Carlo Battisti	Umberto Domenico Ferrari
Maria Pia Casilio	Maria, the young maid
Lina Gennari	Antonia, the pension's mistress
Memmo Carotenuto	an in-patient
Alberto Albani Barbieri	Antonia's friend
Ilena Simova
Elena Rea
Lamberto Maggiorani
Pasquale Campagnola
Riccardo Ferri

PLOT

Umberto D., old ministerial official, forced to live with an unadequate pension, is debated among economic unsurmountable difficulties. He occupies a miserable furnished room, from which the greedy landlady threatens to evict him. Ill, feverish, he enters the hospital, after having entrusted his faithful companion Flik, a little dog, to Maria, the young maid, that shows him a certain comprehension. Gone out of the hospital for some days, he doesn’t find anymore his dear Flik at home: after feverish researches he finds it to the town dog pound and he ramsoms it. Now it comes back again, more urgent and threatening, the danger of the eviction. Umberto D. goes looking for some old friends; but nobody wants or can help him. The idea to stolk his hand out to the passers-by arrives him; but the feeling of his own self-respect forbids him it. He decides then to die with Flik. He goes to the level crossing; but frightened by the sound of a train in arrival, the little dog escapes from his hands. For Umberto D. it is the salvation: decided to regain the trust and the affection of Flik, he starts to play with him and he doesn’t think about the suicide anymore.

PRIZES

Best film at the Festival of Punta del Este
Best foreign film for the critics of New York (EX AEQUO)

CRITIQUE

De Sica’s masterpiece, it is one of the most beautiful films on the old age and its loneliness in the history of cinema, animated by a big sense fo human dignity. Developing with a sober and unadorned narration and with that impression of an almost documentary reality proper of Neorealism, it offers one of the best relizations of the daily poetic of Cesare Zavattini, the only author of the screen-play. It is exceptional the protagonist’s interpretaton, Carlo Battisti, that is not a professional actor , but teacher of glossology at the university of Florence, in that period of seventy. (“Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

NOTES

The film instigated the anger of the conformists, of Giulio Andreotti (at that time undersecretary to the Show) and of who thought that the dirty cloths had to be washed at home.