Shoeshine

Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine arrived in 1946, at the very beginning of Italian neorealism and a year before Bicycle Thieves would canonise the movement. It was his first major collaboration with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (the partnership that would go on to produce Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D.) and the film established the methodology that would define their joint work: non-professional actors, location shooting in unrepaired post-war Rome, narratives built from the small economic catastrophes of ordinary people.

The film follows Giuseppe and Pasquale, two boys shining shoes for American GIs in occupied Rome, who pool their savings to buy a horse (the one thing in their world that belongs entirely to them) and are swept by adults into a black-market scheme that lands them in a brutal juvenile prison. What De Sica does with the prison sequences is what neorealism was, in its strongest form, capable of: he shows the institutional machinery destroying the boys' friendship not through cruelty in the conventional sense but through small administrative betrayals, isolation, and the manipulation of one against the other.

In 1947 the Academy granted Shoeshine a special honorary award for the foreign language film of the year (a category that did not yet formally exist (it would be created in 1956). Orson Welles famously called it one of the films that justified cinema as an art form. Watched today, its ending) and the irreversible thing it asks you to witness, remains one of the most devastating in mid-century European cinema.