Umberto D.
August 3, 2003
In the 1940’s, before the Great War, Hollywood had a strangle hold on foreign markets. In Italy you were more likely to encounter people talking about Clark Gable or John Wayne than you would people discussing the films of Vittorio De Sica. Rightfully so, but with the war came a shifting of the guard; American films suddenly couldn’t make the shores they used to thanks to strict wartime blockades. Italy, and invariably Italian cinema after the war were reeling; poverty was rampant, beggars and shoeshine boys lined the streets of Rome three heads longer than any bread line or backup at a soup kitchen. What was to be done, society was in shambles and American fantasy films and happy ending did more to discourage and encourage.
Out of this feeling of outrage and destitute for a countries people was born a sense of urgency in Italian directors. The wave was called Neo-realism, a sub-genre of filmmaking that was everything that an M-G-M musical wasn’t; harsh yet poetic, devastating yet with slivers of hope, bitterly realistic yet with smarts enough to not only dream, but to suggest, perhaps a reason, but never a solution. There were a handful of directors responsible for Neo-realism, many often note Luchino Visconti’s “Ossessione” as the groundbreaker, I’d choose any one of Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy, especially “Rome, Open City”, but nobody had more of an influence, and nobody today is more recognizable as THE master of the short lived genre than Vittorio De Sica, whose best and most personal film from the glorious era, “Umberto D.” has recently been restored and released on DVD.
De Sica and partner Cesare Zavattini (a noted novelist of the time) collaborated on roughly 6 Neo-realist films from 1942 (traces can be found in their first collaboration, “The Children Are Watching Us”) to 1952, where “Umberto D.” is often hailed as the swan song of the period. Zavattini later would speak of this fruitful decade as a burgeoning of two minds with a passion, nee, “a need to tell the truth.” In ‘46’s “Shoeshine” they focused on a pair of best friends, shoeshine boys who get divided and are forced to turn on each other in a brutal reform prison. In the famous 1948 film “The Bicycle Thief” a poor man walks the streets of Rome with his young son in search of a stolen bicycle, his means of transportation, and in turn, money.
Truth, it is said, is in the faces, and the boys of “Shoeshine”, torn apart by cruel adults, and the wandering father and son of “The Bicycle Thief”, forced, in the end, to pitifully attempt his own theft, have the pained expressions of souls dragged through the mud, the mud of a country struggling to dry up from the downpour left by the war. We didn’t need words, famously said Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard”, we had the faces, and if Billy Wilder’s great silent screen goddess had been thinking this, two years later from her jail cell, she might have been thinking about Umberto Domenico Ferrari, the personification of loneliness, old age, dignity and, in ideological metaphors, society’s ills. It’s all there on his face.
“Umberto D.” is a film about all of these troubles; it’s primarily a study about avoiding inevitable old age and death, of being run down by the man who has no room for the elderly, and of finding perseverance when suicide stalks your every second thought. It’s ripe with metaphor and symbolism, but before digging deep into that well, one needs a brief sketch of the plot, or, if not necessarily a “plot” per se, than a character outline of a dark chamber drama.
Umberto D. Ferrari (Carlo Battisti) is a pensioner in the last stage of his life. He is barely able to survive on the weak pittance the government gives him monthly. Retired for years from a long stint with the Ministry of Public Works, he lives his days with his beloved dog Flike, a wiry mutt (“with intelligent eyes”) that seems to be his only reason for living. He rents a room from an overbearing landlady (Lina Gennari) who wants him out; he’s late on back pay, she won’t accept the 4,000 Lira he’s scraped together, and is on the verge of moving up the class ladder, engaged to a wealthy cinema owner (metaphor coming later).
Also in the house is a young maid, Maria (Maria Pia Casilio) who is somewhat of a surrogate daughter to the lonely Umberto, and like a real daughter, she worries him with her own troubles, such as that she’s pregnant by one of two soldiers, but doesn’t know which one. Undoubtedly if the landlady discovered Maria’s secret she’d be out on the streets with Umberto and Flike. Together the three form the social structure of Italy; the peasant girl, the green-eyed and selfish bourgeois and the forgotten pensioner, who, in the films remarkable first scene, is protesting his meager government pension with a group of similar old men, before being broken up by young cops who disconcertingly snap “go home old geezers.”
This world is not kind to the likes of Umberto or Maria. As he desperately tries to raise the 15,000 he owes the landlady, he has to panhandle his treasured possessions. A gold watch goes for 3,000, a pair of encyclopedias for only two more. At a soup kitchen he is ignored by men worse off and is run out by a women who won’t stand him feeding his hungry dog from his plate. To escape for a few days, he checks himself into a Catholic hospital, a huge, cavernous hanger of a place with endless beds and saintly nuns who give out rosary beads and cookies. If anything, it offers a place to sleep when his hurtful landlord is demolishing his room and using it to “entertain” her upper class friends.
Eventually this sad economy for Umberto D. is too much to handle and those thoughts of suicide haunt his mindset. D. is a dignified man, there is a justly famous sequence where he tries to beg on the street, but downturns his palm at the last second. He gives the hat to Flike and hides behind a column, but seeing his much loved dog beg is even worse; it’s all but over for him now, the realization in his gaunt eyes, over-scored with Alessandro Cicognini’s mournful overture is truly heartbreaking. In a film where your eyes are moist a good 70 out of its 90 minutes, this revelatory sequence (a prelude to even darker moments) is what this brand of cinema-of-reality was initiated for.
In the scope of the Italian Neo-realist movement, “Umberto D.” is significant because it’s both deeply rooted in the style and a shift away. The Neo-realists, in their anti-Hollywood, anti-expressionist intentions cast non-professionals as their leads and shot a good bulk of their films on the streets. The rubble of Rome made for surprisingly effective backdrops and the films shot in long takes to heighten the “happening as is” feeling. Though in turn, “Umberto D.” also uses a few special effects shots (including a rare keyhole shot, better suited to Hitchcock) and had a somewhat skewered ideology that, in major Italian criticism, resulted in attacks on the director and led to the films disastrous box office and, essentially, to the end of the movement. It’s effects would be seen for years; in early Fellini and Lattuada, in the films of the French New Wave, and in the great films of the Indian master Satyajit Ray, but as a whole, Neo-realism was spent.
Carlo Battisti, who so memorable portraits Umberto D., was discovered by De Sica’s assistants walking down the street, going home from a lecture (he was a linguist professor at the University of Florence). De Sica immediately felt, after one screen test, that Battisti was his man; it was all in that face, it had to be. De Sica and Zavattini obviously loved the character (the directors had said it to be his most cherished movie) and showed great compassion for him in his struggle to salvage what dignity poverty has allowed him to save. “I’m just a good for nothing old man,” says Umberto in the early soup kitchen sequence, but in the larger mess of things, De Sica had made him into the face of his nation; an unwanted angel.
The metaphors that got the film attacked as Marxist (a wild overreaction) are easy to pick out. The social structure of the apartment house has the landlady marrying up into an exclusive world where cinema owners are upper class. Was this saying that De Sica (himself cinema royalty) no longer felt like he belonged? In “Shoeshine” the climax centers around the burning of a screen showing Chaplin’s “The Immigrant”, so it’s possible to say that De Sica and Zavattini were speaking for the genre as a whole; maybe they didn’t belong in the same category as Hollywood (Chaplin, in the ‘50’s was an outcast as well) but they’d be damned if their style (eventually lauded the world over) wasn’t revolutionizing a stagnant national cinema.
“If I had to do it again,” De Sica once said about “Umberto D.” despite the controversy, “I’d make the same exact film.” Tell that to the old man and his dog, it makes for a surprisingly happy ending.
The Criterion Collection has released “Umberto D.” on DVD with a wealth of information, including an hour-long TV documentary on the long career of Vittorio De Sica.
by Adam Suraf