Umberto D. Movie Review

This is a classic 1952 black and white film from Italian director Vittorio De Sica that tells the story of a down on his luck Italian pensioner (Carlo Battisti) trying to find some way to survive.

Umberto has some characteristics in common with the kind of character Charlie Chaplin typically played. No matter how desperate his financial condition becomes, he maintains a well-groomed appearance, carries himself with dignity, and treats everyone with a warm civility.

Umberto is generally accompanied by his dog Flike, which looks kind of like a Jack Russell terrier like Eddie on Frasier, though Umberto identifies it as a mutt. He's very attached to the dog, who is very obedient and trained to do tricks.

He lives in what I take to be a rooming house. It has an air of decrepitude, with plenty of grime and ants, and an owner (Lina Gennari) who rents rooms by the hour--including Umberto's when he's not home--to women of easy virtue and their clients.

The owner is a middle-aged woman glad that Umberto is behind on the rent and that therefore she'll likely be able to evict him shortly. Their history is not spelled out, but he has lived there for something like twenty years, and evidently had helped her out when he was doing OK and she was the one struggling, and it may be she is the kind of proud person who can't handle the idea that she could ever have been in need of help from the likes of him, so she masks her uneasiness by making their relationship an artificially antagonistic one.

As winning a character as any in the movie (though Umberto himself is good too) is the rooming house maid Maria (Maria Pia Casilio). She and Umberto are not close close, and their relationship is not a romantic one, but there's a sweetness to their interaction, the way they value each other and do little kindnesses for each other.

Maria is a pretty little thing, with a face and voice that wonderfully convey her simple, good-hearted nature. She's pregnant, and has only been able to narrow down the paternal possibilities to two. She's too much of a free spirit to feel any guilt about her situation, and though she's concerned about her future--she knows she'll be fired as soon as she's showing--she's certainly not panicky about it.

There's a certain lightness, a certain humor to the film at times, but mostly it's about the fading hopes and deteriorating circumstances of the poor. Umberto is hardly alone in his plight, as the film opens with a march through the streets by desperate pensioners, plus we get to know Maria and her troubles a bit, and we see other poor people doing anything and everything they can to survive another day--gathering at soup kitchens, panhandling, feigning illness and piety to con nuns into allowing them to stay at hospitals, etc.

As Umberto realizes that it's simply impossible to stretch his pension to where he'll be able to keep his room and stay alive, the film proceeds via a series of vignettes of his efforts to obtain funds otherwise. None of these efforts prove more than modestly and temporarily successful. In time he decides there's no option remaining but suicide.

The most emotionally effective moments of the film are when it becomes most deadly serious in showing in his face that he's accepted this decision. His parting from Maria is a lovely and sad scene, she at most with but an inkling of his intentions, he looking at her with a wistful fondness as if to say, if only humanity in general could have her basic goodness, there would surely be a place in the world for a decent man such as himself.

The poignancy is sustained as Umberto wanders about seeking some appropriate place to leave Flike where he will be well cared for, wondering if he should instead take his faithful companion with him where he's going.

There are some appealing characters, some very nice moments in this film, especially toward the end, but I won't say that it engaged me the whole way. Some of it is slow and was not that interesting to me, and I suspect if I hadn't known going in that it is the work of a "great" director that I wouldn't have been as receptive to it and gotten as much out of it even as I did. But on the whole, it's worth seeing even if I wouldn't rank it among my favorites.

I also wanted to note that I was quite impressed by the dog training. I'm used to seeing dogs in movies and TV shows--like the aforementioned Eddie--always looking off camera at their trainers before doing what they're supposed to do, and just being kind of wooden in general in their "acting." And maybe in this movie they had to do a huge number of takes to get the scenes with Flike to look the way they do, but he seems to respond really well to Umberto like he's his dog in real life, and he seems to always go where he's supposed to go and do what he's supposed to do in a very natural looking way.