Released to Criterion this week is Umberto D., Vittorio De Sica’s classic film about a pensioner who struggles to make ends meet in an economically-ravaged Italy in the post-war years. A retired civil servant, the ageing Umberto is determined to keep his dignity as he navigates a series of challenges in his quest to satisfy man’s basic needs of food, shelter and friendship. In the latter, Umberto has his constant companion – his dog, a terrier named Flike. I’m not crying OK? It’s just something in my eye.
Cast in the titular role of Umberto Domenico Ferrari (to give him his full title) is the non-professional actor Carlo Battisti, a seventy-year-old Florentine professor of linguistic science. We are introduced to this small fussy looking man in a crowd scene that skilfully addresses the film’s issue from the off; a group of elderly protesters demanding a state pension on which they can adequately live. If audiences are still unclear as to how economically deprived the vulnerable were in post-war Italy, they ought to be left in no doubt by the subsequent scenes which see Umberto eat with a host of pensioners in some kind of subsidised canteen/soup kitchen and, after having been forced to sell his pocket watch, his return home to a less than salubrious, ant-infested accommodation run by a blousy bourgeois landlady, played by Lina Gennari.
On discovering that his room has been let to a courting couple while he has been out, Umberto naturally protests, only for his cries to fall on deaf ears as the landlady – who likely had, shall we say, ‘a good war’ of fraternisation or fascistic leanings – points out that his back rent is now insurmountable and he is to be evicted shortly. Away from the statuesque and unfeeling blonde, the educated Umberto finds sympathy and conversation from the put-upon young housemaid, Maria. In the kitchen, the pair share their woes with Maria revealing that she is pregnant and uncertain about which of her two boyfriends is the father. Their bond will later reach a crisis point when – admitted to hospital with tonsillitis – Umberto leaves his beloved dog in Maria’s care. When the dog escapes via a door the landlady has left open, the returning Umberto scolds poor Maria before taking to the streets to seek Flike and rescue him from the dog catchers. As was the fashion with neo-realism, the role of Maria was filled by another non-professional actor, Maria-Pia Casilio, whom De Sica discovered working as an apprentice seamstress. Following Umberto D. she would go on to have a prolific career throughout the ’50s and ’60s playing similar small-town girl roles. In contrast, Carlo Battisti, having made his debut here, seemingly saw no need to ever appear before the camera again.
Umberto D. was the fourth film made in the post-war period by the partnership of De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini. Their previous effort, Bicycle Thieves, was rightly acclaimed as an immediate classic. A heartbreaking, Oscar-winning giant of world cinema, it is arguably the pinnacle of the neo-realism genre that the duo were key proponents of. But, unlike their other films, Umberto D. explores Italy’s poverty and hardship not from the point of view of the working class (such as Maria) but from its middle-class, educated central protagonist. Despite falling on hard times, Umberto is shown – to an almost unsympathetic degree – to refuse almost all confrontation of the severity of his situation. The decline of respectability is something he steadfastly ignores, as he is determined to keep up appearances at all costs. This is perhaps best exemplified by one of the film’s most famous scenes in which Umberto attempts to beg for spare change in the streets. In a tragicomic sequence of Chaplinesque proportions, this fussy little old man painfully weighs up his options, timidly thrusting out his hand towards passing commuters. When one Good Samaritan stops to rifle through his pockets, Umberto panics at the thought of what he must look like and flips his hand over, gazing up at the sky at some elusive spots of rain. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, he shies away from the ignominy by removing his hat and placing it in Flike’s jaw – the dutiful dog taking his spot and appealing for change as he hides behind a nearby pillar. When the loyal terrier is spotted begging on his hind legs with the proffered hat between his teeth by someone Umberto respects, the old man gives up his hiding place and chides the dog for his wayward playful spirit.
This vein of selfish pride is further explored when he fails to appreciate the concerns that Maria – a working-class Catholic woman about to give birth to an illegitimate baby – feels about her own situation, despite the sympathy, she has shown him and unthinkingly blames her for Flike’s flight. Why did De Sica and Zavattini change up the winning formula? Well, as Ken Loach (a student of neorealism himself) said of his film I, Daniel Blake, his intention with that film was to show how we are all arguably a stopped pay cheque or two away from insurmountable hardship. I suspect this was the message that De Sica and Zavattini were also striving to communicate too.
It is only when Umberto is confronted with the prospect of losing the dog forever, firstly by the prospect of the dog pound and secondly by a dramatic, edge-of-your-seat betrayal of trust between owner and pet, that we realise how truly important Flike is to him. He is all he has got.
Viewed today, Umberto D. can easily take its place alongside the other films from this purple patch and as an important, seminal title in the neo-realist movement. But it wasn’t always that way. Yes, it received international acclaim with nominations for Best Screenplay at the 1957 Oscars and the Grand Prix at Cannes, but in its native Italy, things were very much different. Things were very political, as of course it always seems to be. Giulio Andreotti, future seven-time prime minister and the then Undersecretary of State, did not hold with the neo-realist aesthetic, believing it presented Italy in a negative light. So incensed was he by such titles that he drew up legislation to withhold funding and cinema exhibition licences for any film that, in his mind, “slandered Italy abroad”. It was a typical reaction from the government; rather than simply accept their own failings as outlined by De Sica and Zavattini and try to do better for the Italian people, they instead opted for a combative approach in which they made a stand against the liberally-minded creatives and played on notions of patriotism (the crime of slandering Italy) as a means to get the very public they victimised and neglected on-side. Finally, if these creatives persisted with such work, then they were to be silenced completely. Nothing much changes does it? Released without the kind of support it required to reach the masses, Umberto D. proved to be De Sica and Zavattini’s first flop. Audiences flocked instead to The Little World of Don Camillo, a wildly successful clerical comedy based on the popular works of Giovannino Guareschi, which came with that all-important government funding and seal of approval. Neo-realism went into decline, to be replaced by populist, money-making filoni such as the Peplum movies and ultimately, the Spaghetti Western and Poliziotteschi.
Some critics may also argue that the film is prone to sentimentality in a way that the duo’s previous efforts, notably Bicycle Thieves, was not. In doing so, they point towards including Flike as an emotionally manipulative device. Personally, I can’t entirely agree with this argument and cite how minimal Flike actually is in the initial proceedings. To my mind, De Sica and Zavattini use the dog very skilfully, building on his presence as a means to show Umberto’s pitiable situation far more than manipulate the audience’s sympathy. It is only when Umberto is confronted with the prospect of losing the dog forever, firstly by the prospect of the dog pound and secondly by a dramatic, edge-of-your-seat betrayal of trust between owner and pet, that we realise how truly important Flike is to him. He is all he has got. Pride comes before a fall, and it is in the film’s latter stages that we begin – through Flike – to connect emotionally to an old man’s need to live out his remaining days with dignity.
This release from Criterion includes the inevitable trailer, That’s Life: Vitterio De Sica, a documentary made for Italian TV some twenty years ago that runs to just shy of an hour, and an interview from around the same time with Maria Pia Casilio, who played the kindly pregnant housemaid Maria.
UMBERTO D IS OUT NOW ON CRITERION COLLECTION BLU-RAY
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