Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.
The great Italian director Vittorio De Sica shares the distinction of most Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Film Category (we’ll include the predecessor categories, Honorary Academy Award and Special Achievement Award, that were used to recognize the best foreign film from 1947 to 1955) with Frederico Fellini, each winning four such awards. Only three other directors have won more than one such award -- Ingmar Bergman, who managed three, and Rene Clement and Akira Kurosawa who won two each. De Sica won the first such award with this film Sciuscià (Shoe-Shine or Shoeshine) in 1947, then followed that two years later with the highly acclaimed The Bicycle Thief, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow in 1964, and the magnificent The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in 1971.
The span of time covered by these four awards for De Sica, 1947-1971, also witnessed great strides in the technical quality of filmmaking. Moreover, De Sica’s early films were produced in the context of the Italy of the years immediately following World War II. De Sica had to make due with very limited resources. Nevertheless, what Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief lack in glossy production values is more than compensated for by the poignancy of their respective stories. The Bicycle Thief often appears on critic polls among the finest films ever made. Shoeshine, in my judgment, is very nearly the equal of The Bicycle Thief. I’ve given both films four stars, withholding one star only because these films do not entirely overcome the limitations of their film era or low-budget origins. My thinking is that most members of modern audiences will not experience these films as better than four stars. Were I to grade them exclusively within the context of their era and budget constraints, they would certainly deserve five each.
De Sica’s style became known as Italian Neo-realism and had great influence on subsequent filmmaking throughout the world. The subject matter of Neorealism typically consisted of the tragic aspects of poverty and the daily life of working class people. Stylistically, Neorealism aimed at presenting aspects of “real life” to audiences and seemingly removing the screen and the filmmakers as intermediaries between the subject matter and the viewer. The production characteristics included use of nonprofessional actors and actresses taken from various walks of life, typically playing parts very much like their real lives, and a photographic style characterized by a gritty appearance, adding to the sense of a documentary style. These production characteristics were arguably as much dictated by budget necessity as by artistic intent. Sharp political commentary was also usually evident in Neorealism and the political system in Rome following World War II provided a ready target. Poverty and unemployment were rampant but the bureaucracy was corrupt, ineffective, and insensitive.
De Sica worked closely with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini to generate the story of Shoeshine. Living in war-torn Rome during the recovery years, De Sica and Zavattini surreptitiously observed two shoeshine boys who eked out a meager existence shining the boots of American service men – very nearly the only people in Rome at the time that had any loose pocket change. The result was an exquisitely anguishing story of young boys destroyed by an uncaring legal system and a brutally corrupt juvenile detention system.
The Story: Two shoeshine boys, Pasquale Maggi (Franco Interlenghi) and Guiseppe Filippucci (Rinaldo Smordoni), are best friends. Pasquale has been orphaned by the war. His sleeping place was an elevator until he was discovered there by the building manager. Pasquale now lives with Guiseppe, who admires and looks up to the somewhat older Pasquale. Pasquale and Guiseppe help the local racetrack owner workout his horses and despite the poverty of their existences, the two dare to dream of someday owning their own horse.
Guiseppe has an adult brother, Attilio, who is involved in postwar black market trading in American goods. Guiseppe and Pasquale, hoping to earn quick cash to purchase a horse, are enlisted by Attilio in delivering two stolen blankets to a fortune teller, who Attilio and his thuggish friends intend to then shakedown for receiving the goods. The police become involved and Guiseppe and Pasquale are arrested. Wisely refusing to rat out Attilio and his associates (which would likely be fatal), Guiseppe and Pasquale soon find themselves in a juvenile detention facility, in harsh and squalid conditions, where bunks are infested with bedbugs and beatings are dished out regularly by sadistic guards. Their fellow inmates range from murderers and robbers to those whose only “crime” is the misfortune of being abandoned.
The guards trick Pasquale into divulging Attilio’s name by pretending to beat Guiseppe just out of Pasquale’s sight, while an accomplice boy cries out in anguish. Guiseppe, unaware of the circumstances under which Pasquale identified Attilio, feels that Pasquale has betrayed him and his family and the former friends now become bitter enemies. Further betrayals ensue leading to a moving denouement.
Themes: The principal theme of Shoeshine is similar to that laid out by every film from the period of Neorealism – the oppression of ordinary people by corrupt political and legal systems. When Pasquale and Guiseppe are placed on trial, one receives incompetent representation from a public defender too busy to study the case while the other receives a histrionic defense by a self-absorbed private lawyer. The warden and the guards at the juvenile center exhibit no interest in the welfare of the boys. It is essentially a warehousing operation where the boys are acclimated into a life of violent misbehavior.
In conferring the Special Academy citation to Shoeshine in 1947, the Academy stated that Shoeshine stood as “proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity” because such a “high quality” motion picture could be “brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war.” Ironically, the uplifting message provided by the very existence of this film is exactly the opposite of the message inherent in the story of the film – where the spirit of two innocent boys is fully pulverized by oppressive conditions entirely beyond their capacity to withstand.
Production Values: There is a subtle kind of perfection in Shoeshine in its ability to provide viewers with the sensation of peeking into a secret world usually hidden from our inspection. That it is a world of powerful emotions where abandoned boys struggle against despair, battle for dominance among themselves, and engage in little acts of kindliness to one another, while together confronting the brutality of the system, makes the experience all the more wrenching for the audience.
De Sica, who was himself an accomplished actor (see, for example The Earrings of Madame de . . .), was able to elicit fine performances from his young and inexperienced actors. Franco Interlenghi went on to have a long career as an actor (in such films as I Vitelloni (1953)). The younger Rinaldo Smordoni appeared in only a couple of additional films and ultimately gave up acting and became a baker.
Bottom-Line: The famous film critic Pauline Kael once told a story of seeing Shoeshine at a theater shortly after she had broken off a longtime relationship with a lover. When she was exiting the theater, she overheard a young woman of about her own age saying to her boyfriend that she hadn’t found the film especially moving and didn’t understand why it was causing such a stir. Kael then proceeded down the street bawling her eyes out and wondering whether she was crying because of the film’s ending, because of the emotional upheaval in her own personal life, or because she felt so utterly alienated from those in our society who can view a film such as Shoeshine and not be moved. One of the wonderful powers of movies is their ability to not only evoke emotional responses to the story of the film itself but also to interplay with emotions that we are experiencing from unrelated events in our own lives.
Shoeshine is a film with the capacity to evoke powerful emotional responses for many viewers. I highly recommend it. It is in Italian with English subtitles. It is difficult to locate these days as both the DVD and VHS versions are out-of-print, but occasionally copies show up on internet bidding sites. This film has a running time of 93 minutes and is in black-and-white.
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