closed out
by Douglas Messerli
Cesare Zavattini (story and
screenplay), Vittorio De Sica (director) Umberto
D / 1952, USA 1955
Many critics agree with Vittorio De
Sica’s own assessment of his film, Umberto
D, that is his finest achievement; De Sica simply described it as his
favorite of his works.
Umberto still has a room, but with a large amount of back payment due he
knows that his time there is limited. His landlady is already renting his room
out for sexual rendezvouses by the hour when he goes out, and she threatens
that she will soon throw him out. Both he and the young maid working in the
house look time again out of the bedroom windows, Umberto revealing an entire
world of light and comfort not currently available to him, and Maria seeking to
see the soldiers with whom she is in love.
At first, given the almost cartoon-like nature of this woman (Ileana
Simova) who clearly aspires to become a great singer—for which she has little
talent—and a wealthy married woman—a role she will surely achieve—we can hardly
take these threats seriously.
If she is mean to the nearly starving Umberto and his dog, the maid,
Maria, is a gentle and kind friend, although worn out by all her duties and,
particularly, by the swarms of ants invading her kitchen domain. Stealing bits
of leftover food, she tries to get the elderly tenant to eat, providing him
also, upon his request, a purloined thermometer so that he might check if he is
coming down with an illness.
And why shouldn’t he be? Having tried to
sell his watch, he gets only a few dollars, the daily take by a local beggar.
His prized books fetch a few lire at best. But even the meager amount he has
raised as a down-payment on his room is rejected by the landlady: for her it is
all or nothing. Depression, if not a more illness, is a surety.
After calling for the medics, Umberto is allowed entry to a local
hospital, where for a day or two he is well-fed and looked after. But his
illness, so he is told, is only tonsillitis, and he must vacate his bed. His
neighbor in the hospital attempts to show him how to play upon the sympathies
of the nurses, but Umberto is too much a gentleman and far too honest to
accomplish the task, just, as later, he simply cannot bring himself to beg for
much-needed money.
When he returns to his room, he finds workmen pounding a huge hole in
its wall; the landlady is planning to expand her living room for after her
marriage. And, even worse in his absence, his beloved pet Flike has escaped
through an open door. Umberto checks out the local pound, finally to find his
dog just before he is about to be put to death.
Maria, moreover, as she has previously confided, has her own problems.
She is pregnant, and she has no idea whether the father was the tall soldier
from Naples or the short one from Florence, or whether either of these men will
accept their paternity if she tells them about her condition. Most certainly
her employer, once she learns of Maria’s condition, will kick her out of this
unlivable paradise, where long into every night the landlady sings to her
invited guests. What began as a kind of satire about a striving bourgeois woman
has suddenly turned into a kind of nightmare for those who live near her. And
the next morning, of his own accord, Umberto, packing up the few pieces of
clothing he still owns, slinks off into the streets.
Umberto cannot even feed himself, let alone his dog, so he seeks someone
to adopt the cute pet, but encounters few who seem appropriate. He does
interest a
As the train comes nearer, the dog becomes aware of what will soon
happen, and struggles to escape Umberto’s embrace, running off with the old man
in the chase. It takes some time for the chastised human to draw Flike to him
again. But, at least, both have been spared—if just for a while.
De Sica ends his sad tale with the two of them, doomed by the society in
which they exist, walking down the lane of the park while children play around
them. Even if they do not survive, the new world will go on.
I see this film, despite most critical conclusions, less as a
neo-realist drama, than as a somewhat sentimental sad-sack comedy in the manner
of Chaplin and Clair—two of De Sica’s favorite directors.
The actors are amateurs who the director has molded into convincing
performers, and the camera follows mostly everyday events, many of them on the
neo-realists’ favorite set: the Italian streets. But the entire situation of
the film is a kind of prop to capture our emotions within its “inside/outside”
structure. The three holy saints of this story, all of whom are destined to be
destroyed in one way or another, are symbols more than real human beings,
despite their players’ credible naturalistic acting.
We can almost imagine that, like Chaplin’s tramp, Umberto might be the
subject of a sequel, co-featuring the now even grander landlady, and the
destitute Maria, with whom Umberto will again meet up for further comic and semi-tragic
circumstances. De Sica, to my way of thinking, is not truly a “realist” or even
a new realist (as I have argued, for
other reasons, neither was Rossellini), but a director with more links to
another generation who found some of the neo-realist values useful to his
filmmaking.
I say this not to devalue De Sica’s achievement, but simply to more
firmly link his art to the more romantic and melodramatic theatrical
conventions before him. And it helps to explain, I would argue, the increasing lack
of interest of audiences for the films that followed the moving Umberto, and reiterates his final
redemption in The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis, a work very much about nostalgia for a lost world before
the wars.
Los Angeles, June 4, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).
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