Word: sica
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...Roof (Italian). A story of love and squalor, in equal measure, directed and written by two of Italy's most formidable neorealists. Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini...
...Roof (Italian). A story of love and squalor in equal measure, directed and written by two of Italy's most formidable neorealists, Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini...
...Roof (De Sica; Trans-Lux) is one of the few memorable films produced in almost a decade by the once-daring Italian movie industry. In ailing postwar Italy, cinema was briefly practiced as a kind of social medicine. But the would-be healers prescribed such a bitter pill-neorealism -that the public refused to swallow it; most of the famed Italian films of the late '40s won rave reviews but lost money. In this picture, made in 1956, the ablest of the neorealists-Director Vittorio De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, who together produced Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief...
...overnight on empty lots in Rome, and may not legally be torn down if they have a door and a roof by the time the police arrive in the morning. The rest of the picture describes the young couple's struggle to acquire by criminal conspiracy what De Sica obviously feels to be theirs by natural right: a roof over their heads...
...elevation and intensity, The Roof falls short of the best neorealistic films, but in technical skill and in the subtlety with which it makes its points it ranks among the finest. Director De Sica humanizes the harsh material of the story with his easy gaiety and gentle humor, masterfully plays the Svengali to his pickup cast of raw amateurs-whom he inspires not to act but to live out their feelings with an artless art. Essentially, Neorealists De Sica and Zavattini have not changed their cinematic method, but they seem to have revised their social and moral philosophy. In their...