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Bruegel canvas and carnivalesque organ music for the credits, then "childhood's open-sesame," as Cocteau would have it, "c'era una volta..." Totò the Good, a cabbage-patch foundling gladly received by a sort of D'Annunzio Mother Goose (Emma Gramatica). (So dotty is the crone that she sees spilled milk and turns it into the river of a makeshift maquette, "what a great big place the world is!") Years pass, and the grinning orphan (Francesco Golisano) kicks off a community for the Milanese downtrodden and plays mediator with a greedy tycoon (Guglielmo Barnabò), it becomes a matter of shantytown barricades. Land, shoes and bread are the basic demands, "a queste condizioni crediamo nel doman." Between Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., a fanciful-satirical interlude for Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, the fantasy of magical doves and angelic envoys versus the reality of frozen shacks and smoke bombs. A place in the sun, the marble beauty in the rubbish heap. (She comes to life with no love for the forlorn vagabond, spinning vamp to Brunella Bovo's wide-eyed waif.) It's not just fat cats barking, cupidity is also the human condition among the down-and-outs who charge a lira to watch the sunset and use a celestial gift to conjure up ritzy furs. Poke the ground and oil spurts, Judas (Paolo Stoppa) exchanges battered bowler for top hat and ushers in the Keystone Kops. "La vita è bella, la la la!" Capra's Lady for a Day, Sturges' Christmas in July, unhappy the land in need of miracles. A blur of enchantment and bitterness that builds to a Molnár ascension in front of the looming cathedral, "toward a kingdom where good-morning means good-morning." Heirs include Kurosawa (Dodes'ka-den) and Brooks (Life Stinks). With Anna Carena, Arturo Bragaglia, Erminio Spalla, and Riccardo Bertazzolo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |