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...