Rinaldo Smordoni	Giuseppe
Franco Interlenghi	Pasquale
Leo Garavaglia	Commissioner P.S.
Pacifico Astrologo	Vittorio
Maria Campi	the fortune teller
Antonio Carlino	the man from Abrruzzo
Angelo D'Amico	the man from Sicily
Enrico De Silva	Giorgio
Giuseppe Spadaro	lawyer Bonavino
Gino Saltamerenda	the Panza
Ana Pedoni	Nannarella
Bruno Ortenzi	Arcangeli
Aniello Mele	Raffaele
Enrico Cigoli	Staffera
Antonio Lo Nigro	Righetto
Francesco De Nicola	Ciriola
Irene Smordoni	Giuseppe's mother
Mario Volpicelli	the governor
Guido Gentili	Attilio
Claudio Ermelli	nurse
Antonio Nicotra	Bartoli

Pasquale and Giuseppe are two friends and partners in business. The are shoeshiner, the “sciusciàs” (from the word “shoe-shine” in English “ shoeshiner”, that they shout to attract the attention of the American soldiers).
Pasquale is the elder and he is horfan. Giuseppe, a cape always on the shoulders, has a family. His sister continuously goes to ask him some money to bring to his mother that, with a lot of children, live in a house occupied by evacuated. The two boys have a desire: they want to buy a horse. They succeed. A “odd job” - the delivery of a stock of blandetts to a fortune teller- pays well. On a white horse, the two make a resounding apparition in front of the other “sciuscià”. Their satisfaction, neverheless, is of brief duration; on signaling of the fortune teller, that has been stolen of the blanketts, Giuseppe and Pasquale are halted and, in a session of court where they understand a few or nothing, convicts. At the entrance of the juvenile jail, Pasquale and Giuseppe, tightening each other the hand, try to be united. But they are systematized in different cells; they meet sometimes in the courtyard. Despite the good intentions of an assistant, the jail offers a few occasions of rehebilitation of the corrupted boys. It often spoils them, definitely. Giuseppe, finished among scoundres he estranges from Pasquale that is endearing to a little scared and ill boy to which nobody minds; his mother, a streetwalker, sends a colleague to meet him... When a fire explodes and the boys run away from the jail, Giuseppe brings one of his companions in the stall where the horse is guarded. Pasquale, feeling betrayed, faces the partner and strikes him. Giuseppe dies. Pasquale, desperate, invokes the name of his friend while the horse gets further in the night..

PRIZES

Silver ribbon (EX AEQUEO with “Un giorno della vita” of Blasetti) for the direction
Prize Special Oscar in 1947.

CRITIQUE

Traditionally thought the third masterpiece of Neorealism (after Open city, 1945 and Paisà, 1946 of Rossellini), it is an abrupt film-truth permeated by the unmistakable fairy surrealism of Zavattini, author of the subject and of the screen-play (to which Sergio Amidei has collaborated not a little), even if the idea of the film is of the same De Sica and it is inspired to two children really known during the war. In the first part the cine camera moves to the footstep of the characters according to Zavattini’s poetic of the “shadowing” and the “distraction”, while subsequently he assembles more on the details and on the friendshop between the two boys, and on the life on the reformatory. This last approach has aroused, above all after many years, strong negative judgments on De Sica’s moralism. Seen again today, Sciuscià (from the American “shoeshiner”) is a painful fable, perhaps ingenue, but full of vigor and exciting in his low and marginal humanism. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

NOTES

In Italy it was a commercial flop (just 56 millions lire of collections), in the USA it got the Oscar as best foreign film and had a wide consence of public. Between the main characters only Interlnghi will beocme a professional actor.

COMMENT ON THE FILM

The film had more than a few problems at its exit; while in America the film depopulated, also receiving an Oscar as best foreing film, in Italy it had a cold reception, to not say critique: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself of doing films such this! What will they say of us abroad? The dirty cloths have to be washed at home.” This was the sentence shouted to De Sica after the projection. But which are the dirty cloths that the film intends to wash? With Sciuscià De Sica and Zavattini investigate the infancy’s world of the immedate postwar period, moving the lood either on the psychological plan and on the social one. Unfortunately the Roman infancy ended in reformatory, dreaming white horses. This is the scandal, this is the desperate cry coming from the film, and perhaps in this the critique has found the vituperated dirty “cloths”, as if the juvenile Roman jails were something to hide to the eyes of the spectator. The grieved portrait of this infancy is really an action of accusation for a poverty and for an injustice that are translated in offense and violence made on the weakest beings,
So Sciuscià, seen again today, still appears a painful fable, exciting, simple and extraordinary together, that moves the spectator with the sorrowful documentary description that transudes of our truth.

From Pricò to Sciuscià
De Sica had left in the big saloon of a college the “small little man” (so he consoled him, in the story, his father before committing his suicide) that, in “Children are watching us” (1943) he taught to represent, without indulgences and smiles, a “middle class inward”. On one side the modest and a few awkward houseservant, and from the other her mother: Pricò had embraced the first one, fixed the beautiful face of the second showing, in that way, to be able to give a moral judgment on the adults’ behaviors, on a poor history of adultery, in its joints also banal. De Sica, after being touched in that beautiful scene of effect, goes out in the street. And, with dry yes, he looks some boys now, the “boys fo the war” (and through them he reaches a social moral and not an individual one anymore).
In Rome, in the days of the Nazi occupation and the resumptions of the Gate of Heaven (a film realized in 1944 to subtract to the invitation to reach Venice and to direct the cinema-village created there by the fascists) and to Naples, where his work of theatrical actor has brought him in the months of the liberation, Vittorio De Sica has observed some children taht never could be called “small little men”. “Sometimes I have followed them to ear what they said and what projects they have for their future. But I have been able to ear a few, because the boys today spead in a low voice (...). Differently from the grown-up, the children feel ashamed. I perceive in their eyes a kind of modesty that irritates them and that forces them to talk about other things or to run away as my rwo boys have done”. The first trace of Sciuscià is in this notes of De Sica fo June 1945, a comment to some photos of boys of the war snaped by the operator Pietro Portalupi and pyblished on a magazine; a comment made of images, glared joking, more than considerations dectated by the good sense. the behaviors of the boys of the war -l their lack of trust toward the grown-up, their ability to survive, evern theri more whimsical dreams as the desire to possess a horse...- They are, here, already understood by De Sica. the scriptwriters, coordinated by Cesare Zavattini, furnish him the narrative pylon on which to graft his observations from the truth that, in the film, will acquire a documentry tone so much authentically cruel to result annoying to many spectators.(The director, when the film will exit in the public cinemas, will be judged less worst that a denigrator of Italy’s good name, and he will be invited to don’t wash the dirty cloths in pyblic anymore. The producer, the italo-American Paolo William Tamburella, will be ruined. The only one to earn will be Liya Lopert that will ditribute Sciuscià in the United States boxing a million dollars).
De Sica, in Sciuscià, is not limited to document a bitter page of the Italian history. He narrates with extraordinary intensity a friendship between boys, interwoven of confidences, solidarity, disappointments and dreams, graduating it on a thin psychological loom. The episode of the cinema projection in the jail, with the comedy and the scene of the sea (as, besides, the image-guide of the whole film: the white horse), reveals that the nice youth of Camerini’s comedies, here in capacity of the documentarist, is smart on the “imaginary, on the difference between ‘document’ and its narrative use. Sciuscià is, over that, a touched and touching reflection on the ‘boys of the war’, a transgression quite the opposite than ingenue of the cinema models current at that time. It has nothing to do with the ‘instructive’ film of American origin and with what, until that period has been done in the Italian cinema. Intentionally, the photo has unpleasant tonalities. The sound results mixed. This improper use of the cinema mean, instead of damaging the film, contributes to give insight to Sciuscià, that remains among the most solid tests of the Italian cinema Neorealism.