Cinema: The New Pictures, may 18, 1959

The Roof (De Sica; Trans-Lux) is one of the few memorable films produced in almost a decade by the once-daring Italian movie industry. In ailing postwar Italy, cinema was briefly practiced as a kind of social medicine. But the would-be healers prescribed such a bitter pill—neorealism —that the public refused to swallow it; most of the famed Italian films of the late '40s won rave reviews but lost money. In this picture, made in 1956, the ablest of the neorealists—Director Vittorio De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, who together produced Shoeshine and The...