Shoeshine (1946)

Original title

Sciuscià

Directed by

Vittorio De Sica

Genre

drama film, prison film, crime film, coming-of-age film

Country

Italy

Runtime

1h 33m

Rated

16

Rating

7.8 of 10 from 276 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Two poor boys in postwar Rome shine shoes and dream of buying a horse. When they get mixed up with the police, their friendship is pushed to a breaking point.

tragicmelancholicrawintimateslow-burnnostalgicheartbreakingpoignantgritty

What happens

Shoeshine (Italian: Sciuscià [ʃuʃˈʃa], from Neapolitan pronunciation of the English) is a 1946 Italian film directed by Vittorio De Sica. Sometimes regarded as his first masterpiece, the film follows two shoeshine boys who get into trouble with the police after trying to find the money to buy a horse. In 2008, Shoeshine was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978." Shoeshine became the first film to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 20th Academy Awards in 1947. Film critic Pauline Kael summed up the power of the film by saying "if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?" and equated it to music by Mozart had he written an opera set in poverty. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Un giorno nella vita (1946)
• Without Family (1946)
• Roma città libera (1946)
• Paisà (1946)
• The Bandit (1946)
• Bicycle Thieves (1948)
• Shamed (1946)
• I Met You in Naples (1946)