The New Pictures, Sep. 8, 1947

Shoeshine (Alfa; Lopert) may strengthen a suspicion that the best movies in the world are being made, just now, in Italy. U.S. audiences have seen only one other important Italian picture, Open City. Shoeshine, in some respects, is even better.

In subject and story, Shoeshine is deceptively modest. It traces the gradual destruction of two boys of the Roman streets, twelve-year-old Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and his close friend, 14-year-old Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi). They are attractive and resourceful children, at first appearance, living the anarchic, hand-to-mouth life of most of Italy during the chaotic period between the Italian and German surrenders. Then they become front men for Giuseppe’s older brother, in a small-time black market deal. They are caught and locked up for questioning. If they had informed on their elders promptly, they would probably have been released; but courage and their loyalty to Giuseppe’s brother forbids informing. They are caught into the awful, rickety rollers of the State, and there they are ruined.

Some of the State’s representatives are kind and well meaning, but they are hardly more helpful than the brutes, the prigs, the fools and the merely indifferent. The boys are locked in separate cells and come under new influences. Pasquale is tricked into informing; neither boy ever quite understands how they have been betrayed. The seraphically charming Pasquale dwindles into a corrupted, potential criminal. The stolid Giuseppe grows into a grave embodiment of vengeance. Deceit, bewilderment, loss of affection and of faith drive them to the edge of sanity. Finally Pasquale kills his friend. Over the dead body, he first begins to realize what he has done to his friend and to himself—and a little of what has been done to both of them.

Shoeshine was intended as a furious and moving indictment of a postwar society, and of a world, in which such things could happen. It is all of that, and more. It makes the oversimplified diagnosis and prescription of most social tracts look like so much complacent blueprint. It is filled, in every scene, with an awareness of the pitiful complexity of the causes of even simple evil. The jailers, bureaucrats, magistrates, lawyers and priests who are cogs in the machinery of destruction are savagely caricatured, but each one of them is presented with compassion and understanding, as well as rage. Institutions and individuals alike are shown to be staggering not only under their own intrinsic sins but also under the extra burdens which defeat, and war, and a generation of bullying and corruption, have bequeathed. And the crucial destruction takes place, as it must, in the heroes themselves.

Like all true tragic heroes, Shoeshine’s boys are destroyed less by outside circumstance than by their inability, under the worst of circumstances, to keep faith with themselves and with all that they have reason to trust. And like all true tragic heroes, they are destroyed by a combination of their noblest traits and their weakest ones.

Cinematically the picture is, without pretentiousness, a masterpiece: wonderfully rich and supple, bursting at the seams with humane sympathy, wisdom and creative energy. There is nothing visually fancy about it, and nothing notably original; its beauty rests on its simple and impassioned use of basic principles which most studios have abandoned or emasculated. It is devoted to that fundamental of movie reality: picturing the way that places and things and people really look and act and interact, and making the information eloquent to the eye.

By American standards, Shoeshine was made on a shoestring: 31 million lire ($138,000). (Open City cost only $100,000.) But it was a long, hard scrimmage in the making. Neither Producer Paolo W. Tamburella (who thought up the idea), nor Director Vittorio De Sica, nor Sergio Amidei (who wrote Open City) and his three fellow writers are exactly yes-men. Finding the right actors and getting fine performances out of young amateurs—they were all shoeshine boys—was no small job in itself. And there were plenty of subsidiary difficulties. (When Allied authorities forbade G.I.s to act in the film—and G.I.s were indispensable to the Roman scene of that period—the producers made-do with five Italian ex-P.W.s in U.S. uniforms.)

And once the picture was finished, Government authorities were horrified. They were still more horrified when Signor Tamburella warned them of the publicity stench he could raise out of their refusal to allow the film’s release. The authorities gave in.

Mother Wore Tights (20th Century-Fox) is a nice little movie starring Betty Grable. In most musicals, Boy & Girl break up over a trivial misunderstanding and treat each other, for the next several reels, like a couple of saber-toothed tigers. In this one, a song-&-dance team of the ’90s meet, like each other, get married, have a couple of daughters, and live for years without ever regretting a minute of it.

This is all so very nice, in fact, that Mother is a trifle weak on dramatic interest. Audience tears are jerked—or jerked at, anyhow—on behalf of the dear, dead days of the two-a-day. More tears are tried for when the two little girls, lonely for their touring parents, turn up for Christmas and are entertained by the whole troupe. Some tension develops when the older daughter (Mona Freeman) falls in love with an adolescent socialite and becomes embarrassed about her cheerfully gaudy parents. But Father & Mother are so thoroughly kind and understanding that no harm and very little drama ever really develops.

All in all, Mother Wore Tights is a rather tepid but likable show. It is at its best during the vaudeville numbers, and there are some pleasant songs (best: Kokomo, Indiana). Brash Dan Dailey (Father) has a personality as sharp and convincing as a breath of stage-door air: he can really sing, really dance and really act. Miss Grable can sing too; her pleasure in playing a generous and happy woman is contagious enough to make up for her shortcomings as an actress. What she can really do, of course, is dance. And she still holds undisputed title to the most gorgeous legs in the business.