The film featured a mix of professional and non-professional actors. Some of these included down-and-out alcoholics who had to be awakened for work by having bucketsful of cold water thrown over them.
To create the special effects for this Italian production, producer/director Vittorio De Sica imported American special effects specialist Ned Mann. This would be Mann's final project.
Actor/director Danny DeVito has watched this movie more than any other--more times than he can count.
Vittorio De Sica wanted to make a film that showed a more positive side to life rather than the more downbeat films he had been making. Vittorio De Sica wrote that he made Miracle in Milan (1951) in order to show how the "common man" can exist given the realities of life: "It is true that my people have already attained happiness after their own fashion; precisely because they are destitute, these people still feel - as the majority of ordinary men perhaps no longer do - the living warmth of a ray of winter sunshine, the simple poetry of the wind. They greet water with the same pure joy as Saint Francis did."
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