#1272: DE SICA, Vittorio: Shoeshine (1946)
DE SICA, Vittorio (Italy)
Shoeshine [1946]
The Booklet
Twenty-two page booklet featuring an essay by film scholar David Forgacs and “Shoeshine, Joe?,” a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica.
Smordoni — age 83, seventy years later! — is prominent and often teary with memories.
Radio broadcast
From 1946 featuring director De Sica.By Spine #
Spine #1272
Blu-ray
An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning film is an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy. On the streets of Rome, two boys—best friends Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi)—set out to raise the money to buy a horse by shining shoes. When they are inadvertently caught up in a robbery and sent to a brutal juvenile detention center, their loyalty to each other is severely tested. A devastating portrait of economic struggle made all the more haunting by its child’s-eye perspective, Shoeshine stands as one of the defining achievements of postwar Italian filmmaking.
91 minutes
Monaural
Black and White
in Italian
1:37:1
Criterion Release 2025
Monaural
Black and White
in Italian
1:37:1
Criterion Release 2025
Director/Writers
Vittorio De Sica was 45 when he directed Shoeshine.
Other De Sica films in the Collection:
#323: The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
#374: Bicycle Thieves (1948)
#1119: Miracle in Milan (1951)
#201: Umberto D. (1952)
#202: Indiscretion of an American Wife/Terminal Station (1953)
Other De Sica films in the Collection:
#323: The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
#374: Bicycle Thieves (1948)
#1119: Miracle in Milan (1951)
#201: Umberto D. (1952)
#202: Indiscretion of an American Wife/Terminal Station (1953)
The Film
This stark tale of postwar misery is typical De Sica, shot in beautiful black and white chiaroscuro by DP Anchise Brizzi, and like the more famous Bicycle Thieves of 1948 (Spine #374), features wonderfully naturalistic performances.
The two boys are played by fourteen-year-old Franco Interlenghi (Pasquale Maggi) and twelve-year-old Rinaldo Smordoni (Giuseppe Filippucci).
Interlenghi made acting a career, and has the lead in Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953) (Spine #0000C/#246).
Film Rating (0-60):
55
The ExtrasThe Booklet
Twenty-two page booklet featuring an essay by film scholar David Forgacs and “Shoeshine, Joe?,” a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica.
Forgacs:
“Across Europe, World War II left a legacy of inflated prices, hunger and malnutrition, disease and impairment, poverty and homelessness, along with thousands of orphans and displaced children. Shoeshine, released in April 1946, was the first postwar feature film to deal critically with these young people’s plight. We will see it again soon afterward in Rossellini’s Paisan (Spine #498), released in December the same year, where a young orphan steals to survive and lives with other homeless people in a cave in Naples, as well as in the same director’s Germany Year Zero (1948, Spine #499), centered on a twelve-year-old boy in a devastated postwar Berlin.”
Commentary
None.
Scíuscià 70 (2016)
Fantastic documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary.
None.
Scíuscià 70 (2016)
Fantastic documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary.
“De Sica understood that at that moment, children represented a raw nerve, a key perhaps to better understand the reality of postwar Italy.”
Smordoni — age 83, seventy years later! — is prominent and often teary with memories.
The film historian Orio Caldiron lists some of the first films of the neorealism movement:
Rossellini: Cittá Aperta [Rome, Open City, 1945]
This film
Gentilomo: O Sole Mio [1946]
Zampa: Vivere in Pace [To Live in Peace, 1947]
De Santis: Caccia Tragica [Tragic Hunt, 1947]
De Sica: Ladri di Biciclette [Bicycle Thieves, 1948]
Visconti: La Terra Trema [1948]
Lattuada: Senza pietà [Without Pity, 1948]
De Sica’s daughter — Emi — is a fount of good info:
On Zavattini (whose writing credit here is the most important), who said:
“We’re like a cappuccino. You don’t know where the milk starts and the coffee ends.”
Emi, on her father:
“He could have gotten a stone to act.”
Program
On Shoeshine and Italian neorealism featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe.
Radio broadcast
From 1946 featuring director De Sica.
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