Of the masterpieces that Vittorio De Sica created in collaboration with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini — which include The Children Are Watching Us, Shoeshine, and The Bicycle Thief — Umberto D., released in 1952, is the greatest and the most heartbreaking. It’s the story of a retired civil servant in financially straitened post-war Rome, a proud, old-fashioned gentleman who finds himself on the brink of eviction, with nowhere to go and no source of money except a pitifully inadequate pension. Friendless except for a little dog named Flick and the servant in his house, Maria, a well-meaning country girl who’s beset with her own problems, Umberto wanders through Rome trying to raise the money for his rent (a hopeless endeavor, since his landlady no longer wants him around) while holding onto his shreds of dignity.

The neo-realist movies De Sica made in the ’40s and early ’50s are case studies of the victims of Italy’s ravaged economy and callous bureaucracy, but they display such tenderness toward their heroes that they hardly feel as if they were illustrating socio-political points. His method is to keep the general and the particular constantly but subtly balanced. There’s an eloquent scene in The Bicycle Thief where, in order to buy the bicycle her husband requires for the first job he’s managed to land in months, the young wife pawns their wedding sheets at a government facility, and when the clerk climbs a scaffold to deposit the sheets atop the highest shelf, you register how many thousands of Romans have had to make the same sacrifice. Umberto D. begins with a protest by old men whose pension has been cut, and De Sica keeps returning to images of Umberto among his peers — men who frequent a cheap cafeteria at lunch time (where Umberto sneaks pasta to Flick, who’s hidden under one of the long, communal tables), or who cadge a few days or maybe a week in a hospital ward, where they can be fed well gratis. But it’s Umberto’s tale we follow, with its distinctive details of character and narrative: his relationship with Maria (Maria Pia Casilio), whose situation (an unwanted pregnancy, with two suitors who both are soldiers and both deny paternity) he takes a fatherly attitude toward; his anxiety over Flick, who runs off while he’s in hospital; his tentative efforts to arrange a loan from an old acquaintance he encounters by chance.

More recent Italian filmmakers have worked toward the effects De Sica carries off with apparent ease (like Gianni Amelio in Stolen Children), but it’s his lyricism they can’t emulate. And without it Umberto’s story, like that of the boys thrown into a reformatory in Shoeshine, would be too hard to bear. In one unforgettable episode, Umberto is desperate enough to beg on the street, but he stumbles over his own pride. He sticks out his hand with awkward resolution; then a passer-by reaches for some change and, suddenly embarrassed, the old man flips his palm downward and pretends he’s checking for rain. Finally he slips his hat into Flick’s mouth and instructs him to stand on his hind legs while Umberto hides behind a pillar and watches. The moment is so painful that you want to look away, but De Sica renders it with such poetic feeling that you can’t.

De Sica loved to work with non-professional actors, and when you watch Carlo Battisti (a philosophy professor) in the title role, you understand why. Battisti is astonishing, but since there isn’t a trace of self-consciousness in his performance you scarcely register that you’re watching an actor at all. It’s an actor’s job to explicate the text, but here it’s De Sica who does the interpreting; what you get from the actors is as close to pure experience as you’re likely to find. Casilio has a scene where she wakes up in her cot in the kitchen, looks up to see a cat crossing the skylight, and begins her first morning chore — grinding the beans for coffee — while nothing but a stray tear betrays how frightened and abandoned Maria feels. Yet the mood De Sica sets of early-morning solitude and contemplation so frames the actress’s actions that it’s as if she were exposing every feeling to us. In this deceptively simple film — its spareness now more beautiful than ever in a restored print — the struggle of ordinary human beings is presented with the depth of real life.