A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Thursday, January 22, 2026

Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)

Rinaldo Smordoni and Franco Interlenghi in Shoeshine

Cast: Franco Interlenghi, Rinaldo Smordoni, Annielo Melie. Bruno Ortensi, Emilio Cigoli. Screenplay: Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, Cesare Giulio, Cesare Zavattini. Cinematography: Anchise Brizzi. Production design: Ivo Battelli, Giulio Lombardozzi. Film editing: Niccolò Lazzari. Music: Alessandro Cicognini. 

Vittorio De Sica's neorealist classic Shoeshine is not quite as successful as his Bicycle Thieves (1948) in capturing the street life of Rome after the end of World War II, chiefly because its focus on the two boys, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) and Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni), imposes limits. But they never become Dickensian waifs -- Dickens would never have crafted such an unsentimental ending. If Bicycle Thieves is ultimately the greater picture it's because De Sica learned from Shoeshine the importance of ambiance -- present largely in the prison setting for the earlier film. Still, it's one of the great films about childhood, with a searing vision that was unavailable to American filmmakers of the day.  

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