“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,” muses the titular hero of Preston Sturges’s 1942 screwball comedy Sullivan’s Travels. Joel McCrea’s John L. Sullivan, a famous but dissatisfied Hollywood comedy director, longs to make a socially conscious drama in order to address the ills of society. But upon seeing prisoners busting a gut while watching Walt Disney’s 1934 cartoon Playful Pluto, he realizes that comedy has a restorative power all its own for those who are down and out.
Coming off of their successful collaborations on Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves, one can imagine Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini having undergone a similar artistic awakening. Released in the wake of the neorealist boom, Miracle in Milan deliberately challenged and expanded on the dramatic template that the duo helped popularize over the latter half of the 1940s, as it laces its depictions of post-war suffering in Italy with a tender, whimsical humor that recalls De Sica’s expressed inspirations, Charlie Chaplin and René Clair.
The fanciful tone of Miracle in Milan is announced in the opening moments with a “Once Upon a Time…” title card, followed by a scene of a kindly old woman, Lolotta (Emma Gramatica), finding a baby in the cabbage patch in her backyard. While the fully fledged fairy-tale aspects of the film are reserved for the final act, the first hour unfurls through a series of light-hearted yet poignant vignettes that capture the brief joys of the saintly Totò’s childhood with the endlessly sweet, patient Lolotta before jumping ahead to his young adulthood, during which he finds acceptance within a community of homeless people.
Despite the harshness of his environment, Totò (Francesco Golisano) remains an eternal optimist—happy to be alive and greeting everyone he passes with a hearty “buongiorno.” Many of the film’s early scenes show the positive impact that he has on those around him, even as it’s left to us to decide whether the man, in his purity of intention, stands much closer to a saint than he does to a fool. There’s a wonderful scene where Totò plays peek-a-boo with a distraught young girl behind a door that’s the only part of a house that remains standing. Later, he mimics being short and having back pain as a way to help two men in an encampment feel less alone in their misfortunes. He even pretends to enjoy having water splashed on him to help a young woman (Brunella Bovo) get out of trouble with her employer.
These comedic episodes traffic in sentimentality that could otherwise verge on maudlin were they not ultimately undercut by a suspicion of the motives of the rich and poor alike. When the young Totò follows the cart taking his deceased adopted mother to her grave, a poor thief pretends to be in mourning beside him in order to escape the police officers who are chasing him. Later, when the homeless men and women at the encampment discover petroleum in the ground, the scheming Rappi (Paolo Stoppa) betrays them by informing the land owner, Mobbi (Guglielmo Barnabò), who promised to let them stay on his land, of the discovery.
This tension between the idealist and materialist reaches its peak in the final act, where Lolotta’s ghost delivers a dove to Totò that grants wishes to those who ask. Totò, of course, uses the dove to combat Mobbi’s capitalist might, first by giving his friends the power to blow tear gas back at the police outside the encampment. Then, when the police advance, the men among them find that they can only speak in voices of operatic caliber. But upon being left to their own devices, Totò’s friends barrage him with increasingly drastic requests, each of them wanting more money and products than everyone else, resulting in a chaos that’s understood to be as deadening as what would have happened to them had Mobbi gotten his way.
Miracle in Milan ends on a seemingly happy note, with Totò and everyone else from the encampment taking off to the heavens on broomsticks. It’s a funny and touching image that sees them finally shaking off the shackles of their suffering. But this miracle—the final bit of magic that Totò enacts with the help of the dove—also tacitly acknowledges the impossibility of reconciliation between the rich and poor in reality. Only the magic of cinema can provide the illusion of sustained happiness for those on society’s lowest rungs. As John L. Sullivan says in Sullivan’s Travels, “It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
Image/Sound
As with many of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist films, much of the pathos in Miracle in Milan is derived from extreme close-ups on faces. And this transfer, sourced from a brand new 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and Compass Film, boasts a remarkable image clarity that highlights the intricacies of the many singular faces of the film’s mostly non-professional actors. The contrast ratio is also stellar, making for inky blacks and subtle gradations between shades of gray, while the ample, evenly distributed grain lends the image a lovely film-like texture. The uncompressed mono soundtrack isn’t quite as impressive, but aside from retaining some of the flatness that often comes with post-dubbed films of the era, the dialogue is crisp and Alessandro Cicognini’s whimsical score has a nice depth to it.
Extras
In a new interview, neorealism expert and film scholar David Forgacs discusses screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s journey of adapting his own 1943 novel Totò il buono and contextualizes the film within the neorealist movement. A 54-minute documentary on Zavattini further elucidates the genesis of Miracle in Milan, and gives an in-depth overview of his career, particularly his numerous collaborations with Vittoria De Sica. The disc also includes three archival interviews: an audio-only interview with De Sica from the late ’60s, where he talks with film critic Gideon Bachmann about Italian cinema shifting away from neorealism, and brief video interviews with the director’s son, Manuel, and actor Brunella Bovo. A beautiful 30-page bound booklet rounds out the package and includes an early treatment by Zavattini of what would eventually become Miracle in Milan and an essay by film critic Christina Newland, who teases out the film’s complex interplay of human greed and goodness.
Overall
This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.
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