Film number 49 from our box set, and another one that I put off because it seemed crushingly depressing, and (while undeniably sad, and left me with a lump in my throat) was definitely not that. Certainly the description - old man and his adorable dog fall gradually into homelessness in a poverty-stricken post-war Italy (Rome?) - illustrates why I avoided it (as does the fact that it's by the director of the heartrending Bicycle Thieves, whose absence from the box-set its presence explains), but the real earthiness of the characters, and the fact that Italians just don't seem capable of simply lying down and giving up, means it's a nourishing rather than depleting watch. The main actor, a small, slight, dapper man, was a non-professional, and I believe the next-most-major character, the maid in the house from which "Mr. Umberto" (full name Umberto Domenico Ferrari) is being evicted was new to acting. Both are revelatory. The old man's face is an open book
and he is never less than completely convincing in his reactions to every event and every other character in the film (and especially his beloved small mutt "Flike" (rhymes with Bike), who is the smartest little guy since the dog in the Thin Man movies). Meanwhile Maria-the-maid has an almost cartoon face, it's so open and guileless (she's no great beauty, but she qualifies as a great cutie),
befitting the country girl who can't go back to her village because her father will beat her, but is the one person who cares for Mr. Umberto. Meanwhile his heartless landlady (she is tall and bleached-blonde, in contrast to the tiny, dark Maria)
who is a shameless social-climber, cannot wait to kick him out, and is even renting out his room by the hour in a The Apartment-style scheme while he's out protesting inadequate pensions (the film opens with the rally being broken up by brutish police, who run off hordes of Umbertos). As with Bicycle Thieves, the rest of the movie is very "slice of life" (De Sica is one of the primary figures in Italian Neo-Realism, after all), with Umberto trotting around trying to avoid his landlady at first, and then, when he realizes how serious she is (she refuses to accept anything but a full payment of his back-rent, which amounts to 15 thousand lire, when the most he can scrape together is around 5 thousand) desperate attempts to sell off various items of property or secure loans from old acquaintances (he worked for 20 years for the Bureau of Public Works). Meanwhile Maria confides to him that she is pregnant
(and knows that as soon as the hated landlady finds out, she'll be fired), and also that she's not sure which of her current two boyfriends (both soldiers - she points them out to Umberto as "the tall one from Naples" and "the short one from Florence") is the father, but also that both deny it. What is particularly appealing about their relationship is that he really is like a doting grandfather to her, who feels like he needs to be strict but caves instantly. So he's deeply shocked when he finds out her predicament, but instantly forgives her. (And later, when he runs into one of them giving her a hard time on the street, he gives him a death-stare. Also his last words to Maria, after telling her she needs to get away from the evil landlady, are to dump the one from Florence.)
Other incidents: when he is trying to avoid the landlady he gets himself committed to a Catholic hospital (they come to pick him up - at this point I thought that a bankrupted post-WWII Axis country still treated its citizens better than the current USA) where he is told that he just has tonsillitis. The doctor says that if he was younger, he'd remove the tonsils, but what's the point?
Umberto makes a half-hearted attempt to stay longer by complaining about a pain in his side, before essentially giving up. He does get to stay an extra day because he gets advice from the young man in the bed next to him on how to manipulate the soft-hearted nun who comes round distributing rosaries.
Then when he comes back from the hospital, he finds that Flike is missing. Maria reveals that the landlady purposely left the door open for him to escape. Distraught, Umberto searches all over town before going to the pound, where he witnesses crates of dogs being put down, before, to his immense relief, dogcatchers bring in Flike.
Umberto sees others unashamedly begging, and tries his best first to get Flike to do it
and then to do it himself, but in a tragi-comic scene, he chickens out just as somebody is about to put money in his outstretched hand, and turns it over, pretending to check for rain.
But then things go from bad to worse: as the day of eviction draws near his landlady has workmen knock a giant hole in the wall of his room,
and he realizes that the writing is on the no-longer-existing wall. Then his focus becomes finding a place for his beloved Flike so that he'll be cared for after Umberto is gone. He leaves most of his stuff for Maria and sets out. However, the place he hoped would look after Flike just seems too awful.
And while a little girl he knows from the local park would love to have Flike, her snooty au pair won't let her. So he resolves that he and Flike can just end it all together, and clutching the little dog, goes and stands on the rail tracks (the poster is a massive spoiler!). But Flike struggles free and leads Umberto away, until our last viewing of them is them playing catch and vanishing off down the path by the river. Not too bad, you might say, but Umberto has abandon all his worldly goods and has nowhere to stay, so this is just a moment of joy before the engulfing darkness.
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