Sciuscià

Vittorio De Sica (1946)

Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi), in his early teens, and Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni), a year or two younger, are firm friends.  They scrape a meagre living as shoeshine boys on the streets of Rome.  The time is the present, immediately after the end of World War II:  the shoes we see shined are worn by American GIs.  The boys also test ride horses and are desperate to own a horse of their own.  It seems way beyond their means but, through Giuseppe’s elder brother, Attilio (Guido Gentili), they get involved in a scheme to raise cash.  Giuseppe and Pasquale succeed in buying their horse but then find themselves wrongly accused of theft.  (Attilio and an accomplice (Gino Saltamerenda) are the culprits.)  The boys are put in a juvenile detention centre and eventually receive prison sentences.  While they’re in the centre, a misunderstanding makes Giuseppe think he has been betrayed by Pasquale, which brings about a serious rift between them.  Giuseppe eventually escapes from prison with another, older boy, Arcangeli (Bruno Ortensi).  Pasquale is sure where they will have headed.  He leads the police to the place where his and Giuseppe’s horse is stabled but the two other boys and the animal have already gone.  While the police are searching the area, Pasquale absconds.  He finds Giuseppe, Arcangeli and the horse, then, when Arcangeli has run off, sets about Giuseppe.  The younger boy falls from a low bridge and hits his head on the rocks below, it seems fatally.  Pasquale cries over his friend’s body as the police arrive to take Pasquale back to prison.

Shoeshine was a seminal Italian neorealist film and is generally considered to be a humanistic screen classic.  It left me cold.  I can get some sense of why its unvarnished social critique made such an impact in 1946 but I envy those who, coming to Shoeshine much later, seem able to see it without decades of cinema history blocking the view of the original film.  The final image of the boys’ horse is extraordinary – it looks much more mysterious here than its symbol-of-freedom function in the story would lead you to expect.   But the ranks of unkind, pompous officialdom in evidence seemed to me crude caricatures; more important, I didn’t find the boys expressive.  I realise their playing may have been ‘pure’ compared with junior Hollywood products of the time but I think Vittorio De Sica sentimentalises their innocence.  Their brutalisation in detention consists of looking less clean and a bit less angelic than they did before they were behind bars.   The screenplay was written by Cesare Zavattini, Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci and Cesare Giulio Viola.   The DoP was Anchise Brizzi and the music by Alessandro Cicognini.

15 August 2015