Miracle in Milan: It Is Goodness

The film’s narrative seems at first to be a relatively grounded story about class solidarity and human kindness, with its episodic encounters between the main character, Totò, and other poor working people on the city streets. But it eventually becomes a full-tilt fairy tale, wherein the ghost of an adoptive mother bestows a magical white dove on her son, the protagonist, allowing him to grant countless wishes to his impoverished friends. The ghost who will eventually appear begins the story as Lolotta, a corporeal elderly lady (Emma Gramatica), who finds Totò as a baby in her cabbage patch and raises him. Her spirited perspective on the world informs the child’s; milk spilled on the floor is an occasion not for scolding but for a game of make-believe featuring a white river with toy houses on the “banks.” After she passes away, Totò will be sent to an orphanage. As the little boy walks the streets behind her hearse, a man abruptly joins him, weeping loudly. Confused, Totò looks around and sees that it’s a ruse: the man is hiding from two policemen. It’s a throwaway moment, but versions of it keep appearing in Miracle in Milan: for all its gently fantastical elements, the film sees human nature as frequently callous and self-interested—no less cutthroat a worldview than you would expect to emerge from a place not yet a decade clear of the Second World War. (Milan, in particular, had been heavily bombed.)

Totò and his friends set to work building a shantytown with its own makeshift piazzas and streets; in the end, they have a thriving community. But when the pompous Mr. Mobbi (Guglielmo Barnabò) and a fellow eagle-eyed millionaire discover oil beneath the land, evictions are inevitable. Mobbi assures the poor people that he and they are “all the same,” and that he wishes them no harm, but naturally he’s lying. A real housing crisis in Milan at that time made predatory landlords like Mobbi a blight on the city’s economy; the implication that people like him will gobble up even the smallest sliver of someone else’s space must have rung true to contemporary Milanese audiences.

Threatened by Mobbi and a phalanx of armed police, Totò is near to admitting defeat when the ghostly image of Lolotta comes to him with a gift: a white dove that grants wishes. Soon, the thrill of wish fulfillment turns the shantytown upside down: while some wish for necessities, others wish for extravagant luxury goods. The requests for furs and washing machines are pointedly satirical here, poised as Italy was, in 1951, on the cusp of its “economic miracle” and the rise of mass consumerism. Zavattini and De Sica’s 1963 film on the subject, Il boom, would share Miracle in Milan’s acidic attitude toward bourgeois aspiration.

The police deploy smoke bombs to disperse the crowd; whimsically, they all “blow” the smoke back in the direction of the police. In the unforgettable finale, the shantytown dwellers take to the sky via flying broomsticks, nabbed from the street sweepers around Milan’s cathedral. To achieve this sequence’s complex special effects, De Sica brought in American expert Ned Mann, a pioneer who had begun in silent-era Hollywood. For Miracle in Milan, Mann used the blue-screen traveling-matte process he had helped develop for first use in Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad, and optical printers to combine shots, thus achieving the floating, transparent images of ghosts in the sky.

“De Sica sees magnanimity as a gift so rare as to be practically supernatural, and more often than not punctured by the harsh realities of existence.”

Miracle in Milan shares a bold sense of the fantastical with Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s work, particularly A Matter of Life and Death, with its spectral figures, absurdist humor, and incursions from the heavenly into the earthly domain. De Sica himself credited as influences the comic and poetic work of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, both of whose ebullient solidarity with small and beleaguered communities of working people had been informed by the experiences of the Depression years. But De Sica’s close-ups of the memorably careworn faces of his cast are entirely his own. The ordinariness of their features serves as part of the film’s geography of hard truths.

Despite winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, Miracle in Milan proved too unclassifiable to gain much favor with critics in Italy. It was too quasi-religious for many on the left, and was even banned in the USSR. For others, it was too obviously anticapitalist. Zavattini, a communist (if an unorthodox one), likely wouldn’t have minded this. And though De Sica resented being categorized based on political affiliation, his films contain a deep seam of class solidarity and concern for the poor. Miracle in Milan is no exception. (“Because they are destitute, these people still feel—as the majority of ordinary men perhaps no longer do—the living warmth of a ray of winter sunshine, the simple poetry of the wind,” De Sica wrote of his characters.)

The film’s spiritual gestures fall somewhere between folktale magic and Christian iconography: flying broomsticks and magical white doves, its so-called miracle-working combined with a cheekiness in its sense of the supernatural. De Sica explicitly said that his films had a “Christian—or simply human—sense of fellowship.” A case could be made for the idea that Totò is himself angelic; he’s an orphan who appears from nowhere and nothing and spreads remarkable generosity to ease the suffering around him, by mysterious means. He plays Chaplinesque games with forlorn children, comforts an old man with arthritis, gives away his worldly possessions, and rescues a friend from suicide. He’s too good for this world; you have to wonder whether he belongs to another. But if a charge of sentimentality could ever be leveled at De Sica, it wouldn’t be for Miracle in Milan. Perhaps even more here than in the other, more explicitly tragic works that he and Zavattini collaborated on (from Shoeshine to Bicycle Thieves to Umberto D.), the filmmaker sees magnanimity as a gift so rare as to be practically supernatural, and more often than not punctured by the harsh realities of existence.