Shoeshine

This is perhaps the most disturbing of all Vittorio de Sica's many masterpieces, as it deals almost only with children, mainly boys who aren't even old enough to know or understand what they are doing or what happens to them. The mood is a precursor to Visconti's terribly realistic masterpiece "La terra trema" two years later, but here it all happens in the bleakest parts of central Rome, and only the horse offers some kind of relief. The boys, who spend all their earnings to buy a horse they love riding, are lured into black market dirty business and get caught and end up in juvenile prison, where the sanitary conditions are horrible and the boys are crowded together into small dark cells. Naturally they want to escape. The only comedy moment of the film, in which you recognize the mature de Sica's splendid sense of human humor, is when the direction decides to give the boys some entertainment by showing a film, and naturally things happen during this performance. The direction as always in de Sica's films is splendid throughout like all the actors, and although the story is slightly exaggerated and dramatized, the impact of the realism is convincing and shocking enough. His next film "Bicycle Thieves" would be milder, while this is downright upsetting all the way through, and there is even one innocent casualty, who will make your heart bleed.