Retro Reel: Umberto D.


By Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Criterion Collection, 1952, 89 minutes - add this title to your Netflix queue  

Academy Award nominee, 1956

In postwar Rome, whole segments of society were on the way to new bourgeois heights. But one had nowhere to go: the old-age pensioners, men who had spent their best years in public service but who now had the hit the ceiling of possibility on their dwindling fixed incomes.

Such a man is Umberto Domenico Ferrari, who lives in a boarding house with an upwardly mobile landlady - as unfeelingly shrill as the opera she relentlessly practices in her drawing room - and a guilelessly kind young maid named Maria, who has unfortunately just discovered she is pregnant but not which soldier is responsible. The other denizen of this world is Flike, Umberto's beloved spotted terrier, the dog whose welfare and company is the rootless man's sole purpose in life.

Director Vittorio De Sica, the master of Italian Neorealism, has taken a bleak view of humans' ability to connect and truly care for one another - but his view of the canine-human bond is entirely different. He shows this love as the only pure, unencumbered relationship there is: Umberto risks losing his seat in an affordable cafeteria by sharing his spaghetti with Flike; he willingly spends the money he needs to avoid eviction on retrieving Flike from the pound (his search for the "mutt with intelligent eyes" at this monument to man's terrible cruelty to his fellow animals is one of the more heartbreaking scenes in a film that is full of them). When the downward trajectory of Umberto's life can go no farther, it is Flike and his inherent will to live that brings them both back into something that may even include joy.

The main parts in De Sica's movie were not played by actors but by nonprofessionals he used for their ability to capture a sense of the true. But Flike was one of the few pros; his name was Napoleone, and indeed he is a small dog with big talents. He seems to know what his master wants, and he is always willing to give it - even if it is the humiliation of begging with a hat in his mouth. He is shadow and companion, a friend in a friendless world. He alone is what makes one life worth living.     


Presence of dogs: reelreelreelreel
Respect for dogs: reelreelreelreel
Canine star quality: reelreelreelreel
Family friendly: reelreelreelreel


 

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