“To some the most impressive thing De Sica has yet done”: Miracle in Milan reviewed in 1951

Toto, an abandoned foundling, is cared for by a kindly old lady, Lolotta, and taught to be generous and good. When she dies, he has to go out into the world alone. He joins a group of poor people and beggars living in makeshift huts on the outskirts of Milan. Oil is struck on this squatting-ground, and the poor are ordered to leave. The financiers bring a tear-gas squad to turn them out. Lolotta takes French leave from heaven to bring Toto a magic dove, with which he is able to repel the tear-gas squad and grant the poor people’s wishes. Pursuing angels remove the dove, and the beggars are turned out; Lolotta manages to return it to Toto in time for him, the girl he loves, and the other poor people to fly away on broomsticks to a better land.

De Sica has called Miracolo a Milano a fable, and it has the purity, the simple magic, the moral truth, of the best. Though the construction is imperfect and not all the trickwork comes off, the wonderful unity and sureness of the prologue, with its account of Toto’s adoption, the death of his foster-mother, the funeral, are never quite recovered, the feeling is unflawed. The fault is only one of congestion in the middle passages. 

Perhaps no film since City Lights has seemed less bitter in spite of its bitterness. De Sica transfigures poverty without sentimentalising it. With the exception of Rappi, the soured derelict who attempts to betray the down-and-outs to the financiers, the faces and characters of the poor are those of innocence and beauty, caught and reflected in such diverse things as the lovely plainness of Toto and Edwige, so perfectly played by Francesco Golisano and Brunella Bovo, in the childish greed of an old man who wins a chicken in a raffle, in a row of beggars watching the sunset.

This beautiful and moving film may seem to some the most impressive thing de Sica has yet done; at any rate it is a further stage in the development of one of the cinema’s most outstanding artists. The haunting score by Cicognini makes a perfect accompaniment.