Shoeshine 4K 1946

This old movie by Vittorio De Sica is a solid classic, nobly spreading smart ideas, good thoughts, and timeless truths, showing us the ugly side of how society and people relate, patiently stirring our minds without shocking us into a stupor.

The carefree Shusha are shoe-shining boys who squeeze their wooden boxes into the flow of the street crowd, carving out a patch of sidewalk for their simple labor, saving crumbs, looking into the future, which remains their plan, which is disrupted by a treacherous blow.

A hostile world against a boy's dream: led astray by adult swindlers, the boys end up in a prison yard, where harsh order and unhealthy cynicism reign within the walls of a deaf casemate, where the low morals of a band of robbers rub shoulders with the cruelty of the government officials who supervise them, adding to the bitterness of deception with cunning lies, trapping the children between the hammer of crime and the anvil of justice, killing their naive childhood dreams. The simplicity of a child is incapable of recognizing deception, giving rise to a chain of mistakes and delusions, when a fatal outcome is inevitable.

Here, everything is out in the open—characters, faces, and types, the inexperience of minors and the cunning of professionals who breed and surround crime. Defenseless purity of intentions and calculating pragmatism, the inevitable descent into grief that no one wants and nothing can stop.