Shoeshine (1946)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica


We are the people who, in pursuit of our passions, abandon our children to fend for themselves. And our children are alone. All alone.

In the 1940s Vittorio de Sica directed three of the best and most moving films about children ever made—The Children Are Watching Us (1942), Shoeshine (1946), and Bicycle Thieves (1948). In each of these films, children find themselves in a world where the behavior of adults makes little sense to them, where they are powerless to control their own lives, and where they are unable to protect themselves from disappointment and hurt. It's a sad, mystifying world for children, de Sica seems to be saying, and we adults are too self-involved to feel their pain and confusion and help them through it.

In Shoeshine two boys, Pasquale and Giuseppe, live in poverty just after the end of the Second World War in Italy, shining shoes for American servicemen to finance their dream, to own a horse. They've been making payments on the horse for a while but can't claim him until they make one large final payment. When Giuseppe's older brother offers them a way to make part of the money they need for that payment, they jump at the opportunity, even though it involves doing something shady, delivering stolen American blankets to an elderly fortune teller for resale on the black market. While at the apartment, Giuseppe's brother shows up with two men who identify themselves as policemen. The boys appear to have been set up as pawns in a sting operation but are lucky to escape and are able to keep all the money from the transaction as well, enough to make the final payment on their horse.

The boys are so ecstatic that they spend the night in the stable with their horse, only to find the next day that their good fortune has turned sour. Picked up by the police, they are accused of being accomplices in the robbery of the fortune teller, for the two men were not policemen at all. The most damning evidence against them is that large sum of money they used to make the final payment on the horse. The boys cannot explain where they got the money without implicating Giuseppe's brother, and their sense of honor won't let them do this. Unable to convince the police that they had no prior knowledge of the robbery, Pasquale and Giuseppe are sent to a juvenile prison to await trial.

Only twenty minutes into the movie the circumstantial trap the two boys find themselves in has already snapped shut, and from there things only go downhill. Separated at the detention center, the boys find their friendship and loyalty to each other constantly challenged—by their cellmates, by manipulative prison officials who try to play one boy against the other, and most of all by the soul-destroying machinery of the justice and penal system. The film blends elements of a Warners-style prison movie of the 1930s with a Kafkaesque atmosphere in which the boys are caught up in institutional machinery beyond anyone's comprehension or control.

The prison is a hellish place plagued by overcrowding, bad food, bullying inmates, and corrupt guards. Any of the prison staff with good intentions have long ago given up hope of improving conditions. At every turn the boys are duped—by their adult criminal confederates, their cellmates, the prison officials, even their lawyers. Worst of all, the degradation Pasquale and Giuseppe suffer is not the result of intentional malice, but simply the outcome of neglect, indifference, the self-concerned attitude of the adults in charge of them, and the impossible situation they find themselves in. To call these boys helpless victims of circumstance would be putting it too mildly.

Throughout it all, the horse the boys love—the horse is the first thing we see in the film and the last—remains a symbol of their hope. Their hope for freedom, for a connection to the natural world which the grim conditions of their urban environment denies them, for the affection Giuseppe, the son of impoverished war refugees, and the orphaned and homeless Pasquale experience only from each other. When the boys are separated from their horse and from each other, they are set adrift and become prey to all the worst personal and social evils that come their way.

Shoeshine isn't as well remembered today as other films of the postwar Italian neorealist movement, in part perhaps because it has never received a deluxe home video release by a company like Criterion and is revived less often than better known neorealist films. Yet it has made a strong impression on some very knowledgeable people. Martin Scorsese admired de Sica's empathy with his child characters: "There are no barriers at all between de Sica and these children whose tragic lives he understood perfectly." Orson Welles once called it the best movie he had ever seen and praised its invisible technique, remarkable praise indeed from a director of such highly visible technique. Welles was certainly justified, though, to recognize that de Sica was too savvy to allow a showy style to distract from the highly charged emotions of the story or the truth in the performances of his actors.

In 1948 Shoeshine became the first film ever to receive a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best foreign language film of the year. (This didn't become an official category until the 1956 awards year.) The Academy's citation stated that it was chosen because "the high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity." This seems an unintentionally ironic way to put it, in view of the way the bleak conditions in postwar Italy are mirrored by the film's unflinchingly bleak outlook. Not only do Pasquale and Giuseppe not triumph over adversity, but on the contrary are thoroughly crushed by it.

You might also be interested in:

• Umberto D. (1952)
• Two Early Films by Italian Masters: The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
• My Voyage to Italy (1999)

This post is part of the Horseathon, which runs May 25-28. For more information and a schedule of posts, visit the host site, My Love of Old Hollywood.

Umberto D. (1952)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica

A great film about what it is like to stand by and watch helplessly as you slip into poverty and even your dignity becomes excess baggage.

—Martin Scorsese on Umberto D.

In the 1940s Vittorio de Sica directed a string of movies that were both popular and critical successes, movies that helped focus the world's attention on Italian cinema and the emergent postwar film movement of neorealism. These films centered on children and told stories largely from their point of view—pictures like The Children Are Watching Us (1944), Shoeshine (1946), and The Bicycle Thieves (1948). In 1951 de Sica turned his attention in a different direction, to a bleak story about an impoverished elderly man and his dog. The picture, Umberto D., was De Sica's first box-office flop in Italy, and its failure prompted him to turn away for nearly a decade from the serious subjects and realistic presentation of the hugely influential school of filmmaking he helped pioneer. Today Umberto D. is generally considered one of his two greatest works, along with The Bicycle Thieves. De Sica himself cited it as his own personal favorite of his films.

Umberto D. opens with a scene that might have come directly from a modern newscast. Down a street in Rome a large group of people march toward the camera, waving placards and chanting slogans. As they approach, we see that these are not ordinary street protesters but dignified elderly men dressed in overcoats, hats, suits and ties. They are retirees who, seeing their fixed incomes eaten up by inflation, are shouting "Justice for pensioners" and pressing for a raise in their pensions. Near the front of the demonstration is an elderly man accompanied by a small dog. The man is Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant, and the dog is his Jack Russell-like mongrel, Flike. When the police arrive and break up the demonstration, Umberto and Flike scurry away. "I'm just a good-for-nothing old man," he says to another pensioner, explaining that he is in debt, has no relatives to help him, is plagued by a persistent cough and fever, and is about to be evicted from his room because he is a month behind in his rent.

The film is Umberto's story, and he is in every scene, everything shown from his point of view. The plot of the movie is quite simple, a series of small everyday events that little by little give us a complete picture of Umberto's life in all its abject humiliation and hopelessness. Umberto responds to his dire circumstances with a series of increasingly desperate actions. He sells his possessions, beginning with his gold watch and his books. He tries begging in the street but cannot bring himself to carry through with it. Instead he has Flike sit up and beg with a hat in his mouth while he hides behind a nearby building. When an old acquaintance recognizes the dog, Umberto runs up and tells him that Flike is only playing. He even contrives to have himself admitted to the hospital so that he can save the money he would ordinarily spend on food to apply toward his back rent.

After Umberto is released from the hospital, his situation begins to go seriously downhill. He returns home to find that his landlady is redecorating the apartment in an absurdly frou-frou style, the wallpaper half stripped from the walls of his room, a huge hole knocked in the wall between his room and the next one. Umberto's world seems to be literally crumbling around him. Worst of all, Flike is missing. Rushing to the animal shelter to look for his dog, he is horrified by the casual indifference to the fate of the animals there and barely manages to rescue Flike before he is euthanized. Returning to his room late that night, he finds himself standing at his window looking into the deserted street below, and we can tell from the numb expression on his face and a quick zoom to the pavement below that he is about to jump. It is only when he turns around and sees Flike sitting on the bed waiting for him that he abandons his suicidal thoughts, at least for the moment.

In Umberto D. de Sica, like Chaplin in his films, presents the world as a place populated by victimizers and the victimized. When people are not outright malicious like Umberto's callous, social-climbing landlady, they are indifferent to the suffering of others. Just about the only other person in the film who elicits a sympathetic reaction is Maria, the meek, kind-hearted teenage maid in the apartment where Umberto lives. When Umberto packs his belongings and sneaks out in the middle of the night, he unexpectedly encounters Maria on the staircase and says goodbye to her. The dejected expression on his face makes it clear that he has given up all hope and decided to kill himself and that Maria—like himself another of life's sad victims and the only person in the film to show him any affection—is the one person he will be genuinely sorry to leave behind.

Much of the second half of the film is occupied with Umberto's futile attempts to make some sort of provision for Flike's future. No matter what he tries, though, nothing seems to work out. Apparently convinced that he and his dog are destined to stay together until the end, he finally takes Flike in his arms and walks around the barrier at a train crossing and toward an oncoming train. When the terrified dog leaps from his arms and runs away, cringing behind a tree, this rejection is too much for Umberto and he pursues Flike, wheedling him until he comes back. De Sica might portray Umberto's world as an inhumane place, but in the end he declines to treat his viewers with such cruelty. If we can't be certain what the future holds for Umberto and Flike, we now know that for them there will at least be some kind of future. In a final scene reminiscent of the one in Chaplin's Modern Times, we last see the old man and his dog walking away from us down a path in the park, playing fetch with a pine cone.

This ambiguous ending might seem a timid one, the result of a reluctance by de Sica to follow through on the grim situation he has set up so relentlessly, but I think closer examination tells us it is not entirely arbitrary. If Umberto's pride has been the thing that has kept him going this long, the inflexibility and selfishness it has engendered have also been his greatest flaws. Perhaps his concern for Flike manages to chip away enough of that stubborn pride to make him more adaptable and less self-involved. After all, his resources may be limited, but he does have resources. And it's a psychological truism that nothing can take us out of ourselves and help us transcend self-pity like loving someone else more than we love ourselves. Maybe in the end, rather than Umberto saving Flike, the truth is the reverse, and it is Flike who saves Umberto.

There is no doubt that of all the neorealist filmmakers, de Sica had the strongest streak of sentimentality, and my description of Umberto D. might make it sound quite the tearjerker. But de Sica didn't see the film that way, maintaining that rather than being sentimental, it was a realistic film made "without compromise." I think he was being absolutely honest when he said this, because even though the subject of the picture might break your heart, de Sica does present it in a totally realistic, unmanipulative way. This is a technically simple film with no fancy camera work and only one brief instance of showy editing, when the train is bearing down on Umberto and Flike and de Sica uses some rapid cutting and the shrill sound of the train whistle for heightened effect. Otherwise he makes no overt attempt to pull the viewer's emotional strings either through technical means or through overemphasis, recognizing the powerful emotional force of the story and standing aside to let it do its work.

Still, there's no denying that Umberto D. is a litmus test of any viewer's susceptibility to sentiment in film: if this movie doesn't melt your heart, none ever will. It's the kind of movie which contains scenes, situations, and images—and inspires emotional responses—that you will never forget. And it contains two of the greatest performances ever committed to film. One by seventy-two year old Carlo Battisti, a retired professor from Florence who made exactly one movie in his life, as Umberto. The other by a mongrel named Napoleone as his devoted canine friend Flike.

You might also like:
• Two Early Films by Italian Masters: The Children Are Watching Us (1944) and Story of a Love Affair (1950)
• My Voyage to Italy (1999)

This post is part of the Classic Movie Dogathon hosted by the Classic Film & TV Cafe, which runs February 19-22. Click here for the full schedule.

Top Ranked Films of Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica
3 titles, 45th in points with 15,777

De Sica made post-war films in the style of Italian postwar realism. These films usually have a gritty, black-and-white style that closely resembles documentaries, shot on the streets in real light.

In an interview on a dvd, he said the day of studios making happy escapism for the masses were over, that a new world demanded films of

Two Early Films by Italian Masters

The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
***^½
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica

The Children Are Watching Us, made in 1942 but not released until two years later, is a superior tearjerker that, being told largely from a child's point of view, anticipates Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thieves. The child is a boy about five years old, Pricò. His family is middle class: The father works as an accountant, they live in a modern apartment block in Rome with a live-in housekeeper, and the mother is secretly having a love affair. The movie opens with his mother taking Pricò to the park to watch a puppet show, after which she sends him off to play while she meets her lover, who is trying to pressure her into running away with him. Unknown to her, however, Pricò is watching from a distance, and although he doesn't really understand what is happening, he knows instinctively that it is something which threatens the security of his comfortable life.

This sequence sets the tone of the rest of the movie. As Pricò observes from a distance, we see nearly everything that happens from his point of view. When his mother abandons the family for her lover, we see his sadness and confusion, and we share his sense of being lost as he is passed from one relative to another, each one less sympathetic and caring toward him than the last. We also sense his joy when, after he becomes seriously ill, his mother returns. But even though she resolves to break off her relationship with her lover, he is so persistent that she eventually finds herself torn between him and her child.

De Sica's attitude toward the behavior of the adults in Pricò's life—his father, the housekeeper Agnese, the mother, and her lover—is quite objective. He makes us understand the complexity of their relationships, how the feelings and desires of each conflict with those of the others and also the incredible difficulty of the decisions they must make. He guides the actors who play these parts to restrained performances that convey only too clearly their quiet inner turmoil over their choices. (His attitude toward the other adults in the movie is much less tolerant, their negative qualities exaggerated almost to the point of satire.) Yet in the end they are always guided by their own emotions even though they are aware of the unfortunate effects their choices will have on others. Sadly, it is Pricò, who has no say in their actions, who always ends up suffering the most.

A seaside holiday intended to be a celebration of his parents' reconciliation provides some terrific set pieces including a magic show at the hotel where they are staying, encounters with a group of decidedly odd fellow vacationers, and a very touching episode absolutely typical of early de Sica in which Pricò runs away and tries to get back to his father, who has already returned to Rome, after he sees his mother furtively meeting her lover in a scene that mirrors the one in the park at the beginning of the movie. In many ways The Children Are Watching Us is quite similar to the later Umberto D., only here the lonely, misunderstood, and helpless main character is a small boy rather than an old man. The boy who plays Pricò, Luciano de Ambrosis, who was not even five years old when the film was made, is marvelous at expressing the sensitivity and sadness of his character, and his ability to cry on cue amazing. To call his performance moving would be a tremendous understatement. Heartbreaking would be more like it.

At the end, Pricò is confronted with his own difficult decision, one which he makes with greater maturity and less selfishness than the adults in the the film. Perhaps all that silent watchfulness taught him more than the unobservant adults ever suspected.


Story of a Love Affair (1950)
***^½
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

I couldn't help thinking of the recent Tilda Swinton movie I Am Love while I watched this film. Both involve the wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist, trapped in a loveless marriage to a rather cold older man, who has an affair with a poor but younger, more sexual, and more vital man. But I Am Love, which consciously evoked Antonioni, couldn't stop drooling over the very goodies it seemed to be condemning as emblems of shallow materialism and even provided the heroine with a hopeful future with an earthy stud, an attempt to coat a simple story of adultery with a slick and oppressively elaborate veneer that for me gave the movie a distinct air of artifice. In contrast, Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair, his first fiction film after working for several years as a screenwriter and director of documentaries, seems completely genuine.

Compared to Antonioni's spare later films, Story of a Love Affair is positively packed with plot. Parts of it resemble film noir, while other parts are closer to romantic melodrama. In Milan, a wealthy businessman hires a firm of private detectives to investigate the past of his beautiful young wife, Paola (Lucia Bosé), whom he married without knowing anything about her and who has never revealed anything about her life before their marriage. He also suspects she is having an affair, so he wants her followed. Through the investigating detective, we learn that Paola's best friend was killed in a freak accident—a fall down an elevator shaft—just days before she was to be married and that Paola hastily moved to Milan right afterward.

We also learn that the dead friend's fiancé, Guido (Massimo Girotti), has recently shown up in Milan and that he is indeed having an affair with Paola. Further, it seems that the two were in love before and that even though they did not actually kill the friend, they were passively responsible in allowing the accident to happen. The feelings of guilt over her complicity in her friend's death drove Paola to flee to Milan and find refuge in an impetuous and loveless marriage to a wealthy older man. Now that Guido has returned to her life, she wants to be with him, but she doesn't want to give up the material comforts she has grown used to. So she hatches a plot with Guido to murder her husband so that she can have both her lover and her husband's money.

This may sound like the typical film noir material of movies like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, but Antonioni puts his own stamp on the story, finding and developing elements that would become fundamental to his later work. He hasn't yet arrived at his fully evolved mature style, but the beginnings of it are unmistakable. I think of Antonioni as one of the most visual of all filmmakers, and you can see that tendency already at play here. In Story of a Love Affair are many examples both of his lingering static shots with their formalistic compositions and also of his fascination with architecture and the urban landscape, traits that were to become hallmarks of his films. Also in evidence is Antonioni's characteristic unwillingness to fragment the interaction of his characters into edited sequences, his preference being to follow them with the camera in precisely choreographed long takes—especially in confined interiors—a technique modern filmmakers might do well to study as an alternative to the overuse of the hand-held camera.

Most striking of all, though, is the gradual introduction into what starts as a genre film of themes that would later become preoccupations. The world Antonioni depicts in Story of a Love Affair is one in which people are eager to forget both their collective and their own personal pasts. Yet willingly cut off from the past, they seem adrift in the present, unable to move forward, only to spin around and around in endless circles without ever getting anywhere. Antonioni uses conventional noir tropes to explore his fascination with the twin vortices of the post-World War Two human condition: the alienation of his characters from their lives and the enervation that at the same time prevents them from doing anything to change their lives. And running as an undercurrent through the entire film is a sense of personal isolation that results from the profound inability of these people to connect. At times it's hard to believe this film was made sixty years ago, so fresh does it seem in its attitudes.