Umberto D.

When you’ve analyzed a film as closely as I have this, even decades later it’s hard to give it a fresh viewing. The closest I came to a really new perspective was immediately recognizing that the scene with Umberto trying to beg and then getting Flike to stand on his hind legs with a hat in his mouth takes place before the portico of the Pantheon in Rome, a subtlety I would have missed if I had not been standing on the same spot two weeks ago. Another thing I noticed was that this paragon of Neorealism was not reticent at all with the emotion-coercing music, but since it’s Italian I suppose you expect it to be melodramatic, if not operatic. The De Sica celebration offered as an extra on the new Criterion Collection DVD makes plain that our Vittorio is really a suave, silver-haired showman, an entertainer, an actor himself in spite of his use of nonactors in his early films, mixing lots of sentiment with the social consciousness, closer to Charlie Chaplin than strict neorealism. Umberto D does indeed offer a convincing and compelling portrait of a dignified, poor old man boxed into a post-war dead-end situation, as well as a young servant girl similarly boxed in. While not exactly chaste, its tearjerking is not promiscuous. And yet I cannot see it as a towering masterpiece. It suffers by comparison to Kurosawa’s Ikiru, for example. You have to see it if you haven’t already, but if you have seen it you probably don’t need to see it again. (1952, dvd, r.) *8*