“Shoeshine” Proves That Some Injustices Never Disappear

If you thought the poor and disenfranchised get the short end of the stick in the legal system in today's world, a movie like “Shoeshine” may seem almost archaic to watch. We follow two shoeshine boys who are saving money to buy a horse. They don’t have much to their names (they sometimes don’t even have a place to sleep), but they have dreams, and they are working towards them as best they can. One of the boys does have a family, and in that family is a brother who is a con man. He and an accomplice rob a woman and pay the two boys to turn the other cheek, but they wind up in prison anyway. The police insist the boys turn on the brother.

The boys, in turn, insist they know nothing, and then are charged without a lawyer, a scheduled trial, or even evidence that they were involved with the crime. The conditions of the boys' imprisonment are so unfair that even management of the prison complains that too many boys are being brought in (and not enough are being processed). And in a world where we watch true crime documentaries and shake our heads at all the mistakes made during processing, I realized about 30 minutes into the movie that I was approaching this film the wrong way. Whether this is how police procedurals worked in Italy during the time period is besides the point. 

I realized this when one of the boys, eager to talk to his mother who he was told would visit him, doesn’t show up one day because she decided to go on a trip instead. An officer tries to console the boy, but he is unconvinced: he knows his mom is relieved to not have to worry about him. For that matter, when the older brother of one of the boys is finally ratted out, the mother shows up at the prison. Not to apologize to her son for getting arrested for something her other son did, but to scold her younger son for not protecting the older son. Whether she favors one brother over the other, the message being sent is that you are supposed to suffer in silence for the good of your family.

What kind of expectation is that to put on a kid? What does that teach them? These are poor kids who come from poor families. Trapped in a place where the adults prey on them with few resources available, they form bonds and alliances with other kids in the prison, ready to betray each other at the first chance of escape. Once I got over the fact that the legal system did not match the reality I was familiar with, I was able to feel what the movie was trying to say: That at a time when they should be protected, kids will be forced to protect themselves. 

It is a heartbreaking experience that, while from a different time period, still has emotions that we can feel today.  While real kids have more protections than what we see in this movie, they still deal with a justice system that doesn’t always have their best interests at heart, and family loyalty seems to go one way. It is a shame that in these respects, not much has changed.

“Shoeshine” won an Honorary Academy Award in 1946 (which would be a precursor for the Best Foreign Language Film award a few years later). I’m certain the voters awarded the film because they were moved by the emotional human journey, but I wonder if they could have predicted that, on a practical level, the injustice would still be present in the world more than 60 years later? It turns out the film's greatest strength back then remains the same today.