Import

Miracle in Milan (De Sica; Joseph Burstyn) is the freshest movie in years, a brilliant departure by Producer-Director Vittorio De Sica from the tragic realism of Italy's best postwar films, including his own Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief. Still deeply concerned with man's inhumanity to man, De Sica this time accents the positive ideal of human brotherhood in a warm,exhilarating, richly comic picture.

The film's style fits no convenient pigeonhole. De Sica calls Miracle in Milan a fable for grownups, a tale suspended midway between fantasy and reality. And in its wealth of visual ideas, its deft use of music, its passages of bitter-sweet humor, stylized playfulness and social satire, the picture recalls the best of Charlie Chaplin and Rene Clair. But it is also an original work of art, touched in its finest moments with the elusive magic of poetry.

De Sica's fairy tale, written by Cesare (Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief) Zavattini, is the story of Toto the Good (Francesco Golisano), a newborn baby found in a cabbage patch by a quaint, gentle old lady. Toto is reared in an orphanage after her death and graduates one day into the streets of Milan, a youth of 20, utterly naive, trusting and goodhearted.

For befriending a tramp who has stolen his valise, Toto is invited to take shelter on a dreary wasteland at the city's fringe, where glum derelicts elbow one another to get into each stray shaft of sunlight that breaks through the winter clouds. By spring, Toto is busily turning the hobo jungle into a shantytown haven for Milan's poor, and imbuing them with good will. Among the newcomers is a badgered, not-quite-pretty girl (Brunella Bovo), with whom he strikes up a charmingly innocent courtship.

Toto's ragged flock takes such childlike joy in simple pleasures that its members naively pay admission to a charlatan for a view of the sunset, romp happily through a snake dance when they discover water gushing out of the ground. Then the gushers turn out to be oil, and a plutocrat snaps up the property on a tip from the camp's opportunistic sourpuss (Paolo Stoppa). The plutocrat sends his private police to oust the squatters.

Only a magic charm can save Toto's flotsam. It comes in the form of a heavenly dove produced for Toto by the spirit of his doting foster mother. With the help of the magic dove, Toto holds the cops hilariously at bay, gives the clamorous poor whatever they want. The wishes of the poor are funny, pathetic, always vulnerably human and sometimes as shabby as the greedy designs of the caricatured plutocrat in plug hat and fur collar. Ultimately, the dove enables them to escape into the clouds on streetcleaners' brooms "to a kingdom where 'good morning!' really means 'good morning!' "

The highly inventive fun of Miracle in Milan is simple enough for a child to enjoy, yet full of subtleties and sharp human insights that grownups can savor. In Miracle in Milan, says De Sica, "I was searching for the feeling of a small word that loves to hide everywhere: good." As audiences in Italy and France already know--and as U.S. moviegoers will begin to discover next week--the film bursts with that feeling.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.