Umberto D. (1952)

Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. follows a retired civil servant through a Rome that has no further use for him. The landlady wants fifteen thousand lire by month's end. He sells a watch, sells his books, raises a third of it, and is refused. The film is most often praised for its casting of non-professionals, including a linguistics professor in the title role and a dog credited as Napoleone. This was a doctrine of postwar Italian realism, an argument about where dignity resides, not a modern exercise in identity-conscious hiring. The result is a gallery of unglamorous faces the camera declines to prettify, which earns a small measure of credit and no more.

The film's grievance is economic, and it is genuine. A street demonstration of pensioners is dispersed by police. A landlady rents a room by the hour. A man contemplates begging and cannot. Here is a structural complaint about what a recovering economy does to those it has finished with, and it lands as tragedy instead of pamphlet. Roger Ebert observed that the film does not strain to make its message clear. The critique arrives through a hole knocked in a wall, a dog at the city pound, a friend who will not hear a request for a loan.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. Race does not appear, nor climate, nor body politics, nor neurodivergence, nor any queering of the margins. The pregnant maid Maria is given a private dilemma and a choice between two soldiers, which registers as a flicker of interest in women's interiority and little beyond it. De Sica's subject is shame, not patriarchy. The final sequence, a walk toward the railway tracks that dissolves into a chase and then into play, resists our taxonomy altogether. We file the numbers regardless. The film is seventy years old and remains indifferent to them, which is its own quiet correction.