Il Tetto (The Roof) is the latest result of the fruitful collaboration between Vittorio deSica and Cesare Zavattini. It is only four years old but, except for its smooth technical finish, it seems much older. The story of a young newly married couple who are forced by poverty and family circumstances to join a squatters' colony (similar to the one in Miracle in Milan) which exists on the edge of Rome, it is, perhaps, too obviously the sort of material which might be expected to engage the sympathies of deSica and Zavattini. (p. 49)

The curious failure of Il Tetto brings up once again the old fundamental distinction between art and life, if only because it is on a version of this distinction that Zavattini bases his artistic credo as a film-maker: "In most films, the adventures of two people looking for somewhere to live, for a house, would be shown externally in a few moments of action, but for us it could provide the scenario for a whole film, and we would explore all its echoes, all its implications." The actual facts of daily life become, then, not a premise for dramatic extension, but the drama itself. "All its echoes, all its implications" are therefore the perceptible social, economic, political, and moral reverberations which are revealed in the most ordinary acts of men and women. This philosophy of the film, which derives from an attitude toward life, Zavattini long ago christened neorealism…. As an example of neorealism, Il Tetto does not go the limit, and for Zavattini it may represent a certain concession to metaphor and to the tame world of fiction. But for deSica the descent from poetry to journalism proves almost fatal; he is unable to lift the level of Il Tetto above that of a human-interest editorial. (pp. 49-50)

Il Tetto, to be sure, has the most honorable intentions toward its subject. Like The Bicycle Thief, it sets out to show what can befall a man who must sweat for the bare rudiments of existence—a job, a roof over his head. But to say this about The Bicycle Thief is to evoke nothing of its essence, whereas all the pathos of Il Tetto is pretty much contained in just such a synoptic description. Generalizations about the lives of the poor, the afflicted, the dispossessed are bad because they risk nothing beyond a nominal identification and thereby lose all power to persuade. What binds us to the poor is not their poverty but their humanity. The principals of Il Tetto have no interior life. They "typify," we are made to feel, the lack of personal differentiation which some believe is true of the lower classes. But if it is true, it is surely as vicious a social condition as the material poverty and not to be abstracted from that poverty as a sign of "simplicity" or "universality."

Universality, a sense of brotherhood, is what Zavattini naturally wants to convey. Any man, or—as he claims—Everyman, can be the hero of a Zavattini film. A puritanical distrust of "art," however, renders the hero faceless. It is the minor characters in this film who—briefly—live and, in one penetrating moment which deserves to stand beside the best of Umberto D., deSica immortalizes a homely little maid who says she wants some perfume. But in the over-all quality of its encounter with life, Il Tetto seems like a cramped, compromised rehearsal for the big poetic liberation of the deSica classics. It fails, ultimately, because the two people it tells you it cares about remain merely a pair of pleasant-looking nonentities. Only art can tell us who they are. (p. 50)