MIRACOLO A MILANO / MIRACLE IN MILAN (1951)

Vittorio De Sica once said there were two kinds of film directors, the static shot editors (Team Eisenstein) and the camera movers (Team Murnau).  But then suggested a third: Chaplin, a school of one.  And this Populist Fantasy, lost between perennial classics BICYCLE THIEVES/’49 and UMBERTO D./’52, with regular scripter Cesare Zavattini working up a sort of Magical Neo-Realism, is De Sica’s Chaplin film.*  Francesca Golisano stars as the 'everyman' Chaplin figure*, a literal cabbage patch kid, found & raised by a dotty old lady, now fresh out of the orphanage.  A grown up Holy Fool, this trusting naïf believes the best of people even when he’s being taken.  Landing in a storm-tossed tramp city, he unites the undeserving poor to rebuild as a communal shantytown where most everyone gets along until oil is discovered.  Suddenly, the banker who owns the property wants it back to develop.  It’s paradise lost.  The simplistic politics and general goodness might easily curdle, but De Sica keeps enough bad behavior, greed, feuds & stupidity going on amongst the sharing & caring to cut the sentimentality; ending with a miracle that can be read many ways.  It’s really the same tragic lesson Albert Lamorisse sold as uplift in THE RED BALLOON/’56 and WHITE MANE/’53: No place on earth fit for innocence and goodness.  Exactly what Chaplin was trying for when The Tramp dreams of heaven in THE KID/’21.  De Sica gets us there.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *De Sica mostly Team Murnau, even more so after acting for tracking shot titan Max Ophüls in THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE . . ./’53 whose influence is all over the film he made immediately after, GOLD OF NAPLES/’54.  (Less noticeable in the original Stateside cut which dropped a child’s funeral segment done in a series of fluid crane shots.)  OR: For a stingingly scabrous view of a big city Italian shantytown, Ettore Scola’s appalling/hilarious BRUTTI, SPORCHI E CATTIVI/’76.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *De Sica finds Chaplin touches in Golisano’s baggy, patched pants and slightly splayed running stance, a stockier Chaplin, but with the same short stature & low center of gravity.  Even a water in the face meet-cute a la CITY LIGHTS/’31.  And that police force at the climax?  Pure Keystone Kops.