 2012 (age 76) in Rome, Lazio, Italy) was an Italian film actress (35 credits), best known for major roles in Umberto D. (1952) and Un americano a Roma (1954). These are the other films she acted in: Canzoni di mezzo secolo (1952), Siamo tutti inquilini (1953), Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953), Il viale della speranza (1953), La valigia dei sogni (1953), The Adultress (1953), Bread, Love and Dreams (1953), Angels of Darkness (1954), Mid-Century Loves (1954), Neapolitan Carousel (1954), Air of Paris (1954), Appassionatamente (1954), Il medico dei pazzi (1954), Frisky (1954), Le tournant dangereux (1954), Due soldi di felicità (1954), Roman Tales (1955), I pappagalli (1955), Totò, Peppino e i fuorilegge (1956), Il canto dell'emigrante (1956), Amarti è il mio destino (1957), Always Victorious (1958), Mogli pericolose (1958), Gagliardi e pupe (1958), Arrivederci Firenze (1958), La banda del buco (1960), The Woman of Ice (1960), The Last Judgment (1961), Cuore matto... matto da legare (1967), Lo chiameremo Andrea (1972), Noi uomini duri (1987), Tre uomini e una gamba (1997), and L'ispettore Giusti (TV Series) (1999). From Charles Thomas Samuels, ed., Encountering Directors, NY 1972, interview w/ Vittorio De Sica Rome, May 9, 1971 DS: But when it came out [“The Children Are Watching Us”], we were in the middle of our Fascist period–that absurd little republic of ours–and I was asked to go to Venice to lead the Fascist film school. I refused, so my unfortunate little film, came out without the name of its author.

DS: Neorealism is not shooting films in authentic locales; it is not reality. It is reality filtered through poetry, reality transfigured. It is not Zola, not naturalism, verism, things which are ugly. CTS: By poetry do you mean scenes like the one in The Bicycle Thief, where the father takes his son to the trattoria in order to cheer the boy up only to be overcome with the weight of his problems? DS: Ah, that is one of the few light scenes in the film. CTS: But sad at the same time. DS: Yes, that’s what I mean by poetry.

CTS: You say that neorealism is realism filtered through poetry; nonetheless. It is harsh because you forced your compatriots right after the war to confront experiences they had just suffered through. Didn’t they resist? DS: Neorealism was born after a total loss of liberty, not only personal, but artistic and political. It was a means of rebelling against the stifling dictatorship that had humiliated Italy. When we lost the war, we discovered our ruined morality. The first film that placed a very tiny stone in the reconstruction of our former dignity was Shoeshine. CTS: Are you nostalgic for the earlier days? DS: Very. Umberto D was made absolutely without compromise, without concessions to spectacle, the public, the box office. CTS: Even fewer than The Bicycle Thief? DS: Look, for me, Umberto D is unique [his favorite of his films].Even though it has been the greater critical success, The Bicycle Thief does contain sentimental concessions. DS: In Italy there are about a hundred actors; fewer, if you are critical. In life there are millions. . . . For The Bicycle Thief, only one producer would give me money. David O. Selznick was the only one who saw value in the project, but he wondered whom I would

De Sica—UMBERTO D—4 cast as the father. I replied that I wanted a real Italian worker because I found no one suitable among the available professionals (Mastroianni would have done, but he was too young then, only eighteen). You know who Selznick wanted? Cary Grant. Grant is pleasant, cordial, but he is too worldly, bourgeois; his hands have no blisters on them. He carries himself like a gentleman. I needed a man who eats like a worker, is moved like a worker, who can bring himself to cry, who bats his wife around and expresses his love for her by slamming her on the shoulders, the buttocks, the head. Cary Grant isn’t used to doing such things and he can’t do them. Therefore, Selznick refused to give me money, and I had to beg to finance the film, as I always have had to beg. For my commercial movies, money was always available. CTS: Bresson complained to me that you neorealists were violating reality by dubbing, since the voice is the truest expression of personality. DS: It’s not the voice; it’s what one says. CTS: Still, why do you dub? DS: Because I didn’t have the money. The Bicycle Thief cost a hundred thousand dollars, Shoeshine, twenty thousand. With such budgets, I couldn’t afford sound cameras. CTS: You’ve worked in color and black and white. Which do you prefer? DS: Black and white, because reality is in black and white. CTS: That’s not true. DS: Color is distracting. When you see a beautiful landscape in a color film. You forget the story. Americans use color for musicals. All my best films were made in black and white. CTS: Most critics today maintain that the true film artist writes what he directs. DS: That’s not true. Directing is completely different from writing; it is the creation of life. If Bicycle Thief had been directed by someone else, it would have been good, but different from the film I made. CTS: Does this mean that you think dialogue less important than images? DS: Images are the only important things. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Five films have been made of

The Brothers Karamazov, all bad. Only one came close to Dostoyevsky: the version by Fedor Ozep. That’s how the director is an author. In all these films the same story was used, but only one of them was any good. CTS: Why are you so drawn to the destruction of young children as a theme for your films?

DS: Because children are the first to suffer in life. Innocents always pay. CTS: This is what you show in The Children Are Watching Us. But something even more remarkable in that film is the general decency of the characters. Even that nosy neighbor turns out to be all right, in the moment when she brings the maid a glass of water. Does this represent your belief

about mankind? DS: All my films are about the search for human solidarity. In Bicycle Thief this solidarity occurs, but how long does it last? Twenty-four hours. One experiences moments, only moments of solidarity. That glass of water is one of them. Two hours later there will be no more union; the people won’t be able to bear one another. CTS: But it’s important that the moment occurred. DS: One needs something that lasts longer. CTS: Is that possible? DS: No. Human incommunicability is eternal. CTS: Incommunicability or egoism? DS: Let me tell you something. I wanted to call my films from Shoeshine on, not by their present titles, but “Egoism #1, #2, #3.” Umberto D is “Egoism #4.” CTS: Did you believe in your next film, The Gate of Heaven? DS: No, I made it only to save myself from the Germans. As a matter of fact, the Vatican didn’t find it orthodox enough and destroyed the negative. . . . All the time the Fascists kept asking me when I would finish that Vatican film and come to Venice, and I kept telling them I was at work on it. It took me two years. I completed it the day the Americans entered Rome. It was made to order. There are some good things in it, but the final scene of the miracle is horrible. It was a film made only to save me from the Fascists.

De Sica—UMBERTO D—5 CTS: Why do you use music in The Bicycle Thief so often to provoke an emotional response? DS: I am against music, except at a moment like the end of The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis when we hear the Hebrew Lament, but the producers always insist on it. CTS: You said that this film contains a compromise. . . DS: Not a compromise, a concession. A small, romantic sentimentality in that rapport between father and son. CTS: But that is the most moving thing in the film. DS: Look, I agree that The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D are my best films, but I stoutly maintain that the latter is superior. DS: [about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis] I am happy that I made it because it brought me back to my old noble intentions. Because, you see, I have been ruined by lack of money. All my good films, which I financed by myself, made nothing. Only my bad films made money. Money has been my ruin. Cesare Zavattini on reality in film (quoted in Jack C. Ellis, A History of Film 1979): Substantially then, the question today is, instead of turning imaginary situations into "reality" and trying to make them look "true," to make things as they are, almost by themselves, create their own special significance. Life is not what is invented in "stories"; life is another matter. To understand it involves a minute, unrelenting, and patient search.” De Sica on film technique (from Miricalo in Milano): I follow the development of the plot step by step; I weigh, experience, discuss and define with (Cesare Zavattini), often for months at a time, each twist and turn of the scenario. In this way, by the time we start shooting, I already have the complete film in my mind, with every character and in every detail. After such a long, methodical and meticulous inner preparation, the actual work of production boils down to very little. On neorealism (from Liz-Anne Bawden, Ed., The Oxford Companion to Film 1976): The term "neo-realism" was first applied . . . to Visconti's

Ossessione (1942). At the time Ossessione was circulated clandestinely, but its social authenticity had a profound effect on young Italian directors De Sica and Zavattini, [who] adopted a similarly uncompromising approach to bourgeois family life. The style came to fruition in Rossellini's three films dealing with the [Second World] war, the Liberation, and post-war reconstruction: Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945), Paisà (Paisan/Ordinary People1947), and Germania, anno zero

(Germany, Year Zero/Evil Street, 1947). With minimal resources, Rossellini worked in real locations using local people as well as professional actors; the films conveyed a powerful sense of the plight of ordinary individuals oppressed by political events. The roughness and immediacy of the

films created a sensation abroad although they were received with indifference in Italy. . . . By 1950 the impetus of neo-realism had begun to slacken. The burning causes that had stimulated the movement were to some extent alleviated or glossed over by increasing prosperity; and neo-realist films, although highly praised by foreign critics, were not a profitable undertaking: audiences were not attracted to realistic depictions of injustice played out by unglamorous, ordinary characters. De Sica's Umberto D (1952) was probably the last truly neo-realist film. . . . Although the movement was short-lived, the effects of neo-realism were far-reaching. Its influence can be traced across the world from Hollywood, where stylistic elements in films about social and political problems echoed those of the neo-realists, to India, where Satyajit Ray adopted a typically neo-realist stance in his early films.... Roger Ebert on Umberto D: Umberto is upright, neat, exact, and the cut of his clothes shows that he was once respectable. Now he is a retired civil servant on a fixed income that is not enough to support him, not even in his simple furnished room, not

De Sica—UMBERTO D—6 even if he skips meals. He and his dog are faced with eviction by a greedy landlady who would rather rent his room by the afternoon to shame-faced couples. Vittorio De Sica's "Umberto D" (1952) is the story of the old man's struggle to keep from falling from poverty into shame. It may be the best of the Italian neorealist films--the one that is most simply itself, and does not reach for its effects or strain to make its message clear. Even its scenes involving Umberto's little dog are told without the sentimentality that pets often bring into stories. Umberto loves the dog and the dog loves him because that is the nature of the bond between dogs and men, and both try to live up to their side of the contract. The film is told without false drama. Even when Umberto calls the ambulance and has himself taken to the hospital, there is no false crisis, no manufactured fear that he will die. Later, when Umberto considers suicide, he goes about it in such a calm and logical way that we follow his reasoning and weigh the alternatives along with him, instead of being manipulated into dread. "Umberto D" avoids all temptations to turn its hero into one of those lovable Hollywood oldsters played by Matthau or Lemmon. Umberto Domenico Ferrari is not the life of any party but a man who wants to be left alone to get on with his business. In his shoes we might hope to behave as he does, with bravery and resourcefulness. The movie follows its hero as he faces the possibility that he may lose his room and be turned into the streets to beg. He has always paid his bills and this prospect horrifies him. The opening shot shows him joining a street demonstration in Rome, as old men seek an increase in their meager state pensions. Umberto marches in the protest, but is not a joiner, and indeed when the police disperse the crowd he is angry not at the cops, but at the organizers: "They didn't even get a permit!" He smuggles his little dog Flag into a dining hall where the old are given free lunches, and slips his food under the table for the dog, while tricking the stern welfare workers with some quick plate-switching. He tries to sell his watch, but everyone has a watch they want to sell. We gradually learn the outlines of his life. He lives in a room infested with ants, which the landlady will do nothing about. Adulterous couples leave his room just as

he is returning to it. His friend in the rooming house is Maria the maid, who is pregnant. She isn't sure if the father is the boy from Florence, or the one from Naples. Umberto is not offended that she sleeps with more than one man. He is beyond being surprised by the trouble sex can bring, cares about her as she cares about him, because they are both good people in a bad place. Because his dog has needs, Umberto has needs. He must care for Flag. He is truthfully sick when he arranges to go to the hospital, but not that sick, and the trip is mostly to get a few days of clean sheets and good meals. He arranges for the maid to take care of the dog while he's gone, and even stages a pantomime with a stick and a ball

to distract the dog from following him. Later he finds that the dog ran out the apartment door, maybe to look for him, and is lost. There is a scene of documentary simplicity, in which Umberto seeks Flag at the dog pound, and learns how unwanted dogs are put to death. He peers helplessly into a cage so filled with barking, scrambling dogs that he cannot see for sure if Flag is even there. When he finds the dog, note how De Sica shows them greeting one another. This

whole passage is all the more affecting because the movie doesn't milk it for tears, but simply shows it happening. Neorealism was an Italian movement, born in wartime, continuing through the 1950s, which believed that films should be made close to the surface of everyday life and played by non-professionals who embodied their characters. "Umberto D" is one of the most successful demonstrations of that theory. The old man is played by Carlo Battisti, then 70, a university lecturer who had not acted before. De Sica (1901-1974) said his method was to form a mental image of a character while working on the screenplay with his longtime collaborator Cesare Zavattini. "Until I can find the man, woman or child who fits the figure I see in my mind's eye," he wrote, "I do not begin." With "Umberto D," "before fortune smiled on me once again, I had searched Rome, Naples, and other cities and had lingered for hours, for days even, in those places where I was most likely to find the kind of old-age pensioner who was the hero of my film...but I had not yet met the person who from the first had smiled at me with sorrowful dignity from the pages of the script."

De Sica—UMBERTO D—7 Sorrowful dignity is exactly what Battisti embodies for Umberto. He is observant, understanding, sympathetic. He doesn't rail against the injustice of the world, but is simply determined to defend the corner he occupies with his dog. Because Umberto doesn't talk much with other characters, we have to determine his thoughts by how he looks and what he does, and there is a masterful scene in which he considers begging in the street, and decides against it. Note the timing of this sequence. With a slightly different twist, it could shot-by-shot be a comic bit for Chaplin's Little Tramp, but De Sica holds it to understated pathos. Umberto watches a successful beggar. He puts out his own palm, halfway, not really committing himself. As a man is about to give him money, he turns the hand over, as if testing for rain. He cannot beg. He thinks. He gives his hat to his dog, which sits up and holds it in its mouth, while Umberto hides nearby. No, this will not work either: He will not demean his dog by making it do something he would not do. The stages by which Umberto arrives at the idea of suicide and then is drawn away from it are among the best in the film. His dog is central to the action--both because he will not abandon it by his own death, and because the dog refuses to leave his side. It is the fact of the dog's love that saves him, because he cannot ignore it. One great scene takes place when Umberto takes the dog to a couple that boards unwanted dogs. It's clear they're in it only for the money, and that many of their pets don't have long to live. Umberto offers them money to take Flag, but their eyes tell him it is not enough to support the dog for long. Leaving, he hides under a bridge, but the dog finds him, and again we're reminded of a sequence that could be in a Chaplin film, but has been toned down to quiet sadness. "Umberto D" tells what could be a formula story, but not in a formula way: Its moments seem generated by what might really happen. A formula film would find a way to manufacture a happy ending, but good fortune will not fall from the sky for Umberto. Perhaps his best luck is simply that he has the inner strength to endure misfortune without losing self-respect. It is said that at one level or

another, Chaplin's characters were always asking that we love them. Umberto doesn't care if we love him or not. That is why we love him. Stewart Klawans: “Seeing Clearly Through Tears: On the Smart Sentiment of Umberto D.”(Criterion) Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning routine), performed with little or no dialogue and shot as if in real time. People who admire the work of such contemporary filmmakers as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chantal Akerman, and Abbas Kiarostami can see something up-to-date in this aspect of Umberto D., and even recognize in it a principal source of today’s cinema of the steady gaze.

These same critics generally dislike the pooch. They feel that screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and director Vittorio De Sica did enough to immiserate their title character by depriving him of youth, family, friends,

health, money, and home. Surely an audience needs no further prompting to feel the isolation of Umberto Domenico Ferrari. That the filmmakers also make him go everywhere with little Flike—clutching him to his breast, fretting over his well-being, ultimately begging the dog to come play with him—seems to these viewers an almost invasive ploy, as if Zavattini and De Sica were trying to force into their hands an already soggy handkerchief. But as someone who begins weeping at the first notes of the title music—someone who thinks this film’s long, undramatic sequences can be seen best when watched through tears—I wouldn’t want Zavattini and De Sica to have backed off. I believe their greatest work, which surely includes Umberto D., kept touch faithfully with popular sentiment, even while helping to create the decidedly un popular tradition of the art-house film. Perhaps today’s division between auteurist productions and mass-market movies might be eased, and contemporary cinema enlivened, if our filmmakers would more often put

De Sica—UMBERTO D—8 themselves at risk as Zavattini and De Sica did with Umberto D. Of course, this prescription is open to question, considering that Umberto D. was released to utter disaster. It was the fourth film that Zavattini and De Sica made together after World War II, and the first to fail. Shoeshine(1946) and Bicycle Thieves (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 Bicycle Thieves, “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 Bicycle Thieves winning the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. But what Zavattini and De Sica had established with these earlier films they brought to a close with Umberto D. Although the picture won the support of viewers abroad—the New York Film Critics Circle voted it best foreign film of the year, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Zavattini’s script for best screenplay—Umberto D. was a miserable flop at the Italian box office. Worse, upon its release in early 1952, the film came under attack from Giulio Andreotti in Libertà, the weekly organ of the Christian Democratic Party. Since the Christian Democrats had full, seemingly permanent control of the government, and since Andreotti (later to serve seven times as prime minister) controlled the state’s movie production loans, and exercised the right of precensorship over scripts, the brand of film criticism he practiced was unusually powerful. According to Andreotti, De Sica was guilty of “slandering Italy abroad” by “washing dirty linen in public.” Writing in the voice of his party, his government, or the Italian nation—it wasn’t clear which—Andreotti said: “We ask De Sica not to forget the minimal commitment toward a healthy and constructive optimism that can help humanity to move forward and to gain some hope. It seems to us that the world fame that our directors

have rightly acquired gives us the right to demand that he accept his duty and fulfill this task.” This official condemnation, however damaging, would not have been enough in itself to doom Umberto D. with the public. You might imagine, for example, that the Christian Democrats’ political rivals would have rallied to the film. But the main opposition was the Communist Party, which had conducted its own attack against Zavattini and De Sica for what it too saw as pessimism. And so, in Italy’s highly politicized film culture, Umberto D. opened without organized support, to compete against

the recently revived Cinecittà’s superproductions and such government-subsidized fare as Don Camillo (1952), a nougat-centered clerical farce. With the dismal release of Umberto D., Italy’s neorealist period came to an end. But was the film itself dismal? Or was the pessimism that offended viewers in 1952 no more objectionable, intrinsically, than the sentimentality that bothers some critics today? For the beginnings of an answer, one need look no further than the first images of Umberto D., which dramatize an impromptu street demonstration by old-age pensioners. The event has the circumstantial brusqueness of a news item—one of those fatti di cronaca that

Zavattini liked to use as seeds for his stories. The street, shown in deep focus, appears to have more than enough space to accommodate the crowd. There’s even room for a city bus, which noses forward in the opposite direction of the march, as if to assert the rights of normal routine. Although Alessandro Cicognini’s music comes on with the throb of verismo opera, the initial view prompts curiosity more than tears. Some viewers may even let out an ironic laugh when the police drive in to break up the protest and the camera, shooting through the windshield of one of the cops’ jeeps, records the pursuit of the demonstrators: a gang of old men, who huff away in hats and flapping overcoats. The camera glimpses Umberto two or three times during this ruckus, but it does not single him out until the protesters have dispersed, to pronounce curses against their own organizers and recover their breath. So Umberto D. introduces its protagonist as one figure among many.

De Sica—UMBERTO D—9 His situation, at first glance, seems faintly ridiculous. His person—embodied by the nonprofessional actor Carlo Battisti, a Florentine professor of linguistic science—is distinguished by an alert, somewhat rabbity face and fussy manner, which hint at a lifetime of intelligence expended to no real effect on the world. The burden of decorum, the futility of culture: the film touches on these themes lightly, almost comically, in its opening sequence, but soon begins to insist upon them by positioning Umberto between two characters of contrasting status—apparently the last two people in the world with whom he is still in contact. As an educated, middle-class man, he might be expected to feel closer to the woman from whom he rents a room, but she is a tall, blonde monster of bourgeois pretension. Played by Lina Gennari with all the mannerisms that a veteran actor can muster and Battisti cannot, she comes across rather like an unfunny Margaret Dumont. By the end of the film, she will literally decorate Umberto out of her house, there being no space for him in her version of the high life. And so, despite being a gentleman, Umberto finds himself in concert with the housemaid (another nonprofessional, Maria Pia Casilio, discovered by De Sica when she was an apprentice seamstress), whose dark, ingenuous, button-eyed face is unmarked by book learning. If I make this character scheme sound more diagrammatic than it actually plays, it’s only to make a crucial point about what Umberto D. is not. Unlike other neorealist films, such as Shoeshine or Bicycle Thieves, it is not a story about the working class. Nor does Umberto D. concern itself with the neorealist theme of economic hardship as such, despite Zavattini’s quickness in telling us, right in the first scene, how many lire Umberto gets for his monthly pension, how much he pays out in rent, and how much he owes. Beggars abound in the

film, soup kitchens and charity wards extend their provisional shelter; but Zavattini also makes it plain that Umberto needs these resources partly because he ran up debts, while other pensioners are in the clear. When I say that Umberto D. pushes neorealism to new extremes, then, it’s not only because of the film’s extraordinary concentration on the mundane but also because of its subject matter, which goes to the limit of social criticism. Yes, poverty and old age bear down on Umberto, in ways

that are specific to Rome in the early fifties—but the key problem is indecency. Umberto is slowly being stripped of his dignity, and even of the desire for dignity. Which brings us back to Flike. He is the only major character other than the landlady to be played by a

trained performer, the canine actor Napoleone. Perhaps this fact accounts for the movieness of Umberto’s interactions with him—a movieness that offends people who want a “perfect aesthetic illusion of reality,” giving the impression of “no more cinema.” But De Sica was not necessarily one of these people. He had spent his life in show business; in his youth, he had been Italy’s most popular star. He knew that sentiment is as legitimate a mode of storytelling as irony or satire, so long as the sentiment is honest—which I believe it is in Umberto D. If the main character feels that his humanity itself is slipping away, his sense of being a proper man, then why shouldn’t he have a sentimental relationship with a dog? The great critic I. A. Richards once remarked that you could characterize an era of history according to a certain choice between anxieties: were people more worried about being thought sentimental or stupid? In Umberto D., two very smart filmmakers had the courage to jerk tears, and created a masterpiece. Couldn’t we use a few more?

De Sica—UMBERTO D—10

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2019 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS (SERIES 39) Oct 1 Charles Laughton The Night of the Hunter 1955

Oct 8 Masaki Kobayashi Harakiri 1962 Oct 15 Nicholas Roeg Don’t Look Now 1973

Oct 22 Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles 1974 Oct 29 Larisa Shepitko The Ascent 1977

Nov 5 Louis Malle Au revoir les enfants 1987 Nov 12 Charles Burnett To Sleep With Anger 1990

Nov 19 Steve James, Frederick Marks & Peter Gilbert Hoop Dreams 1994 Nov 26 Alfonso Cuarón Roma 2018

Dec 3 Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge 2001

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The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.