A Film Canon

Like The Children Are Watching Us, Shoe-Shine extrapolates a narrative from the various sensory-motor disjunctions endemic to childhood, albeit in a more overtly political register, and in relation to a slightly older demographic. To this end, De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zattavini replace the pervasive disorientation of the earlier film with a dichotomy between two forms of leg - those of the American G.I.s for whom urchins Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) and Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordini) perform their eponymous service, and those of the horse for which that service is ultimately designed to pay; that is, between the leg as an inanimate, dislocated object, and the leg as a purveyor of liberating motion, most beautifully encapsulated in the horse's passage through the very district where the shoe- shines occur. From this perspective, the central drama - the boys' incarceration in a reformatory, after being apprehended for a black market swindle designed to finalise the payment of the horse - feels like the inevitable compromise between these visions of radical movement and stasis, as evinced not only in their various circuitous passages through its corridors - embodied in a series of incongrously (for De Sica) elaborate tracking-shots - but in the gradual relocation of agency from feet to hands, if only to perform the limited action of clutching at and gesturing from between the cell bars. The result is a neorealist prison film, in which the (relative) prioritisation of interiors over on- location, exterior sequences draws particular attention to De Sica's residual taste for melodramatic flourish, reinforced by Interlenghi's slightly hammy, self-conscious performance. That said, the other non-professional actors - especially Smordini - are impressive, while, as with the earlier film, the ending achieves a profound pathos that is largely devoid of sentimentality; or, rather, opens sentimentality's potential for profundity.