EN
“In these films, especially in De Sica’s, children are a kind of guarantee of spontaneity. And how they are exploited by him! This is how his films got their cute-dog dimension. What was then perceived as unadorned reality in Bicycle Thieves now displays all its fictionality. The father-son relationship speaks volumes. By contrast, what a father figure Chaplin is in The Kid! Shoeshine is a harsh film with kids. The parents are missing. That it ends surreally says a lot.”
Frieda Grafe
“Shoeshine has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in film works that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium – if Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty. Shoeshine, written by Cesare Zavattini, is a social protest film that rises above its purpose. It is a lyric study of how two boys betrayed by society betray each other and themselves. The two young shoeshine boys who sustain their friendship and dreams amid the apathy of postwar Rome are destroyed by their own weaknesses and desires when sent to prison for black-marketeering. This tragic study of the corruption of innocence is intense, compassionate, and above all, humane”
Pauline Kael
