Vittorio De Sica’s “Shoeshine” (screening now at New York City’s Film Forum) was one of the first Italian neo-realist films. Opening in 1946, the narrative simply follows two homeless, basically innocent boys, Pasquale (sensitive Franco Interlenghi) and Giuseppe (spirited Rinaldo Smordoni), in postwar Rome occupied by American troops. The two shine shoes and dream of buying a horse. Rome may have grand buildings and statuary, but the boys live in an impoverished and bleak world of crammed apartments; sleeping in hallways, elevators, and stables; and inevitably getting in trouble with the law.
They are sent to an overcrowded reform school that offers food that is rarely edible and has a generally harsh, uncaring administration (though there are a few sympathetic officials) that punishes them with belt beatings and manipulates them to betray each other. Pasquale is labeled “violent by nature” by the same officials, who offer no alternatives and unthinkingly drive many of the boys into criminality on their release.
The film’s images offer a touch of authenticity in capturing the squalor of Rome’s underside, but it lacks the psychological nuance (the moving relationship between father and son), the visual complexity of Rome’s neighborhoods and markets, and how the inequities of class of De Sica’s later and great neo-realist classic “Bicycle Thieves” (1948).
Next to “Bicycle Thieves,” “Shoeshine” feels shallow and pedestrian. It conveys some feeling of how the boys, some of whom are abandoned by their parents, are social victims but projects little sense of their individuality. “Shoeshine” concludes in tragedy, in a scene that would have had more power if it were less overwrought. The film is still worth seeing as an introduction to neo-realism.
