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IV
Italy
By 1948 the first raw impact of the Italian neo-realists had made itself felt with memorable effect but it was only later that non-Italian critics were to find out that this powerful movement of social criticism in the cinema did not begin with Roma Citta apertd (1945). It stemmed rather from Visconti's film Ossessione (1942) and De Ska's / Bambini ci guardano, with a script by Zavattini, in the same year. In 1948 Visconti gave us his magnificent and uncompromising study of the poverty-stricken fisher-people of Sicily, La Terra trema, although it was not seen abroad in its original version until some years later. It has been disappointing to some of us that Visconti like Rossellini has not developed further along this path. Whatever he may say to the contrary, his last film Notti bianche (1957) was a pale shadow in every way of his strong, warm and intensely human earlier work. It is hard for us to accept the statements made by some Italians in recent years that neo-realism is dead, or that it has been superseded by a cult of neo-romanticism. Such announcements suggest that those who utter them have no proper understanding of the purpose or meaning of neorealism. As the decade progressed, it became clear that only a handful of film-makers in Italy faithfully subscribed to the neo-realist movement; of them De Sica and Cesar Zavattini were, and still remain, the outstanding.
So much has been written about De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (1948) that it is almost redundant to reiterate here that it is among the great films of all time. Few films have matched it for its integrity, its profound humanism, its social comment on employment and unemployment, its portrayal of simple human relationships, its use of non-actors, its wholly successful interpretation of real life on the screen with a minimum of contrivance and great subtle technical skill. I am, however, in a minority, I believe, in liking De Sica's later film, Umberto D (1952) even more than I did
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