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Bert Cardullo on Shoeshine

by Bert Cardullo, 2006

Shoeshine was conceived out of the experiences of vagrant orphans in povertystricken, postwar Rome, where they organised their enterprises (many of them illegal) in the wake of the Allied liberation. Often these youngsters were seen trailing after American soldiers calling out, “Sciusci” , Gio?” – their phonetic equivalent of “Shoeshine, Joe?” – for GIs were among the few able to afford even this minor luxury in a country filled with unemployment following the cessation of hostilities. A magazine published a photo spread on two of the shoeshine boys, nicknamed Scimmietta (“Little Monkey”), who slept in elevators, and Cappellone (“Big Hat”), who suffered from rickets in addition to having a large head; and their pictures attracted a small-time, American-born producer, Paolo William Tamburella, who suggested to De Sica that a story about such street waifs would make a touching and topical movie. Immediately, Zavattini took up the suggestion, and he and De Sica walked the streets of Rome absorbing the atmosphere, in order to achieve maximum fidelity in the final motion picture.

The filmmakers even got to know the two boys, Scimmietta and Cappellone, who tried to earn enough money shining GI boots on the Via Veneto so that they could rush to the nearby Villa Borghese stables for an hour of horseback riding. They became the models for Giuseppe and Pasquale of Shoeshine, and, for a brief moment, De Sica considered drafting Scimmietta and Cappellone to play themselves in the movie, since there were no equivalent Roddy McDowalls or Dean Stockwells working at the time in the Italian cinema. He decided, however, that they were too ugly – a decision that tellingly reveals the limits of realism, neo- or otherwise, and that points up yet again that realism is one among a number of artistic styles, not reality itself. Zavattini artfully adapted the shoeshine boys’ lives and love of horses to the screen, while Rinaldo Smordoni and Franco Interlenghi were chosen from among the throngs of an open casting call to play “Little Monkey” and “Big Hat.”

In order to drum up money to realise their dream of owning a horse, the two boys become party – albeit innocently – to the robbery of a fortuneteller’s apartment. When they acquire the animal, a white stallion named Bersagliere, no conditions adhere to its joyful ownership: The horse belongs to both of them, involves each youngster totally, and symbolises their common pastoral longing for a life of pureness and beauty. They are soon apprehended by the police, however, and, when they refuse to implicate the real thieves, Giuseppe and Pasquale are sent to jail as juvenile delinquents. There they are tricked into turning against each other, and, in _Shoeshine_’s climax, Giuseppe slips to his death from a bridge in an attempt to escape attack by an angry, vengeful Pasquale. As the latter falls to his knees next to his friend’s body in the river bed, expressing in an unforgettable cry of despair the anguish of all suffering humanity, their beloved horse has long since symbolically galloped off into the darkness.

As was the usual practice in Italian films, the script of Shoeshine was the joint work of several professionals – Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, and Cesare Giulio Viola – in addition to the team of De Sica-Zavattini. And although Shoeshine was shot in real locations as much as possible (excluding the final bridge scene, which was shot in the studio because the producer did not have the money to wait for good weather), there was nothing improvised about its script, which was worked out to the smallest detail. There were those in the late 1940s who liked to proclaim that motion pictures like Shoeshine were pure, unadulterated Life flung onto the screen – which, of course, is nonsense, and even an unintended insult to De Sica’s powers as a great, instinctive movie dramatist. In fact, De Sica the director cannily exploits every resource of the cinema with which he had been working for fifteen years – not hesitating to underscore _Shoeshine_’s pathetic tragedy with heart-tugging music by the redoubtable Alessandro Cicognini – in order to give his audience the emotional frissons latent in the story he chose to bring to the screen.

For all its hybridisation, however, what endures from Shoeshine is De Sica’s palpable empathy for these street children and the plight of the entire generation they represent. As an artist with no particular ideological axe to grind, moreover, he manages always to give a human or personal dimension to the abstract forces that frame this drama. The grainy, newsreel quality of Anchise Brizzi’s photography, the sharp cutting, and the seemingly spontaneous naturalness of the acting (particularly of Smordoni and Interlenghi as the two boys) all sustain the feel of an exhausted Roman city, bereft of its pride. This same weariness affects the authorities in the prison scenes, which have an almost documentary air of moral as well as physical squalor.

The very title of this film – the Italian-English neologism coined by the shoeshine boys of Rome – is a clue to its all-embracing intentions. Shoeshine may be the pathetic story of Giuseppe and Pasquale, but the tragedy of post-World War II Italy is reflected in their sad tale. Even as the American GIs in the film see the image of their own security and prosperity in their shined shoes, so too does Italian society find the image of its own disarray and poverty in the story of these beautifully paired boys. Shoeshine is an illumination of reality, a “shining” of reality’s “shoes,” if you will, of the basic problems facing a defeated nation in the wake of war: for the ruled, how to survive amidst rampant poverty at the same time as one does not break the law; for the rulers, how to enforce the law without sacrificing one’s own humanity or that of the lawbreakers.

Shoeshine is much more than the melodramatic story of two boys whose friendship is destroyed at the hands of those rulers of a malevolent and insensate social system. Society may ultimately be responsible for the death of Giuseppe and the destruction of his and Pasquale’s friendship, but De Sica does not portray this society as villainous, as consciously or indifferently evil and exploitative. Shoeshine, then, is neither an accusatory work nor a propagandistic one. Indeed, great skill is shown in putting the single moral-bearing sentence of the narrative – “If these children have become what they are, it is because we have failed to keep them what they are supposed to be” – into the mouth of Giuseppe’s corrupt lawyer, a man for whom lying is a profession.

In this film, Italian society is shown to be as much a victim as the two boys. The real tragic conflict is not between childhood innocence and adult injustice; it is to be found in a society divided against itself. De Sica is interested as much in having us examine and question (not blame) this society as in having us pity Giuseppe and Pasquale. Shoeshine is thus a typically neorealist picture in that, despite its deep concern with humanity, it makes no attempt to probe beneath the surface into the mind of the individual. Accordingly, concepts like Angst or absurdity have no place in neorealist art, and alienation is defined purely in social terms. In place of the traditional cinematic concern with the complexities of the individual psyche comes a desire to probe the basically human.

Declaring, for example, that Giuseppe’s older brother callously and selfishly involves him and Pasquale in crime fails to take into account the environment that produces such crime. Giuseppe’s brother may he a thief, but he is one in a society where there is little or no work; he must survive, so he steals. Yes, he does involve his brother in his crime, but he also pays him well. Giuseppe’s brother is callous only from the point of view of someone who has never been in his situation; he thinks that he is doing his younger brother a favour. Petty crime is a way of life for them both, and the older brother’s justification for robbing a fortuneteller is doubtless that he is robbing the equivalent of a thief: a woman who legally steals other people’s money by supposedly telling their fortunes. It is when Pasquale names the big brother as one of the thieves to prison officials that Giuseppe turns on his friend; and Giuseppe’s loyalty to his sibling – to the person who tried to do him a good turn, not to a villain who selfishly involved him in a crime – leads ultimately to his death. Ironically, in attempting to help Giuseppe survive, his older brother has helped to get him killed and has gone to jail himself.

Moreover, while it is true that the police use underhanded methods to make Pasquale confess by pretending to beat Giuseppe, it is equally true that they use such methods because they want to capture the gang that robbed the fortuneteller’s apartment. Like Giuseppe’s brother, the police are not villains: They want to stop the black-marketeering that is threatening an already unstable economy, and they use whatever means they can to do so. The police do not act foolishly by splitting up Giuseppe and Pasquale; the pair is split up by chance in the assigning of groups of boys to cells. The prison in which the police house the boys is not by design cruel, crowded, wretched, and dirty. It is crowded because many of the boys of Rome have turned to petty crime in order to survive; wretched and dirty because the prison is so crowded and because adequate funds do not exist to provide for the boys; and cruel because the prison staff is small as well as overworked, hence prone to solve problems by force rather than by disputation. The prison was not even built to be one: Ironically, it was originally a convent and has been taken over on account of a shortage of space in other prisons.

The deception that the police work on Pasquale is not without its consequences, for he and Giuseppe themselves learn deception. In revenge for Pasquale’s betrayal of his brother, Giuseppe, along with several other boys, plants a file in his cell; it is found and, as a result, Pasquale is severely whipped by the guards. Later, in court, Giuseppe is forced by his lawyer to falsely put all the blame for the fortuneteller incident on the older, putatively craftier Pasquale. (This lawyer himself is not cheaply opportunistic; he is unscrupulous in the defence of his client, like many lawyers.) In revenge for Giuseppe’s rejection of him and escape from jail with his new friend Arcangeli, Pasquale then tells the police where the two boys are hiding. Giuseppe plans to sell the horse that he and Pasquale had bought and to live off the money with Arcangeli, but the police find them at the stable; Arcangeli flees, and Giuseppe is killed in his fall from the bridge.

Tragically, the prison officials, in “protecting” society from Giuseppe and Pasquale, have brutalised the youths, robbing them in the process of the very emotion and the very virtue necessary for the survival of humane society: love and trust. In the name of law and order, society has destroyed what it should promote: bonding, both male and female. When he goes to jail, Giuseppe is torn not only from Pasquale, but also from the mysterious little girl named Nana, who had been following him through the streets of Rome and is inconsolable in his absence. Once the boys are placed in separate cells, Pasquale can give his affection and confidence only to the tubercular Raffaele, who himself is ostracised by the other prisoners and then trampled to death during a fire; while Giuseppe can give his love and trust only to the scoundrel Arcangeli, who abandons him on the bridge at the end at the first sight of Pasquale. A homosexual subtext of male jealousy is present here, as Parker Tyler has noted,1 but the theme of homoerotic love among adolescent boys – especially those confined to a prison or reform school – is not developed in Shoeshine. As De Sica himself admitted, he did not develop this theme both because it revolted him and because he felt that it would undermine the film’s larger polemic.2

Clearly, though, _Shoeshine_’s polemic does not consist simply of portraying brutality against children, for which society will have to pay no particular price and for which it is simply “evil.” The film portrays society’s brutality against itself in the person of its future: its children. What makes Shoeshine especially poignant, however, is that we see more than the love between Giuseppe and Pasquale destroyed: We see a love destroyed that could only have grown and spread to their other relationships as they grew older; a love that meant to solidify itself through the purchase of the horse and take flight, to announce itself triumphantly throughout Rome and its environs.