Made in the aftermath of World War II, Vittorio De Sica’s “Shoeshine” is a juvenile delinquency film with a difference. The grievous misdeeds are committed against children, both by adults and an Italian system of justice as vacuous as it is corrupt.
Hailed as a shocker when it opened in the United States in 1947, yet paradoxically perhaps the least-seen of canonical neorealist movies, “Shoeshine” gets an extended run at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration.
The movie is dated yet universal. Indeed, its initial reception and subsequent erasure are part of its meaning. The protagonists are two street kids. The elder, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi), is a homeless orphan; his sidekick Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) has an indifferent, impoverished family. They survive shining the shoes of American troops and live on a dream that they might someday buy a horse. De Sica maintained that the scenario was based on a year’s worth of personal observation of Rome’s many street children.
The initial mood is weirdly idyllic. The boys are played by appealing nonactors (Interlenghi would enjoy a long, subsequent screen career) and somewhat sanitized (no pimping of kid sisters). They are innocently devoted to each other. The snake in the garden is Giuseppe’s adult brother, who enlists them in a black-market scheme cum burglary. The boys are busted and thrown into an overcrowded prison distinguished by its off-handed inhumanity. Their friendship is the first casualty. Worse will follow.
“Shoeshine” operates on several levels. Pasquale and Giuseppe’s downward trajectories are foredoomed, but the film’s ensemble acting can’t help but soar. De Sica recruited scores of local boys (and a single little girl), then guided them through a series of choreographed prison-yard riots and shower-room brawls. A kangaroo court sequence notwithstanding, the action peaks with a madhouse metaphor. Priests show the boys a wartime newsreel. The projector catches fire, prompting a slapstick jail break.
Difficult to characterize, “Shoeshine” is an uneven and, despite some grown-up buffoonery, a largely unfunny tragic farce. This tonal discord may explain its eclipse two years later by De Sica’s supremely polished follow-up, “Bicycle Thieves” — which would go on to top Sight and Sound’s first decennial poll of the world’s greatest movies.
Still, the initial response to “Shoeshine” is fascinating. Reviewing for The Nation, James Agee was so overwhelmed that he spent a long first paragraph wrestling with the whole notion of “humanism.” By contrast, the film critic Pauline Kael took “Shoeshine” to heart — literally. Her appreciation began by oversharing that she saw the movie “alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair.” She then went on to rage against a college student in the audience who did not appear similarly moved.
“Shoeshine” was released in New York under the sponsorship of the Newspaper Guild of New York. In his review in The New York Times, Thomas M. Pryor treated it as a scoop, a “harrowing” (if artless) exposé of “fascism’s bequest to the children of Italy.” Fascism, though, is not the only culprit.
Implicit in “Shoeshine” is a shameful but unsurprising revelation: Society’s main victims are children — collateral damage in every upheaval, whether it’s an economic crisis, climate change or war.
Shoeshine
Through June 27 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org.
