Vittorio De Sica’s own favorite among his films, Umberto D. claims the most powerful opening of any Italian neorealist film. It begins with an overhead long shot of a city street in daylight. From behind the cars that move up the street, steadily becoming the shot’s focus, is an orderly mass of people, retirees who are demonstrating for a raise in the amount of their pensions. It’s the next shot that discloses this intent of theirs: an upwardly tilted street-level shot showing, instead of the people themselves, the placards they carry. A frontal shot of the group reveals the fierce, wholehearted participation of the protagonist, Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant. (Umberto was the name of De Sica’s father, a retired bank clerk to whom the son, in its opening credits, dedicates the film.) Police cars enter the scene, dispersing the protesters aggressively though nonviolently. Two of the shots here are key, one from the vantage of one of the slowly entering police cars as marchers run from it (subtly, De Sica has reversed the direction of the protesters in relation to the camera, to underscore their agitation at the arrival of authorities), and the other from above: a tilted overhead shot—a disturbing glimpse of human panic. In sum, this passage, the most brilliant one that De Sica ever devised, not only launches the film, not only (as we shall see) connects with a later image to frame a consideration of the film’s motive, but also permeates the entire film as a persistent theme of social concern for which the example we follow, Ferrari, strikes a single representative chord.
The scene following this opening is crucial to our understanding of the forces of authority arrayed against the protesters. Three of the marchers, including Ferrari, have taken cover from the police in an alley off the main street. Ferrari’s companion, a mongrel named Flike, expresses his distaste for what the police have just done by snarling and barking, causing one of the men, who has just fearfully wiped his brow with a white handkerchief (a sign of surrender, at least a partial wavering in the cause), to shout that Ferrari should control his (actually, otherwise, perpetually gentle) animal. This man blames the organizers of the demonstration, who failed to secure the necessary municipal permit for the march, thus providing the legal basis for the police action in interrupting and disbanding it. Ferrari calmly explains that the organizers had applied for the permit but were denied. In this way, then, the municipal authorities had calculated in advance their basis for aborting the demonstration.
This provides food for thought, especially in the context of Italy’s then recent history. Current civil authority clearly is at pains to differentiate itself from Fascist authority; cunning manipulation—bureaucratic shenanigans—has replaced brute force. Some of those marching, like the man now opposing the organizers, have adequate financial security; others, like Ferrari, do not. About to be evicted for being in arrears on his rent, Ferrari is in a desperate situation that the 20% raise in pensions being sought would alleviate. The protest is, for him, a life-and-death matter. To be sure, the march is civilly disruptive; it contests the mundane order of things. De Sica shows the normal flow of traffic derailed by the marchers precisely to indicate this disruption. But what in this instance does restoring civil order precisely mean? By stopping the demonstration, authorities seek to isolate those demonstrating from their fellow citizenry, whom the demonstrators are trying to reach in their appeal for justice and whose support they need in order to marshal the political clout necessary to achieve their goal: the raise in their pensions. The authorities will claim as their support the “cause” of civil order so that the majority of citizens can have the uninterrupted enjoyment of their normal routine. This in effect seeks to contain the protesters within the status quo, without access to the means of remedying the problem besetting them. However, the disruption entailed by the march is itself contained; it’s a limited disruption with legitimate aims. It gives a voice to a minority of people that the majority, whose sympathy they are attempting to engage, can also hear, on the street and through the media. Police interruption of this disruption is a way of shifting public attention from the message—the demonstrators’ cause—to the fact of the disruption, which the police appear to be ending on behalf of the majority of the citizenry. It’s a cloaked form of Fascism. The original message gets lost and another takes its place: the bogus issue of civil order—bogus, because the “disruption” of it was so deliberately contained and limited by the organizers and demonstrators themselves out of a need to strike a precarious balance between getting public attention and not irritating or enraging the public against their cause.
De Sica presents, then, an aborted demonstration, and the success of his method lies in the fact that we not only consider the cause of the demonstrators but also the motivation of the authorities who denied the permit in the first place, whom the police (obediently, professionally—in this instance, not maliciously) publicly represent. Almost all of the rest of the film will deal with a single individual, “Umberto D.,” but so intelligently and cogently has De Sica established the social context of the financial needs of a group of people and the human, i.e., political forces intent on obstructing all remedy of the problem that this context accompanies the character throughout the film. This is a remarkable achievement, especially given the close attention that De Sica pays to the peculiar details of Ferrari’s individual circumstance—details that speak to the humanity of the film no less than the social context that confers on Ferrari a representative identity.
The lion’s share of De Sica’s largely unsentimental film depicts the tragedy of Ferrari’s circumstance. A pensioner, he is untouched by Italy’s painful postwar economic recovery; he has, in effect, been left behind, consigned to anonymity in Italy’s past, without recourse to his nation’s future. But De Sica is careful not to pit one generation against another. He accomplishes this in two ways. One is to show how former colleagues of Ferrari repeatedly feign deafness to his overtures for financial assistance; all his better-off old friends appear too busy with their own lives to pause long enough even to provide substantive counsel. Written off by those who know him and should care, how much easier it is for the bureaucratic state to overlook or dismiss his right to live. Thus De Sica creates an implicit quarrel among the “war generation”; looking backward, even to an old bureaucratic comrade currently in dire need of help, is too distasteful, too demanding, too threatening in its capacity to awaken painful emotions that these individuals have smoothed over and suppressed, along with the political memories to which these emotions have necessarily become attached. Ferrari, like many others, then, has become a casualty to the national motive to move forward. The other way that De Sica spares the film a schematic competition between old and young is to make Ferrari’s closest human friend a girl, Maria, who is his landlady’s maidservant. Pregnant, not knowing which of two boys is the father (both deny paternity), she also lives a perilous existence, since exposure of her condition may at any point render her homeless as well. When Ferrari asks her if she might move back with her parents, Maria replies that her parents would beat her. Both on the verge of some sort of terrible beating from life, the old man and the girl have formed a deeply sympathetic bond. Maria is Ferrari’s one steadfast friend, acting on occasion as intermediary between him and his landlady. The only other champion he has, of course, is Flike, for whose care part of his small pension must go.
The landlady couldn’t care less about the ants in his studio apartment about which Ferrari, who has lived there for decades, complains. She wants the back rent he owes, which he cannot pay and which she is in no such economic fix as to need with any urgency. Indeed, she can do without Ferrari’s money; what she really wants is for him to leave. During the day this viciously unkind woman—during the war, they had been friends—rents out Ferrari’s room to extramarital couples, a violation driven home when we see one such couple leaving Ferrari’s room as he is returning to it. At first, Ferrari is determined to remain in his home. He tries selling a watch, but like the hocked and stolen bicycles in De Sica’s magnificent Bicycle Thieves (1948) watches abound; many others are trying to sell theirs to help make ends meet. By law Ferrari cannot be charged rent while in hospital, so he feigns illness in order to be admitted into this free institution, and the soul in the next bed charms a nun into extending his stay. This new friend counsels Ferrari to ask the nun for a rosary to show his good faith, and Ferrari, who it is implied doesn’t even believe in God, much less practice Roman Catholicism, complies—one of several assaults to his dignity he reluctantly embraces in pursuit of a means of retaining his long-accustomed life. (Earlier, he practiced in the street extending his hand for a handout, but just when someone was about to deposit a coin he turned his palm downward, pretending he had been using his hand—on this sunlit day—to check for rain.) It almost seems that, lacking property of his own, he also lacks a life of his own. Self-determination is out of the question. But things are about to become much worse for Ferrari.
Once released from the hospital, Ferrari learns that his landlady had allowed his dog, under her maidservant’s care, to escape into the street. Ferrari is beside himself. The most harrowing part of the film now follows: his desperate search of the municipal pound as massive cages full of dogs are delivered to their extermination. (This scene strikes an aural chord in my experience. At graduate school, daily could be heard the screeches of animals being experimented on and killed in science labs, in most cases purely to maintain for various programs a continuity of federal funding.) Ferrari finds his friend in time; however, the suspenseful experience has only intensified his already keen sense of vulnerability. Once he returns home with Flike, he is all but shattered by a further blow. During his absence, his landlady has had his room stripped of wallpaper and had one wall broken down in order to join its space to the adjacent room. Ferrari’s home, if she has her way, will become part of a cocktail party room: the ultimate sign not only of this woman’s inhumanity but of society’s, insofar as someone’s life is being discounted in favor of someone else’s peripheral entertainment. Amidst his enormous sense of violation, Ferrari tries with all his might to hold on to his dignity; but the landlady, unswerving in her assaults, has finally broken his spirit. Ferrari decides to commit suicide. When he cannot find an adequate home for Flike, he decides they should both die together from the force of a train. At the last moment, Flike, unwilling to die, tears himself from Ferrari’s grip, saving both their lives. Trust, though, has been broken; Flike will have nothing more to do with Ferrari until, by degrees, Ferrari wins back his companion, with the help of a pine cone, in a park. The film ends with children at play in this park as Ferrari and Flike reunite to face their uncertain fate. This image conjoining Italy’s past and future, old and young, implies the single thread of humanity that society must acknowledge and appreciate if Italy is to survive with its character and morality intact.
De Sica admirably succeeds in keeping the landlady from becoming a villain; she is cold-blooded, not evil. She also has turned her back on the war and, in her own way, is in flight from her memory of it. (It helps, too, that Lina Gennari gives a crackerjack performance in the role.) Her evil, if De Sica had taken that route, would have constituted a sentimental touch, and since so much of the film is taken up by Ferrari’s contest with the landlady this touch would have ruined the film. Moreover, her evil would have constituted a serious distraction, for our attention would have shifted from where it belongs, the evil inherent in the idea of property trumping humanity, to some monstrous flaw in someone’s character. Instead, De Sica keeps us focused on the relationship between Italy’s postwar present and recent wartime past.
Of course, there was another potential problem, a gaping sentimental hole lying in wait into which the whole film could at any moment drop. If a man so loves his dog, can Disney be far behind? With immense intelligence, De Sica again keeps his nimble directorial toes dancing over and around the hole. Closeups of the dog are mostly avoided, two-shots of the pair are given some distance, and shots even appear of his walking the dog where only the taut leash appears in the frame. We know the dog is attached to it; but De Sica understands we don’t always have to see Flike.
Alas, there is a single point where, I feel, De Sica fails to avoid or transcend sentimentality, and it damages the film somewhat, although certainly doesn’t ruin it. It’s but a second or two, but it’s a mistake. Back from the hospital, Ferrari opens his terrace windows as a zoom from behind his back, focused on the pavement below, discloses his suicidal intent. Ferrari looks appropriately transfixed afterwards, but the zoom lasts too long, if indeed such an attention-calling shot was necessary at all. Here, at least for me, the flourish of technical bravura slights the humanity involved: a man so full of hopelessness and despair that he would contemplate ending his own life. Indeed, the shot’s “expressiveness” is even inexact, for when Ferrari then withdraws, shutting the windows, the viewer might reasonably assume that Ferrari has rejected suicide when in fact this is precisely the course he is about to pursue. The application of the zoom lens, especially at such length, cheapens and sentimentalizes an appalling moment in Ferrari’s life and, in tandem with what then follows, possibly misguides the audience in terms of the direction of the narrative.
That said, Umberto D. did not deserve the treatment the Italian government accorded it. The film was roundly dismissed as being totally sentimental. The Andreotti Law, recently passed, codified state funding of Italian cinema, but only for popular entertainments, not the socially probing films that composed the neorealist movement. There are a number of reasons why Italy turned its back on the films that had been giving its cinema worldwide fame. For one thing, like many of the characters in Umberto D., Italy wanted to put the past behind it, and Italian neorealism had become identified with wartime and just-postwar Italian cinema. Related to this, many neorealist films, especially the postwar ones by De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, addressed social problems besetting Italy, and the government felt that this was tantamount to airing their own dirty linen in public since Italian films were distributed to the rest of the world. Thus, while national pride dictated that such acclaimed films continue, national pride even more strenuously dictated that they cease, lest a certain kind of view of Italy, already negative from its connection to Fascism, be perpetuated. Italy’s “problems” were behind it, Italy preferred to insist even at the expense of truth. Similarly related is the fact that these socially investigative films tended to proceed from a political and socioeconomic view either recognizably Marxist or quasi-Marxist, and both Roman Catholic and democratic strains endlessly worried over that. Finally, the conquering United States was extorting all sorts of favors as recompense for helping Europe, including Italy, to rebuild, and Hollywood, which had the federal government’s ear, was flat-out unhappy that a few Italian neorealist films such as Bicycle Thieves and Giuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice (1949) were cutting into its profits by drawing patrons away from Hollywood product. For all these reasons, then, Italy was determined to kill the movement that had elevated its cinema and given this a purposeful, progressive voice, and of this determination its cruel, dismissive reception of Umberto D. provided further testimony. Moreover, the film’s unglamorous, noncommercial nature assured its popular defeat.
Cesare Zavattini and De Sica wrote the film’s excellent script; Eraldo Da Roma superbly edited the film. The black-and-white cinematography by Aldo Graziati (G. R. Aldo) flawlessly blends De Sica’s shooting on both streets and sets. Finally, the nonprofessional cast is excellent. Leading it is Carlo Battisti, the former university professor who memorably plays Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a role to which he brings just enough of a physical resemblance to Charles Chaplin to anticipate the latter’s Limelight (1952). Like Chaplin’s Calvero, Battisti’s Umberto D. is a fully human characterization.
Let us permit De Sica to have the last few words on this very fine film of his. It is, he has remarked, “the tragedy of those people who find themselves cut off from a world that they nevertheless helped to build, a tragedy hidden by resignation and silence, but one that occasionally explodes in loud demonstrations or is pushed into appalling suicides. A young man’s decision to kill himself is taken seriously, but what does one say of the suicide of an old man already close to death? It’s terrible. A society that allows such things is a lost society.”
