Toward a Kingdom where “Good morning!” really means Good Morning.
. . . . . Closing epilogue of Miracle in Milan

Can fairytales or fantasies genuinely convey serious moral lessons any more sophisticated that the basic difference between good and evil? Does a story like Cinderella, for example, merely teach us that good-natured, moral people have a better shot at finding happiness in life than those who are spiteful and self-absorbed or is there also a credible possibility that it transmits advice about treating all children in a family with the same level of respect? The ability of fairytales to convey meaningful messages is a question inherent in Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realistic fantasy, Miracle in Milan (1951), which came on the heels of his Academy Award winning masterpiece, The Bicycle Thief (1948). Is it even appropriate for a topic as serious and disturbing as rampant homelessness to be treated as subject matter for a magical fantasy accompanied by a cheery musical score, irrepressible optimism, and whimsy? Some would say that the whole idea of combining the term Neo-realism with fantasy is something of an oxymoron.

My response to those who criticism Miracle in Milan on the basis of it being a cop-out or a missed opportunity to make serious points about a major social problem includes two counterarguments. First, very few films that tackle the issues of poverty or homelessness make any significant point beyond the obvious one: poverty has an enormously debilitating effect on the human spirit, physical health, and mental health. I don’t recall a film about poverty or homelessness that seemed to articulate or promote a particular solution or plan of action. At best, films about extreme poverty may motivation us to try a little harder to alleviate poverty by reminding us of its horror, but those who watch and are moved by such films are typically the ones who already care while those who prefer to ignore the problem will typically also ignore such movies, especially if they are emotionally draining, point fingers, or advance a socialistic message. Perhaps a less emotionally heavy-handed film about the issue has a chance of reaching a wider audience. Second, if one takes the trouble to interpret the symbolism in this De Sica parable about poverty, it has as much or more to say as any other film on the topic.

Historical Background: Vittorio De Sica was born in Sora, Italy on July 7th, 1901 but grew up mostly in Naples, in a family of the lower middle class. He worked for a while as an office clerk to help support his poor family. He participated in amateur performances from an early age, made his film debut while still a teen in a supporting role in Bencivenga’s Il processo Clemenceau, and joined a stage company in 1923. By the late twenties he was something of a matinee idol in theater, usually playing a witty, personable young man. He parlayed that image into cinematic success as the lead in Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini che mascalzoni in 1932. Some of his other noteworthy light comedies of the 1930’s included Mister Max (1938) and Department Store (1939).

He turned to directing in 1940, initially making comedies similar to those in which he had previously starred. His fifth film, however, The Children are Watching Us (1944), marked a major shift in emphasis for De Sica. For one thing, it was the beginning of a highly fruitful collaboration with writer Cesare Zavattini, and, secondly, it presaged the Neo-realism movement that was to dominate post-war cinema in Italy until 1952. The pair next worked together on The Gate of Heaven (1945) during the war, but truly began to make their mark on the history of cinema with two great films in the emerging style of Neo-realism: Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief (1948), both of which won the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film. These monumental successes were followed by Miracle in Milan (1951), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1951, and Umberto D. (1952), for which Zavattini received an Academy Award nomination for best script.

No one came to epitomize Italian Neo-realism more than De Sica. The tenets of Neo-realism included use of non-professional actors, gritty cinematography, simplified narratives, and emphasis on the everyday activities of working class or impoverished people. Neo-realism emerged in Italy after World War II as much out of necessity as artistic ideals. Italy was in physical and economic ruins and the use of non-professional actors reduced the cost of making films. The gritty cinematography was partly the result of low-quality film stock and limited capacity to control lighting with expensive equipment. Even so, the principles of Neo-realism also served the spirit of the times by capturing the pathos of the struggle to survive in the Italy of the late 1940’s.

The Story: Toto, abandoned as an infant, is found by Old Lolatta (Emma Gramatica) in a cabbage patch. She is a cheerful and eccentric woman, full of vim and verve. Coming home one day, she finds the porridge boiling over onto the floor. Rather than cleaning it up, she puts toy trees and houses around it, converting the spillage into a river through the town. Lolatta raises Toto to boyhood, but when she passes away, he is sent to an orphanage.

Released from the orphanage at eighteen, Toto (Francesco Golisano) is now a strapping young man, full of optimism and exuberance, but naïve to the ways of our quaint world. He passes a man on the sidewalk and the following short exchange introduces Toto to the harsh realities of an unfriendly world:

Toto: Good morning.
Stranger: To whom did you say “Good morning?”
Toto: To you.
Stranger: Me?
Toto: Yes.
Stranger: You know me?
Toto: No.
Stranger: What do you mean then with “Good morning?”
Toto: I wanted to say . . . well . . . “Good morning.”
Stranger: Phooey! You have to put up with so much early in the morning.”

Toto is unable to find work and soon his valise is stolen by a vagrant. Toto follows the man and confronts him, stating that the valise is his. The man sets it down on the walk and begins to cry because he liked the valise. Toto empties his belongings from the valise and gives it to the man. Needing a place to sleep, Toto follows the man, Bad Rappi (Paolo Stoppa), to a lot where the homeless have set up cardboard shelters in which to sleep. Toto awakens in the morning with all of his irrepressible exuberance, as the homeless huddle together in little patches of sunshine breaking through the overcast skies. He plays with a sad little girl, Angelina, and soon has her smiling. A bone-chilling wind whips up and blows away most of the makeshift cardboard shelters. Over the ensuing days, Toto organizes the vagrants to erect sturdier shantytown structures and gradually becomes the community’s unofficial leader.

Two of the homeless men, Gaetano (Erminio Spalla) and Alfredo (Arturo Bragaglia), discover a damaged statue of a Greek goddess in a nearby junk pile. They nearly come to blows over it, but by Toto’s timely intervention, the statue is soon gracing the shantytown’s central square. Toto organizes the dwellings, providing streets and blocks and segregating the families, couples, and singles into different areas. One new arrival is a group of four, Signora Marta Altezzosa (Anna Carena) and her husband Guiseppe, their young child, and their maid, Edvige (Brunella Bovo) – as improbable as a maid in a shantytown might seem. Edvige gradually emerges as Toto’s low-key love interest. A black man and a white woman, both single, arrive at about the same moment, take an obvious shine to one another, but the idea of racial mixing at that time in Italy was apparently verboten. They go their separate ways. Another man is an irascible loner who refuses to be friendly with the other people of the town. Still another, Lallaralla, tries to commit suicide by standing in the path of an on-coming train, but is rescued by Toto.

For entertainment, the citizens of the Shantytown gather to watch a sunset, sitting in chairs arranged as though for a theater event. Another man sets up a booth where, for 100 lyres, he provides customers with a series of compliments: “What a forehead! What a smile! What a beautiful profile! What a spiritual face! Who knows who your father was?” I’m not sure if that last item qualifies as complimentary; if not, the point was lost on the satisfied customers.

So, life is improving for these folks, thanks to the happy optimism of Toto, but along comes Mr. Mobbi (Guglielmo Barnabo), a rich, capitalist pig. He is bargaining to purchase the property, but finally loses interest when he can’t haggle the owner down to his price and when it becomes evident that the vagrants will be tough to move out anyway. Business returns to normal and Toto works on setting up a pole in the middle of their little town. Suddenly, a geyser wells up from the hole, to everyone’s delight. At first, they believe it is water, but it turns out to be oil.

The irascible man (let’s call him The Spy) sees opportunity to profit himself at the expense of the other homeless people. He slinks off and, for the price of a top hat, he informs Mobbi, the rich capitalist, about the discovery of oil. Soon, Mobbi has purchased the property and is determined to drive the homeless away. The rest of the film relates to the battle between the community of homeless, led by Toto, and the greedy Mobbi, his lawyers, and the police. The story becomes increasingly fanciful, as the homeless acquire the beneficent intervention of Toto’s deceased caretaker, Old Lolatta, a couple of other ghostly spirits, and a magical dove. Among other developments, the statue of the Greek goddess (Alba Arnova) comes to life and the various hapless homeless suddenly discover that Toto is able to bestow on them their heart’s desires with the help of his magic dove. Their requests begin modestly enough but soon escalate into increasingly greedy demands, such as millions of millions of millions of lira. The white woman enamored with the black man asks to be changed to a black woman, only to discover that the black man has asked to be changed into a white man! A short man is made tall and Signora Marta Altezzosa gets a sparkling new dress and gaudy jewelry.

Toto offers his sweetheart, Edvige, first the moon and then the sun, raising the dawn for her. Unfortunately, dawn is when the police, under the orders of Mobbi, have scheduled their final raid on the shantytown. Be careful what you wish for! The vagrants are rounded up and hauled off in paddy wagons, until the power of the magic dove is invoked for one final grand and fanciful finale – which you won’t want to miss! Hope springs eternal – at least it should in a compassionate society.

Themes: In my opinion, Miracle in Milan makes four major points which together comprise a logical argument in relationship to how a compassionate society ought to deal with the issue of poverty. The first point is the obvious one: many people have been left out of the relative prosperity of modern societies and have been left to wallow instead in abject poverty. That much simply establishes the problem that is to be examined. Despite its upbeat, fanciful tone, Miracle in Milan establishes through its realistic cinematography the bleak and depressing circumstances under which these poor people live. No viewer will mistake shivering in the cold of the morning after spending the night in a makeshift cardboard hut for anything other than abject poverty.

The second theme articulated by Miracle in Milan was the idea implicit in most of the films of the Neo-realistic period that the abject poverty of the lower classes is attributable to the concentration of wealth among the privileged wealthy. The Communist movement was strong in Italy and its Marxist rhetoric identified capitalism as the culprit responsible for poverty. Marxism advocated the idea “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” Capitalism, by contrast, is built on incentive theory, rewarding each in proportion to the worth of his or her skills on the free market. Miracle in Milan illuminates the results of unrestrained capitalism by contrasting the furs, top hats, limousines, and high-rise office buildings of the wealthy with the squalid conditions of the homeless.

De Sica’s third theme, however, adds a kind of complication to the discussion seldom broached in works of the Neo-realistic ilk. After the spirits provide Toto with a dove that empowers him with the ability to fulfill the desires of his fellow vagrants, he is soon overwhelmed by demands that steadily increase in the quality of greediness. De Sica is acknowledging that greed is a fundamental human tendency that will manifest itself wherever and whenever the opportunity arises. If the poor are less greedy than the rich, it is only because their circumstances have rendered greed a meaningless vice. They are too busy worrying about mere subsistence. As my own dear wife often says, “The natural tendency of life is for more and more.” For another illumination of this idea, check out my review of the film Lamerica, which chronicles the evolution of some of the Italian people after World War II from impoverished victims of corruption and greed to capitalistic victimizers of neighboring Albania. Inside almost every person, there lurks a greedy fat capitalist pig. Only some of us are “fortunate enough” to manifest that ugly tendency! “Need” is a bottomless concept. Implicitly, the second half of the Marxist ideology, “to each according to his need,” is impossible to achieve.

If there is a rational approach to the issue of poverty, it is not to be found in either unrestrained capitalism or the ideals of Marxism. To take capitalism first, capitalism can operate either to create economic opportunity and wealth or to deny it. At its most effective, capitalist investment creates wealth for the capitalist while also generating employment opportunities and income for workers – a positive-sum game where all benefit. At its most damaging, capitalism operates as a zero-sum game, concentrating wealth in the hands of a few by exploiting the poor and excluding the unemployable. Capitalism could work for the benefit of the collective society if governments functioned effectively to regulate it for the common weal, by fostering its positive-sum manifestations while restricting the exploitive forms. Unfortunately, the reality, at least in America, is that the capitalistic interests control the government rather than the other way around.

Marxism also fails, however, as an answer to poverty, for at least two reasons. Without a firm linking of rewards to skills and productivity (market value), the foremost source of incentive is dissipated. Sad though it may be, greed is the single most powerful motivator for most humans to acquire skills and maintain their productivity. Communist societies are thus unable to compete effectively with those based on capitalism. Secondly, as common sense dictates, the most able members of a society would prefer to operate under capitalist ideology while the most needy would typically prefer Communist or socialist ideology. As long as both options exist in the world, there will be an inevitable “brain drain,” whereby the ablest will emigrate to the societies that provide them with the greatest reward.

Supporters of unrestrained capitalism (the political right in America) like to invoke the claim that poor people in America have an undue sense of entitlement – believing they are entitled to this and that rather than feeling obliged to earn it. The validity of that argument rests entirely on what “this and that” happen to be. Most of us want a society that is humane but also vigorous and productive. The way to have both is to provide a safety net of entitlement but to limit it to the minimum necessities that each person deserves simply by virtue of being a living human being in a society. The incentive system of capitalism ought to prevail for everything above the basics for survival, but a social safety net ought to be in place at the base. Food enough to maintain physical health, shelter adequate to protect one from exposure, clothing, basic health care, and education for the young – that much should be each person’s fundamental privilege in a modern society by dint of existence. After that – by all means – let capitalism hold sway and work its wonders.

When a society provides less than the minimum survival necessities to its poor, we all lose in multiple ways. The children who grow up in poverty are deprived of opportunity to develop their potential and society loses a big chunk of their potential contribution. Poverty also breeds crime. And poverty leads to hopelessness and despair, which brings us to De Sica’s fourth thematic message: a healthy society is one that fosters hope for all people. Hope is motivating, but despair kills the human spirit. De Sica leaves us with this message from the poor.

We want a hut to live in where we can lay our head,
A plot of earth to toil in where we can live and die,
A loaf of bread, a pair of shoes, some stockings and some socks,
So we and our children can believe in a tomorrow!

Production Values: The idea of combining the neo-realistic filming style with a fantastical allegory was certainly radical. The photography is every bit as gritty and bleak as that utilized in Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief, but the music provided by Alessandro Cicognini is airy and delightful and the performances buoyant and joyful. It makes for a stark contrast.

Presumably these actors were all nonprofessionals at the time this film was made, though I wouldn’t have guessed it from the results. There wasn’t a single noticeably weak performance. I note that Paolo Stoppa, who played Rappi, went on to appear in many other films, including Gold of Naples (1954), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Boccaccio 㣪 (1962), The Leopard (1963), Becket (1964), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). Otherwise, I found no listing for other cast members in top-quality films.

Bottom-Line: This is a thoroughly enjoyable film – a delightful and comical surreal fantasy. It has a little of the feel of one of the bittersweet Charlie Chaplin offerings. I don’t believe that it shortchanges its somber subject matter. It just presents its moral lessons with sugarcoating. The tragedies of homelessness and poverty continue to be such intractable problems that there is certainly no harm done by delivering the message in as many different forms as possible. A film such as this one may reach an audience that would never stay seated for Pixote or Los Olvidados. If the film’s social message fails to reach anyone, it is still good entertainment. Miracle in Milan is in Italian with English subtitles and has a running time of 95 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Italy:

Amarcord
L’Avventura
The Bicycle Thief
Christ Stopped at Eboli
Cinema Paradiso
The Conformist
Death in Venice
Divorce Italian Style
The Dreamers
Eclipse
8 ½
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
General della Rovere
The Last Emperor
The Leopard
Life is Beautiful
Malèna
Mamma Roma
The Night of the Shooting Stars
Nights of Cabiria
La Notte
Padre Padrone
Il Postino
Rocco and His Brothers
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Shoeshine
The Son’s Room
The Spider's Stratagem
Star Maker
Swept Away
Teorema
The Tree of Wooden Clogs
Umberto D.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older