The streets of Rome are paved with rubble: Shoeshine

Few movies are more painful to watch that V. DeSica's 1946 Shoeshine, a great and disturbing highlight of Italian postwar neo-Realism. All done in gritty, grainy black and white (of course) probably on location on the streets of postwar Rome, still suffering from tremendous poverty and destruction, filmed with I would guess mostly amateur actors, the story has both the simple and elemental qualities of a tale and the grand emotions of a lyric opera, especially at the tragic conclusion. Story is of two shoeshine boys who, improbably, are trying to save money to buy a horse (the equivalent at the time of teenagers yearning for a sports car - flash and freedom); through the lead of the older teenage brother of one of the boys, they get involved in selling some stolen goods (American blankets - movie is set during the war) and inevitably the get caught (partly because they stupidly use the windfall to buy a horse and then prance around the city). They get sent to juvenile prison, with all of the horrors, or most of them, that you can imagine - brutality, indifference, overcrowding, unsanitary, etc. Police squeeze the boys to give up info on the older sibling, which of course breaks a huge social taboo and leaves the two boys at odds, estranged from family, and even more vulnerable. It's a very dark movie, so not for everyone, and much of it is an expose of the horrible social conditions in Italy at its time (and no doubt still the case, with some modifications, in many cities in the U.S. and the world today) - thousands of kids working the streets of Rome with no chance of ever receiving an education, families living impoverished and crowded conditions, social services that are just warehouses for kids who have nowhere else to go, everyone taking advantage of them, treating them like dirt - notably, the American GI who gets his shoes shined and dismissively refuses to pay, mumbling as he leaves the stand: "Tomorrow." As with so many movies of this period - Rome Open City, Bicycle Thieves, to name two - the street scenes of Rome are incredibly interesting to look at, and nothing like the tourist mecca we expect: yes, we see some squares with fountains, but decidedly not the Trevi of Fellini - these are ugly, dark streets with broken stones and facades. The waterfront (along the Tiber presumably) is cindered and industrial - Rome looks like a place you'd want to escape from - but how can you do it? Where would you go? The boys' hopes of buying a horse, though briefly realized, are absurd and doomed. One child in the prison talks longingly of Florence - and you get the sense that they understand that anything would be better than where they are now. Part of the wonder of watching this and other post-War Italian films is thinking about how much that culture has changed in the past 70 years - from a dank ruin to a gleaming metropolis. It's like watching a film not just from another era but from another world.