Umberto D.

Umberto D.
by Vittorino de Sica
1952 | Italy | M12 | 1h29

It was De Sica’s favourite film, Bazin considered it one of the greatest in the history of cinema, Chaplin cried when he saw it. Buñuel wrote that ‘it was one of the best films that neo-realism had produced’. The new Italian Christian Democrat government manoeuvred to prevent it from winning at the Cannes Film Festival, and a young Giulio Andreotti wrote an inflammatory article against neorealism, accusing De Sica of giving ‘a bad image of the country’, to which the director replied that he was ‘telling the truth’.

Umberto D. is a lonely old man whose surname is shortened to universalise a problem that Italy was grappling with at the time: that of pensioners living in poverty on the meagre pensions they received. Contrary to the producers’ wishes, the director once again sought out new and unknown faces: a teacher to play Umberto D., and a girl he met in the provinces who had accompanied a friend to the casting to play the maid at the boarding house where he lives. There are clear parallels with Bicycle Thieves in this intimate portrait of a lonely man, who has only a dog for company and struggles to survive and maintain his dignity, where Zavattini, who this time wrote the script alone, reaches the peak of his poetic quest.

with Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio and Lina Gennari