Vittorio De Sica (1952)

Like Bicycle Thieves (1948), Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D is set in early post-World War II Rome.  It begins with a street demonstration, elderly men protesting about their inadequate pensions.  One of the marchers is particularly conspicuous thanks to the little dog accompanying him.  The man is the title character, Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant.  The dog is Flike, a Jack Russell terrier.  At the end of the film, Umberto and Flike are still together but it’s a close call.

Umberto (Carlo Battisti), employed for thirty years in the government’s public works department, resides in a shabby lodging house.  He’s behind with the rent to the tune of fifteen thousand lire and his landlady, Antonia Belloni (Lina Gennari), won’t hear of part-payment:  she threatens him with eviction unless he settles up in full by the end of the month.  Umberto lives an isolated, uncommunicative existence.  Apart from the odd bad-tempered exchange with the callous landlady, he talks mostly to Flike and to Maria (Maria-Pia Casilio), a maid in the lodging house.  He keeps himself clean and tidy but isn’t in good health and the cold, damp room doesn’t help.  Signora Belloni behaves as if Umberto had already vacated it.  He returns from the pensions protest to discover a young couple in the room, rented out to them for an hour.  After spending a few days in hospital with tonsillitis, Umberto comes back to find workmen redecorating the place.

A sequence on the hospital ward makes clear that some of his fellow patients are there because it’s a relatively comfortable place to be; although Umberto felt unwell, he may have been thinking on similar lines when he phoned for an ambulance.  If so, the hospital stay is part of a series of increasingly desperate measures that his straitened circumstances drive him to.  In an early scene, he sells his watch to another man.  The latter, who haggles successfully for Umberto to reduce the price, is promptly revealed to be a beggar on the street where the transaction takes place.  Later on, Umberto is himself reduced to begging in public.  He’s so ashamed that he uses his hat to hide his face.  He then has a better idea, getting Flike to sit in a begging position, with the hat held in his mouth for contributions, while Umberto skulks behind a nearby pillar.

By this point in the narrative, Umberto and Flike have already endured a period of separation.  Maria agrees to look after the dog while Umberto’s in hospital.  On his master’s return home, Flike is nowhere to be seen:  Maria explains that he disappeared when an outside door was left open.  Umberto hurries to the city’s crowded dog pound, where lost or abandoned animals, unless they’re quicklyh claimed, are put down.  He’s ecstatically relieved to find Flike there but Umberto is well aware that he lacks the means to keep either his dog or himself going.  Unable to get a loan from a former colleague or from his ex-boss, Umberto decides to commit suicide, but not before he has found Flike a home.

He leaves his lodgings, carrying his few remaining possessions in a suitcase.  Wandering through the streets, he comes upon a dogs’ ‘boarding house’ and talks with the couple running it but their inmates look so feral and distressed that Umberto decides against the place.  In a park where they sometimes walk, he offers Flike to a young girl who knows and likes the dog; she accepts the offer excitedly but her nanny says no.  A railway line runs alongside the park; in despair, Umberto, holding tight to Flike, stands in wait for a train that will end both their lives.  Terrified by the noise of an approaching train, Flike panics, wriggles free and runs back into the park.  Umberto follows.  At first, the dog is wary of returning to his owner but Umberto, holding out a pine cone for him to play with, eventually coaxes Flike out from behind a tree.

In the film’s closing shot Umberto, playing with Flike, recedes into the distance.  This image of survival – the survival of two underdogs – faintly suggests Chaplin’s tramp shuffling away but the effect is bleaker:  the reunion feels like a very brief postponement of the inevitable, for dog and man alike.  Reviewing Umberto D in Sight and Sound in 1953, Karel Reisz wrote that the protagonist’s ‘last gesture does not suggest any practical solution – he still has no money, nowhere to go – but it represents a moral victory, an affirmation of solidarity’.  Since Umberto’s last but one ‘gesture’ was a failed suicide-canicide attempt, thwarted only by Flike’s escape from his master’s grasp, the outcome is a very qualified moral victory – to say the most.

The film may be less famous than either Bicycle Thieves or Shoeshine (1946) but it’s widely admired and was supposedly its director’s own personal favourite among all his films.  The opening street demo is gripping; one later sequence, the unstressed, expressive description of the maid Maria’s early-morning routine, is rightly celebrated as a high point of Italian neorealist film-making.  But Umberto D lacks the momentum of Bicycle Thieves – and that’s not all.  Cesare Zavattini, De Sica’s regular collaborator and one of several writers involved in Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves, gets the sole screenplay credit here.  As with those two predecessors, some of Umberto D‘s cast hadn’t acted professionally before.  Maria-Pia Casilio would go on to work regularly in Italian cinema; seventy-year-old Carlo Battisti, a professor of linguistics, never made another film.  Battisti, although he holds the camera, doesn’t give a nuanced performance; the same goes for Lina Gennari, already a professional actress.  Alessandro Cicognini’s maudlin music is so relentless that it’s counterproductive.

Most of the emotional power derives not from De Sica’s and Zavattini’s social conscience but from the man’s best friend story.  The relationship of Umberto and Flike completely dominates subplots like Signora Belloni’s forthcoming marriage and Maria’s pregnancy.  (The father-to-be could be either a tall soldier from Naples or a short soldier from Florence – Maria’s not sure which.)  The film was remade, more than half a century on, as a French movie, Francis Huster’s A Man and His Dog (2008), notable for the last film appearance of Jean-Paul Belmondo but which seems otherwise to have sunk without trace.  Even so, its title would have been the right title for Umberto D.

29 June 2024