Umberto D

Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant, played by Carlo Battisti, struggles to get by on a meagre state pension in post-war Rome. He takes to the streets in protest, alongside scores of agitated pensioners who are easily forced back in retreat. His rental debt to a tyrannical landlady, in whose house he has been resident for twenty years, escalates beyond hope. As part-payment, but to his shame, Umberto's room is hired out to prostitutes by the hour. His only friends are an adoring dog, Flik, and the pregnant maid, Maria, played by Maria-Pia Casilio, in whom our leading man confides.

Umberto has himself taken to hospital for some free nourishment. He is certain he can clear his debts if he can hide out in the ward for a week. On the advice of a knowing roommate he requests a rosary from a kindly nun who has influence with the doctors.

Umberto continues to trust in providence. Despite overwhelming odds he believes he can turn fate around. However, Umberto's desperate efforts are in vain. The merciless landlady, whose overriding interest is that of her bourgeois singing friends, is getting engaged and redesigning his room as a parlour.

Our old hero's previously unshakeable pride momentarily gives up on him and he tries his hand at begging. In one of the film's most moving scenes Umberto's honour and sense of shame win over his practical needs, quickly followed by an embarrassing encounter with his former boss. There is nothing more to be done. Suicide is contemplated yet dramatically botched as Umberto cannot bear to be parted from Flik, who is horrified at his master's intentions. Thankfully, the film ends on a cautiously optimistic note as Umberto and Flik take off, ready to battle on and confront whatever hardship the future might throw at them.

For many lovers of neo-realism cinema Umberto D, and not The Bicycle Thieves, is De Sica's true masterpiece. De Sica believed very strongly in the project, wishing to make a statement against society's abandonment of its elderly. He persuaded the reluctant Angelo Rizzoli to produce the film, when the latter would have preferred Don Camillo. The work is dedicated to De Sica's father and uses a mixed cast of professional and non-professional actors (Battisti and Casilio). Battisti's stoic interpretation is painful to observe as his dignity stubbornly clings to an unaffordable sense of pride. In contrast, Maria, resigned to her bad luck, does not know or expect any better life. The power of this evocative and deeply moving work, that managed to anger Giulio Andreotti at the time, is reinforced by the strength of Cesare Zavattini's screenplay, Oscar nominated for Best Writing for a Motion Picture Story.

As a sign of the times, Kurosawa's Ikiru, emerging in the same year, explored a similar theme, that of a diplomat whose misfortune compels him to re-examine his life.

It is difficult to remain untroubled by Umberto D. In an epoch in which we witness further fragmentation of the family unit, decreasing pensions and an ever aging population, Umberto D's' spotlight on the poverty, solitude and neglect of the old, is a universal theme and as relevant today as it was in the aftermath of the war.