Vittorio De Sica

Born in Sora, the Italian city in the province of Terra di Lavoro, on July 7, 1901, Vittorio Domenico Gaetano Sorano De Sica was the son of a Calabrian bank employee and a Neapolitan woman. When he was very young, the family moved to the capital. “I had a very unhappy childhood. I think I understood what human suffering was and throughout my life I have tried to portray it and come out in defense of suffering humanity,” explains De Sica.

The boy was studying accounting when a childhood friend convinces him that they can earn some money in the movies, then a developing art. Thus, he goes to a casting and gets a role in the silent film The Clemenceau Trial , a luxurious melodrama at the service of the Italian diva Francesca Bertini . He decided to dedicate himself to acting, so he joined Tatiana Pavlova’s theater company. In a short time he formed his own theatrical company, and acquired great prestige on the stage, which he would not abandon throughout his life, since he performed some 150 productions of plays and magazines.

He would also get to intervene in a more or less similar number of films. After the arrival of the sound she stars in What scoundrels are men! , a comedy of white telephones – light Italian films of the time – directed by Mario Camerini . The actor would lavish himself a lot on the genre, in films with an elegant tone, such as At your command, ma’am .

Once at the pinnacle of stardom in Italy, De Sica manages to boost his projects as a director. He makes his debut with the help of Giuseppe Amato , with Scarlet Roses , also quite inconsequential, about a guy who is convinced that his wife is cheating on him. “A film director must interpret the moment in which he lives and represent the current reality. Then he can be better or worse, but the important thing is to be honest,” said De Sica.

After Magdalena, Zero in Conduct and Born on Friday , he directed Recuerdo de amor , during the filming of which he fell in love with the protagonist, the Spanish María Mercader , sister of the murderer of Leon Trotski, despite the fact that De Sica was married to the actress Giuditta Rissone , with whom he had a baby. He decided to divorce, and was united to Mercader for the rest of his life, who gave birth to two other children, the actor Manuel De Sica and the composer Christian De Sica . He had also had a previous relationship with the Spanish actress Mimí Muñoz , with whom he had another daughter, Vicky Lagos , also an interpreter .

While filming Daró un millione , another Camerini film as an actor, he became intimate with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini , with whom he got along perfectly and who would end up writing almost all of his films. Almost the same age, and both of them being Catholic, they began their fruitful collaborations with I bambini ci guardano , from 1944, around the tragedy of Prico, a four-year-old boy whose mother abandoned the family to go with her lover. .

When he was shooting his next film with a script by Zavattini, Heaven’s Gate (1945) – a special commission from the Vatican, through the Catholic Cinematographic Center – De Sica became an Italian Oskar Schindler. In accordance with a rescue plan, apparently supervised by Pope Pius XII himself, the filmmaker saved the lives of hundreds of Jews by recruiting them as extras for his film, around a group of sick people traveling as pilgrims to a sanctuary. They say that the Supreme Pontiff forced the filming to be delayed more and more to make time for the Allied liberation. He was the production delegate Giovanni Montini, later Pope Paul VI.

Around that time, none other than Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, called De Sica to meet with him. He offered her to become the axis of the new Italian fascist cinema. Luckily, De Sica had a good excuse to get rid of such a ‘kind’ offer: his contract with the Vatican forced him to finish the tape.

After the liberation, the Zavattini-De Sica tandem helped to consolidate the emerging neorealism with The Shoeshine Boy , about two children who survive as best they can by shining shoes in post-war Italy. The original title, Sciuscià , refers to the Anglo-Saxon term “Shoe-Shine”, with which the trade is named. “Neorealism was not created around a table or in the middle of a discussion. It was born in us, in our minds, in the need to express ourselves in a different way than the Mussolini regime and a certain type of American cinema had forced us to do. “explains the director.

Undoubtedly the duo’s greatest neorealist masterpiece is Bicycle Thief , about a father who with his son searches for the stolen bicycle without which he will not be able to work pasting posters. “A story of love for others”, commented on it the critic André Bazin.

The director could not finance it, because the producers did not trust that such a simple story would work. He found someone very interested in the project who offered him a million dollars at the time, as long as the protagonist was… Cary Grant ! But De Sica refused because he had thought that the role had to be for a man in the street, identical to the character. He finally hired Lamberto Maggiorani , a real steelworker whom De Sica met during one of his usual walks through Rome to soak up people’s problems.

The film won the Oscar for best foreign language film. However, the producers remained reluctant to pay for his adventures with Zavattini. To carry out the following ones, he decides to lavish himself more and more as an actor, in sometimes low-quality films. Thanks to that he gets the money to shoot Miracle in Milan , a great mix of social cinema with magical elements. The neorealist cycle ends with the masterful Umberto D , about the daily difficulties of a retiree, who is nevertheless a great financial failure.

Thus, De Sica decides to make up his cinema, make commercial concessions in which he could ‘sneak’ his social concerns. He manages to interest the great American producer David O’Selznick, who finances him the melodrama Termini Station , in exchange for his partner, Jennifer Jones , playing the protagonist, an American housewife who doubts between returning to her husband, or staying with her lover (an extraordinary Montgomery Clift ). O’Selznick also hired him to cast Jones as an actor, playing Rock Hudson ‘s friend in A Farewell to Arms (1957) , a role for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Role.

As an actor, he was capable of filming anything, although he always kept the level high. His role as carabinieri officer Antonio Carotenuto stands out, which he played in Pan, love and fantasy , and due to his success in the sequels Pan, love and jealousy , Pan, love and… (in Spain he filmed Pan, love and… Andalusia , where despite the title he played another character). He was Pope Pius VII, in Austerlitz , by Abel Gance , an Italian lawyer in Capri , by Melville Shavelson , a cardinal in The Fisherman’s Sandals , by Michael Anderson , an aristocrat in Madame de… , byMax Ophüls …Also directed himself as defense counsel in Universal Judgment . Possibly his best work was the fake who ends up defending the ideals of the hero he has supplanted in General de la Rovere , where he placed himself under the orders of another of the greats of neorealism, Roberto Rossellini , founder of the movement.

After becoming close friends with the couple formed by the prolific producer Carlo Ponti and the extraordinary actress Sophia Loren , he decides to collaborate with them on several feature films. With The Gold of Naples , made up of six Neapolitan stories, he consecrated the actress. With Two Women –which contains a very harsh sequence of a rape–, the harsh story of a mother who tries to survive together with her daughter during the postwar period, Sophia Loren won the Oscar for best actress. They nominated her again for her exemplary work as the regular lover of a businessman, played by Marcello Mastroianni , in Matrimonio a la italiana , adaptation of the great play ‘Filumena Marturano’, by the maestroEduardo DeFilippo .

Loren and Mastroianni would return to their orders in the famous Sunflowers , where a peasant travels to Russia in search of her husband, who disappeared during the war. Unfortunately, in the 70s, his films are excessively commercial, and it is difficult to recognize his authorial obsessions in them. When no one trusted his cinema anymore, and after minor works such as On the trail of the fox , A new world , The witches and Seven times a woman , he surprises locals and strangers with the extraordinary Finzi Contini’s garden , adaptation of the novel by Giorgio Bassani, about a Jewish family trying to maintain the illusion of normality in Mussolini’s pre-World War II Italy. Curiously, it is one of the few works of his in which he did not count on Zavattini.

Also of interest is Bitter Awakening , about a tuberculosis patient who falls in love with a mechanic in a sanatorium. She says goodbye to the cinema with the irregular The Journey , with Sophia Loren accompanied by the British Richard Burton , with whom she did not quite get along. She died on November 13, 1974, in Neuilly-sur-Seine (France), after undergoing surgery for a cyst in her lung.