Miracle in Milan (1951)

Director: Vittorio De Sica
Writers: Cesare Zavattini
Stars: Emma Gramatica, Francesco Golisano, Paolo Stoppa
Runtime: 100 minutes

Plot: The film, told as a neo-realist fable, explains the lives of a poverty-stricken group in post-war Milan, Italy.

Review: The whimsy and fairy tale atmosphere that pervade Miracle in Milan were De Sica's respite from the severity of his earlier films, an exercise in satire and irony which he linked to the world of Hans Christian Anderson wherein "virtue triumphs and evil is punished." The first half of the film, (based on the novel, Toto, il buono , by Cesare Zavattini, de Sica's frequent collaborator) adheres to the documentary recreation of Milan's impoverished outcasts.

Miracle in Milan is a modern-day fable which implies that the "pure in heart" must seek their heaven apart from earth. Toto the Good (Francesco Golisano) is an orphan who is discovered as a baby in the cabbage patch of the kindly old Lolotta, who teaches him to be good and pure of heart. When she dies, he spends several years in an orphanage after which he becomes an apostle for the beggars of Milan, aided by a white dove which possesses the power of miracles—the dove being a gift from Lolotta, now his guardian angel and benefactress. 

De Sica's combination of realism and fantasy is seductive, and his use of the fanciful sometimes overshadows the social commentary about the exploitation and dispossession of the innocent when confronted by the vagaries of poverty and the industrial society. And although De Sica steadfastly refused to admit it, the film has an element of despair, of spiritual quandary, as a dominant theme.

Miracle in Milan, which won the Grand Prize at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival and was named Best Foreign Film by the New York Film Critics, is one of Vittorio De Sica's lesser masterpieces.

Reviewed by Intisab Shahriyar