Shoeshine is all that a work of social art ought to be, would have to be to have any worth whatever, and almost never is. It is remarkably perceptive and compassionate in its study of authority and of those who embody authority, serve it, and suffer in and under it. It is also the rarest thing in contemporary art—a true tragedy. This tragedy is cross-lighted by pathos, by the youthfulness and innocence of the heroes, and I suspect that the makers of the film were themselves confused by pathos, but it is stern, unmistakable tragedy as well.

Vittorio De Sica’s lyric study of how two boys betrayed by society betray each other and themselves. It has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in films that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium. If Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty. The two young shoeshine boys sustain their friendship and their dreams amid the apathy of postwar Rome, but they are destroyed by their own weaknesses and desires when they’re sent to prison for black-marketeering. Cesare Zavattini wrote this study of the corruption of innocence; it is a social-protest film that rises above its purpose.