Alex Heeney reviews the 4K restorations of the post-war black-and-white films Shoeshine (Vittorio de Sica) and The Lavendar Hill Mob (Charles Crichton).
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Vittoria de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Charles Crichton Lavender Hill Mob (1951), both post-war films from Italy and England, respectively, have been recently restored in 4K. It’s a strange experience watching black-and-white films of that era look so crisp and unblemished, without the blurriness of 35mm or even the trace of dust, spots, and other damage.
On the one hand, they look beautiful, and any restoration challenges aren’t evident in the frame when you watch it. On the other hand, the restoration process turns these mid-twentieth-century artifacts into something entirely new — a new medium for a message from another era. Such is progress. It creates a strange cognitive dissonance that I remarked on and then quickly moved on from as the films progressed, and I became more involved in the stories.
I don’t have nostalgia for the muddy prints of days of yore
I don’t have nostalgia for the muddy prints of days of yore. When I lived in Northern California during the transition between film and digital in cinemas, I couldn’t wait for film to be abandoned. I was used to the perfect, crisp digital projection that Toronto had long since embraced.
I recently saw a 35 mm restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. It looked beautiful in glorious technicolour, and the image perhaps was even more alive on film. But the visual beauty came at a price: the sound. The voices were often so dampened to the point of inaudibility that I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Without captions, I relied on my memory of the dialogue from when I’d recently watched another restoration on Criterion Channel, where sound quality wasn’t an issue. But this struck me as a hugely inaccessible screening I didn’t wish to repeat. Fortunately, 4K restorations avoid these issues.
Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946)
Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine is widely considered the first masterpiece of the Italian neorealist director. Sometimes, the canon can lead you astray, but this film is still resonant, humanist, and infuriating today. It’s the story of a friendship torn apart by the cruel and indifferent adult world that cares little for children and less for the challenges of post-war poverty.
The film follows two inseparable young teenage boys in post-war Rome: Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordini) and his best friend, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi), an orphan of the war. By day, they work shining shoes. By night, they dream of combining funds to buy a horse. When Giuseppe’s older brother gets them into some illegal dealings for a quick buck, they suddenly find themselves incarcerated in a harsh system that pits boys against each other and discourages empathy.
A bond severed in de Sica’s Shoeshine
As soon as the boys enter the juvenile prison, they are separated, which they and we experience as a violent rupture. Arriving in the cavernous space which will become their home, where the other boys are hidden behind cell doors, de Sica shoots the pair in a wide shot. They are walking side by side, so close as to seem like a single unit, within the vast expanse of the prison. We realize they’ve never been forcibly parted until now. They spent the war years getting by because they had each other. Suddenly, they’re all alone.
The boys’ fates are predetermined by their privilege. Giuseppe has a family who pays for a lawyer. He quickly falls into a group of boys he shares a cell with who support him and ultimately plan an escape. Pasquale, by contrast, is relegated to an upper level of the prison where the only friend he makes is a sickly boy who needs his protection. Giuseppe may be physically smaller in stature, but he finds people who help him. The more empathetic Pasquale instead uses his minuscule privilege to help someone else. It leads to not-so-buried resentments, especially as the prison guards manipulate him into squealing on Giuseppe’s brother, thinking he’s doing so to spare the helpless Giuseppe a beating. Pasquale does this as an act of compassion, but it only furthers the rupture between the boys.
Embracing the gothic in Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine
There’s a gothic element to Shoeshine, which traps us within the same four walls the boys cannot escape for most of the film. The boys, especially Giuseppe and his friends, dream of leaving. The food is terrible, their freedom is curtailed, and fending for yourself becomes your top priority, even if it means hurting others. For Pasquale, who was already effectively on his own, despite some support from Giuseppe, prison life has its merits: a reliable place to sleep and food to eat when the closest he’d had to a bed before was an elevator the landlord would chase him off.
Inside the prison, the boys are all described as miscreants and criminals. Whatever their crimes, it mostly comes down to needing shelter and food and being naive enough to be manipulated by more sinister adult forces. The prison isn’t a place of shelter or rehabilitation but where these same adults, who see the boys and not the system as the problem, foster the self-interested behaviour they claim to condemn. There’s no way out for these boys.
Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
Charles Crichton’s Ealing comedy The Lavendar Hill Mob is a highly amusing caper starring Alec Guinness as a bank worker who oversees bullion deliveries, who spots an opportunity to steal a pile of gold from his employer. Amidst the Ealing comedies, it follows the superior Robert Hamer film Kind Hearts and Coronets, also starring Guinness, this time as a man intent on killing off everyone in his family who comes before him in the line of inheritance. Guinness also plays all of his family members, both men and women. Like Kind Hearts, The Lavendar Hill Mob is lightly class-conscious about the desperation for money in post-war Britain, relies heavily on the immensely talented Guinness’s performance, and is queer-coded.
An exquisite Alec Guinness
Guinness stars as Harry Holland, a comfortable bank worker who wants to retire early by stealing gold. He teams up with a man who lives at his boarding house who melts metal into sculptures, Aflred (Stanley Holloway). The film’s best part is the planning stages of their heist and the budding queer-coded friendship between the soon inseparable, scheming men. They spend so much time together and live together that they resemble a couple more than recent acquiantances united by a common absurd goal. Once the heist gets going, the film can drag a bit and doesn’t make sense. But it’s all worth it for a scene where Harry must pretend he’s been kidnapped and tied up (very poorly) and help the cops find him in this not-so-great disarray.
During the 1980s AIDS pandemic, a militant gay activist group took their name from the film, and it’s interesting to watch the film today with this in mind and how we can read it through a queer lens.
