Miracle in Milan, an involved and rambling screenplay, originally written by Cesare Zavattini in 1940 and later published as a novel entitled Toto the Good, contrasts sharply with the simplicity and warm humanity of [the same writer-director team's] Bicycle Thief and gives director Vittorio De Sica less opportunities to guide his thespers to those extremely human, heart-warming performances which are his speciality. Whereas Thief was aimed at the audience heart, Miracle is aimed at the brain.
Miracle in Milan(Miracolo a Milano)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Italy · 1951
1h 40m
Director Vittorio De Sica
Starring Emma Gramatica, Francesco Golisano, Paolo Stoppa, Guglielmo Barnabò
Genre Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
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An old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. Years later Toto, the grown child, bounces from job to job and eventually build a shanty town in a vacant lot with a group of squatters. The squatters discover oil in the land and must defend it from a ruthless capitalist.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by Bosley Crowther
Although it is questionable whether this picture has the simple, universal appeal of an old Chaplin film, for instance, or whether its meanings are as sharp as some may think, it is certainly a lively entertainment and should be a subject of discussion for months to come.
This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
The strangest and most delightful of the many collaborations of those joint exemplars of neo-realism, Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini: a Chaplinesque fable about a purely innocent and good young orphan who leads the inhabitants of a Roman shantytown in angelic revolt against their cruel evictors. [10 Nov 1996, p.4]
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
The failure of innocence here is touchingly absurd; the film is stylized poetry, and it is like nothing else that De Sica ever did.
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
Italy’s crises of employment and housing are the subjects of its sentimental story, which is also a wildly imaginative tale brought to life with astonishing special effects and slapstick stunts.
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