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MovieMail's Review
Miracle in Milan has always puzzled the critics. Written and directed by the high priests of Italian neo-realism, Cesare Zavattini and Vittorio De Sica, it is a Frank Capra style comedy, with a totally fantastic ending and not much realism along the way.
Shot mainly on a specially constructed set on the outskirts of Milan, with a largely professional cast and abundant special effects under the direction of American SFX specialist Ned Mann, it tells an implausible story about a teenage orphan whose sheer goodness animates the denizens of a shantytown to resist a series of attempts to evict them from their poverty-stricken paradise.
When oil is discovered underground, the previously amiable property developers turn tough and eviction proceeds, but the inhabitants, defeated in this world, escape to a better one.
Can this charming fable possibly be realism, the critics asked? The answer, funnily enough is yes. It is realism, but in the vein of what we have since learnt to call magic realism, which was alive and well in Zavattini's scripts and stories from the 1930s onwards.
Miracle in Milan deceived nobody. Unlike a Capra film, where you are supposed to believe that big business will reform itself, Miracle in Milan is explicit. A delightful dream is just that, a dream.
De Sica mingles his trademark realistic style with whimsical fantasy to address the shameful treatment of displaced persons after the war. The story follows Toto, a newborn boy discovered in a cabbage patch by an elderly woman. Made homeless as an adult he ends up in a shantytown, inspiring the other homeless to build new homes from scraps of wood and metal. When a rich reserve of oil is discovered beneath their town however, a greedy landowner tries to force Toto and his friends off the land. The film won the Best Film Award at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival.
