Before he directed one of the greatest films of all time, 1948’s Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica became the face of Italian Neorealism in 1946 with his first masterpiece Shoeshine. Italian Neorealism was a post-World War II film movement which depicted everyday lives of the working class, specifically in the context of poverty and social hardship. The notable figures of this movement ranged from Federico Fellini to Michelangelo Antonioni to De Sica himself. Before he brought us into the tragic, complex relationship between a father and son in Bicycle Thieves, De Sica examined the tragedy of a brotherly-like friendship between Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi). Split into two parts, Shoeshine follows two shoeshine boys in 1940s Italy who set out to raise funds to buy a horse. After finding themselves caught up in a robbery, the two boys are sent to a brutal juvenile center where their friendship and loyalty are severely tested. De Sica was a talented director not just known for being one of the faces of Italian Neorealism but also as a director known for bringing life itself to the big screen. Orson Welles himself has been quoted as stating that when he watched Shoeshine “the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life.” Being the first film to take home the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 1947, Shoeshine is not just a devastating fable of innocence lost, it’s a humanistic story of social indifference and economic struggle.
L-R: Franco Interlenghi as Pasquale and Rinaldo Smordoni as Giuseppe in SHOESHINE. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
Shoeshine both begins and ends with the image of a horse, the receptacle of Giuseppe and Pasquale’s doomed hopes and dreams. Though the film has a simple plot, its vision of economic struggle told through a child’s-eye perspective rings bells. Shoeshine’s script (credited to Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, Cesare Giulio Viola, and Cesare Zavattini) leaves moments of dark humor that explain the kids’ dire situation. As they walk among the streets of Italy, one of the boys jokes that the horse they plan to buy “eats more than us.” Even commenting on the film’s own tension, an officer tells his doctor (who is boiling a solution he will pour into a syringe and then inject the officer) “Better let it boil a minute more than a minute less. Not boiling it enough can lead to unpleasant consequences.” Consequences are the name of the game as Giuseppe and Pasquale head into juvenile hall. As the pressure builds for the boys to give up the names of those who committed the robbery, psychological torture coerces out a confession that will forever fracture the friendship between them. The young non-professional actors, Franco Interlenghi and Rinaldo Smordoni, are fantastic as Giuseppe and Pasquale, their faces serving as emotional canvases for laughter, pain, sadness, and anger. Not being enough to just show the tragedy of its main characters, there is a moment in the film where De Sica stops the film cold to show a young imprisoned man eager to see his mom as a visitor. The young man is met with heartbreaking disappointment as he meets with another woman instead who tells him his mother is traveling and hands him a box of rations instead. De Sica lingers on this young man’s sadness for a beat before he returns to the main story. This is the humanistic part of De Sica’s storytelling. He doesn’t just want you to see the suffering of just his main characters, he wants to show you that everyone hurts — the fellow inmates, the criminals, the officers who hunt down the criminals. Everyone.
A scene from SHOESHINE. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
De Sica’s direction of Shoeshine is wide-ranging, not just capturing the emotion of his characters’ pain but capturing the pain and emotion of 1940’s postwar Italy. As the boys venture into juvenile hall, De Sica paints a harrowing picture as if the boys are heading into purgatory itself. The shots of the towering prison cells, stacked on top of each other, would later echo shots of future prison films like The Shawshank Redemption, another film where freedom is not only a virtue, it’s an elusive state of mind. In the film’s trial sequence, De Sica perfectly displays the tension of the moment, centering on the young boys’ faces as they await sentencing. A lawyer emphatically states in the same sequence “for it is us adults, in the pursuit of our passions, who abandon children unto themselves”. Shoeshine is not for the weak; its heartbreaking conclusion would leave anyone shaken who has invested time into these tragic characters. But it is indeed for those who believe in the power of cinema and its propensity to evoke emotion, passion, and — hopefully — change.
L-R: Franco Interlenghi as Pasquale and Rinaldo Smordoni as Giuseppe in SHOESHINE. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
Criterion does not disappoint on the presentation of this Blu-ray release. The 4K digital restoration, courtesy of The Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna is gorgeous, showcasing De Sica’s early masterpiece like never before. The release also includes a booklet that contains an essay by film scholar David Forgacs and Shoeshine, Joe? a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica that serves as the genesis for this brilliant film. There is a 2016 documentary by Mimmo Verdesca called Sciuscià 70 that marks the film’s 70th anniversary, a new program on the film featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe and a 1946 radio broadcast in which De Sica addresses the wrongful public indifference towards street children. For any lover of cinema, Italian Neorealism, or emotional stories of everyday people, Shoeshine is a steal.
Shoeshine Special Features:
- *NEW* 4K digital restoration, undertaken by The Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Sciuscià 70 (2016), a documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary
- *NEW* program on Shoeshine and Italian neorealism featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe
- Radio broadcast from 1946 featuring director Vittorio De Sica
- Trailer
- *NEW* English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar David Forgacs and “Shoeshine, Joe?,” a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica
Available now on 4K UHD, Blu-Ray, and DVD August 19th, 2025.
For more information or to purchase, head to the official Criterion Collection Shoeshine webpage.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
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