Shoeshine (1946, Vittorio De Sica)

66/100

Let me note first my single favorite thing about this movie: Its original title, Sciuscià, turns out to be not the Italian word for "shoeshine" (as I'd always assumed), but rather a transliteration of how the Neapolitan accent pronounces that English word. It's as if a Japanese film were titled, say, Suturoberi Aisukurimo. (Matthew Butcher incoming with actual examples from Japan. Does Audition/Ōdishon qualify? Or is its true title in katakana?)

Not far behind, however, are Shoeshine's two central performances, both of which are orders of magnitude more assured and relaxed than one could reasonably hope to expect even from a classic of nascent neo-realism. It's been over a decade since I last watched Bicycle Thieves, so I just now checked to see whether I commented on its juvenile performance, and yes indeed: "Are people so cowed by the knowledge that De Sica's use of non-professional actors was revolutionary that they can't see how stiff and unnatural that kid is? He might as well part be part of Our Gang." A real mystery, that, since De Sica made Shoeshine two years earlier and apparently found the two most naturally talented boys in Italy. And here's the thing: It's not a case of them simply Being rather than Acting, of the camera capturing unmediated behavior (as I would say is the case in e.g. Ozu's I Was Born, but...). These are genuine performances, visibly beholden to the screenplay—which I don't mean as a knock, so is (for example) every great Mastroianni role. They're just better at it than you'd expect, the same way that young Jodie Foster made every other child actor of the '70s look affected by comparison. And that's crucial to the extent that this film depicts a tragic escalating war between best friends, each of whom feels cruelly betrayed by the other even though both care deeply about the other's welfare. When Giuseppe first turns on Pasquale, it chilled me to the bone.

You hopefully caught that italicized "to the extent that," though. Not for nothing does De Sica open Shoeshine with an interior shot of the (seemingly empty) juvenile prison, to which our protagonists won't be sent for another half hour or so. That's a filmmaker's way of telling us what's important—in this case, the system that'll grind Pasquale and Giuseppe into pulp. For a while, De Sica balances the psychological and the sociopolitical quite well, creating circumstances that unjustly punish the boys without depicting them as guileless innocents. They knowingly agree to facilitate a minor crime and unwittingly get used as cannon fodder by adult assholes with more nefarious designs; when fortune unexpectedly drops horse-purchasing money into their laps at others' expense, they don't think twice about taking advantage. (At the same time, so cute, a horse! To simply ride around feeling noble astride.) And their tit-for-tat fallout in juvenile hall plausibly gets set in motion simply because the state separates them, allowing for decidedly human-scale misapprehension (plus some peer pressure and class disparity). Where the film goes wrong for me is at the trial, where enmity gets shifted so firmly toward The Man that The Boys' relationship, which is what I really care about, gets undermined. In order for the final scene to have real emotional weight (for me—clearly it does/did for others, notably Orson Welles; sorry to reveal myself as an alien, Victor), Giuseppe needed to actively accuse Pasquale, not just passively watch his attorney do so; what follows (a good hunk of which concerns the escape plan and ignores Pasquale altogether, though it's solid suspenseful cinema) certainly makes sense, but that's not the same thing as being dramatically satisfying (to say nothing of devastating). Even these two remarkable young actors couldn't give my heartstrings a sufficiently forceful tug.