Miracle in Westwood: A De Sica Festival

If you are a movie lover seeking to replenish your soul, you’re in luck.

Starting tonight at Melnitz Hall and running through Aug. 16, the UCLA Film and Television Archive will be unspooling a series of major cultural import: “Vittorio D: De Sica Behind the Camera and on the Screen.”

De Sica was a great director who was also a great actor, and the festival, consisting of 25 films, headlines both his talents. All of the legendary neo-realist masterpieces from the ‘40s and early ‘50s will be on view--”Shoeshine,” “The Bicycle Thief,” “Miracle in Milan,” “Umberto D”--as well as his performances in Max Ophuls’ “The Earrings of Madame De...” and Rossellini’s “General Della Rovere” that are pinnacles of the acting art. Virtually all of the crowd-pleasers from his post-neo-realist period are here, including “Yesterday Today and Tomorrow” and “Marriage, Italian Style.” His last great film, the 1970 “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” made four years before his death, closes the festival.

If the festival consisted of only these famous films, that would be reason enough to attend, particularly since the films are infrequently revived--often in fuzzy 16-millimeter prints. (All the UCLA prints are in 35mm.) By also including a sampling of early films starring De Sica in his pre-director, matinee-idol period, and by showing a number of his early, often frothy directorial efforts, the series, which was initially curated for the Museum of Modern Art by film historian Stephen Harvey, charts the career trajectory of one of the most extraordinary artists ever to work in the movies.

Together with his lifelong scenarist Cesare Zavattini, De Sica brought a new poetic realism to film. They could not sustain the poetry; after the glorious efflorescence of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the filmmakers continued working together but on more conventional projects. (Some of those films, such as “A Place for Lovers” and “Sunflower,” are not in the festival.) Still, between 1943 and 1951 De Sica and Zavattini made six films in a row, five of which are masterpieces. It’s an unparalleled feat in the history of movies.

Of particular interest at UCLA are two films that are both legendary and all but unseen in this country.

“La Porta Del Cielo” (which screens Thursday at 7:30 p.m.), about a trainload of invalids on their way to the shrine at Loreto, was begun in 1943 during the German Occupation. Because of its official sanction by the Vatican, the film allowed De Sica to keep his distance from the Germans; according to Harvey, De Sica “deliberately stretched out shooting for 10 full months, until the American forces were safely inside the gates of Rome.” Completed but rarely shown even in Italy, it’s a film even many De Sica devotees have never heard of. And yet it was made in his greatest period.

Is it a great film? No. The shoestring catch-as-catch-can production, which was partly a cover to shield from the Nazis the helpless and the insurgent among the cast and crew, limited De Sica’s control; the script’s soapy, allegorical aspects tend to clash with the realistic locations (including, in the final scene, St. Peter’s, which was housing 3,000 homeless refugees). But how can anyone who is interested in De Sica--that is to say, interested in the art of film--pass up a chance to see this film? It would be like a music lover passing up the opportunity to hear a recently discovered, medium-grade Mozart opera.

There are no qualifications to be made about “The Children Are Watching Us,” which screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m. It’s the first major De Sica-Zavattini collaboration; watching it is like seeing their great themes in embryo. And yet it’s not just a warm-up for “Shoeshine” or “The Bicycle Thief,” which also describe the fragility and destruction of innocence. It’s almost as great as both of them--it can stand by itself.

It’s about the effects of an adulterous mother’s affair on her small son. De Sica was perhaps the greatest director of children. It was more than a matter of wheedling the right emotions out of them. He connected up with their simplicity and hurt and tenderness. His artistry with children was a matter of profound respect for their condition. For De Sica and Zavattini, children were emblematic of the destruction of all innocence in the world--a particularly resonant theme in the ashes of World War II. The effect of this film, as with “Shoeshine” and “The Bicycle Thief,” is both delicately intimate and operatic. The tragedy is scaled to the stories of ordinary people but their lives are all of our lives. Their destruction destroys us all.

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