In the Zavattini and De Sica oeuvre, Miracle in Milan [1951] was a parenthetical work. It was an excursion into fantasy, related to realism and in its service perhaps, but generally following a different path from the one defined by Shoeshine [1946] and Bicycle Thieves [1948]. With Umberto D., this director and screenwriter return to pure neorealism.

Now an eccentricity of Zavattini's is his claim that Italian cinema must, contrary to all evidence, "transcend" neorealism. This is a perilous and paradoxical position after the success of Bicycle Thieves, which represented the pinnacle from which any artist could only descend. But Umberto D. proves that the undeniable perfection of Bicycle Thieves does not delimit the neorealist aesthetic. This latest film succeeds, rather than in the strict application of the laws of neorealist form, in creating an almost miraculous equilibrium between neorealism's revolutionary conception of screenwriting and the exigencies of classical storytelling. Where one would never have believed that such a compromise could exist, these film artists have arrived at an ideal synthesis between the necessary rigor of tragedy and the spontaneous fluidity of daily reality. For Zavattini, however, this success did not come without sacrificing a part of his aesthetic theory, which we all know would create a cinematic "spectacle" of ninety minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing ever happens. An impossible task, perhaps, except in a theoretical film that would reflect reality like a two-way mirror, but such a deeply aesthetic notion is as inexhaustible as nature itself.

From this point of view, Umberto D. tries to go, and succeeds in going, much further than Bicycle Thieves did. Disagreement will inevitably arise, because the film's sociopolitical themes and its sentiment may make some people consider it a plea for old-age pensions, while others dismiss it as nothing but a melodrama. There will always be the carping critic who wants to mock De Sica's "faint heart," yet it is clear that the real film here is much more than the sum of its parts. The story of Umberto D., which concerns a retired bureaucrat and his dog — if one can still speak in this instance of a story or plot — is as much about the times when "nothing happens" as it is about dramatic events, such as the protagonist's failed suicide. De Sica dedicates more than one reel to showing us Umberto D. in his room, closing his shutters, arranging various objects, looking at his tonsils, going to bed, taking his temperature. Too many pills for a sore throat, I have to say! Enough pills for suicide . . . The sore throat plays its small role in the plot, but the most beautiful sequence in the film, the awakening of the little maid, rigorously avoids dramatic italicizing. The young girl gets up, comes and goes in the kitchen, hunts down ants, grinds the coffee . . . and all these "irrelevant" actions are reported to us with meticulous temporal continuity.

I mentioned to Zavattini that this last scene sustains our unflagging interest, whereas Umberto D.'s bedroom scene does not succeed in the same way. "You see," he told me, "that the aesthetic principle is not in question, but only its application. The more screenwriters reject genres of action and spectacle and try to make a story conform to the continuity of everyday life, the more choosing from among the infinite events of someone's life becomes a delicate, problematic issue. The fact that you were bored by Umberto D.'s sore throat, yet moved to tears by my little heroine's coffee grinder, only proves that I chose the second time what I, and perhaps you, had not conceived of before."

This is an uneven film, certainly, and one that does not satisfy the soul as much as Bicycle Thieves, but Umberto D. is also a film whose weaknesses are due only to its ambitions. This places it not only in the forefront of neorealism, but at the very edge of the invisible avant-garde, which I, in my own small way, hope to promote.