Word: sica
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With a few old cameras, with war-battered city streets for sets and with amateurs for performers, directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica have given the world some of the finest movies ever made. They gave Italy a major industry, and treated moviegoers everywhere to the likes and looks of fiery Anna Magnani and smoky Silvana Mangano. Italian painters and sculptors, artistically confined under the Fascists, have broken free. The earthy realism of such Italian novelists as Moravia, Berto...
...probable that everyone who sees Vittorio De Sica's will reach for some symbolic meaning, but I doubt there really is one. Miracle in Milan is a modern fairy tale, no more. The evil tycoons and down trodden mass are simplifications made for the sake of fantasy rather than ideology. Its hero, a poor, virtuous boy, could easily be Jack the Giant Killer or Aladdin with a magic lamp (though in this case it is a dove...
...Sica heightens his fantasy with a cast of unbelievable, but highly amusing characters, a grouchy tramp who longs to possess a silk hat, an effervescent, scatterbrained old woman, who dies and becomes an equally bouncing angel, and a weak-kneed general. To put across such unreal nonsense as Miracle in Milan, all the actors must show no signs of farcical acting. Since they do not, the motion picture is delightful...
...product. After liberation, Italy's democratic government resumed the subsidies. But Italy's able young film boss, Under Secretary of State Giulio Andreotti, 33, onetime journalist and underground fighter, wisely kept hands off the product. Result: such imaginative directors as Rossellini and Vittorio (The Bicycle Thief) De Sica had free play...
...develop something more than sex and social realism. With its U.S. dollars, Italian Films Export is staging a Hollywood-like "Italian Film Festival" in Manhattan in October, which will offer a different production every night for seven nights. They include Gogol's satiric The Overcoat; De Sica's tragic Umberto D.; the comic Little World of Don Camilla, a story of rivalry between a priest and a Communist leader; and a love story, Two Cents Worth of Hope, which shared first prize at the Cannes Film Festival and stars 15-year-old Maria Fiore in her first picture...