After watching The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D and having been so impressed by those films I secured a copy of this. Unfortunately, this fell way short of those other two both in style and content. Why this has received such praise is beyond me. Unlike the former films which are slow paced, meditative and draw you in this just rockets along at a pace and I found it hard to follow. The dialogue comes at you like machine gun fire and I found it really hard to read the subtitles fast enough to keep pace with the story. The acting was totally unconvincing too. It reminded one of more of the dramatic hammy renditions given by Italian football players falling down in phony pain trying to convince the ref to give a free kick. I wasn't convinced at all. It left me cold.
Review of Shoeshine
