Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (Sciuscià) is, to say the least, a celebrated film about postwar Italy. Although it fails to meet the unified artistic measure that De Sica would achieve in this vein with his two greatest works, Bicycle Thieves (Landri di biciclette, 1948) and Umberto D (1952), it’s a stinging and trenchant piece of work, showing why two shoeshine boys, struggling to survive, drift into crime and how they are utterly destroyed by the juvenile imprisonment that is meant to reform them. Critic Pauline Kael wrote about this film, a favorite of hers, “It is one of those rare works of art which seem to emerge from the welter of human experience without smoothing away the raw edges, or losing what most movies lose—the sense of confusion and accident in human affairs.” In helping to define the neorealist movement staked out by Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini, Shoeshine garnered an Oscar as the year’s best foreign-language film and won for De Sica the best director prize from Italy’s film journalists. Italian officials, though, disdained the film for throwing a glaring light on the nation’s postwar neglect and mistreatment of children.
The two protagonists are Giuseppe, 15, and Pasquale, 13. The setting is Rome, 1945. Best friends, the boys shine shoes on the street. (The title, Sciuscià, derives from the cry of such boys to attract business, usually from American soldiers passing by.) Both are impoverished. Pasquale was orphaned by the war; Giuseppe, rendered homeless, his entire family reduced to the status of refugees. The two share a dream, like the bit of land that George and Lennie dream of owning one day in John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men; Giuseppe and Pasquale’s dream is to own a horse. On the surface, it is a common enough dream of children; but the horse also suggests much of what reality and their threadbare existence aren’t giving them: freedom; pride; beauty—a sense that it’s possible to transcend the limits of their squalid environment. In sum, the horse symbolizes hope.
It is this joint dream of theirs that leads the boys to their downfall. In order to collect the money necessary to realize it, the boys become involved in a black-market scheme in which they are guided, out of Oliver Twist, by Pasquale’s nefarious older brother, who, of course, ought to be protecting rather than exploiting them. The scheme brings the boys into contact with a clairvoyant, who reads their fortune; thus De Sica introduces (perhaps too blatantly) the idea of their fated existence, that is, the hopelessness of their situation regardless of the dreams they nurture. The boys are arrested and detained in prison. This comes after one of the film’s most memorable images: the boys, on the back of the horse they have bought, riding down the city street amidst traffic and pedestrians. It is their one moment in the sun, and their loss of it foreshadows their doom.
Awaiting trial, the boys are placed in separate parts of the prison, and this separation of dear friends foreshadows the drama of betrayal in which they will become embroiled, leading to tragedy. The issue is Pasquale’s divided loyalty between his brother and Giuseppe, who is tricked into disclosing the former’s part in the crime under the belief that he must do this to terminate the flogging that he is misled into believing that Pasquale is being given behind closed doors. Pasquale never learns the real reason for Giuseppe’s ratting out his brother and assumes betrayal, chilling his feelings for someone who was more a brother to him than his biological brother. Moreover, there is another reason for the hardening of Pasquale’s heart against Giuseppe: the vicious criminals in whose cell-block Pasquale has been placed. Indeed, this may be cinema’s preeminent attempt to show how prison culture warps the incarcerated individual rather than reforms and redeems. Both boys are sentenced to outrageously long prison terms (one year, and two years), which prompts Giuseppe’s escape and the ultimate betrayal. Pasquale leads authorities to Giuseppe’s hiding-place and, as it turns out, kills Giuseppe himself. The film ends with an aching reprise of the image of the boys and their horse. Luis Buñuel cited this film as one of the inspirations for Los olvidados (1950).
For me, the best stretch of this film is the period of the boys’ incarceration pending trial. Here, De Sica provides glimpses of other children, sketching in details of what brought them to this unconscionable predicament, and showing, in one heartrending instance, the meeting between a deeply ashamed boy and his mother. There can be no doubt that De Sica’s blame lands on war, its aftermath, and officialdom’s inadequate response, rather than on the boys, and that the film is intended to demonstrate forces beyond the children’s control that nevertheless seal their fates. In this, however, the film runs a distant second to the staggering piece of work that Rossellini would create the following year on a similar theme: Germany, Year Zero. Rossellini’s neorealist masterpiece is far more focused, analytical and devastating. De Sica’s film has about it many more touches that border on the theatrical, sentimental and melodramatic, and some of these even cross the border. De Sica did not entirely succeed in avoiding an air of contrivance; it proved impossibly challenging to create a narrative whose coincidences seemed to belong to reality and not the filmmaker’s own pen. (The nonetheless remarkable story and script are by Cesare Zavattini, Sergio Amidei, Cesare Giulio Viola, Adolfi Franci, and De Sica.)
Still, Shoeshine is an estimable piece that would loom larger today were it not for Rossellini’s much greater film about a boy coping with (in his case) a ravaged postwar Germany. Shoeshine’s singular achievement, perhaps, is the launch of the career of one of the world’s most prolific film actors: Franco Interlenghi, who is wonderful as Giuseppe, and who would be more wonderful still as Moraldo in Federico Fellini’s greatest film, I vitelloni (The Young Calves, 1953).
Tags: Vittorio De Sica
