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While certainly best-known for Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica’s vast, varied body of work is worth diving into. This June, those in NYC can experience quite a taste of it with four films by the director at Film at Lincoln Center’s Sophia Loren retrospective, immediately followed by the release of the new 4K restoration of Shoeshine at Film Forum. Restored by The Film Foundation and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata, in association with Orium S.A. Restoration, the new trailer from Janus Films has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “One of the greatest achievements in the cinematic revolution known as Italian neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine stands as a timeless masterpiece of trenchant social observation and stirring emotional humanism. In postwar Rome, street kids Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) shine the shoes of American servicemen in hopes of saving enough money to purchase a beautiful horse.

No, it’s not the story of the 18th President of the United States. Kirk Douglas must have been a big hit in Rome, starring in one of the first and best of the Italo epic ‘classics,’ before the musclemen cornered the market. Homer’s tale of the husband who took ten years to come back from Troy is given real star power, a splendid production and best of all, an intelligent script. This disc looks a lot better than the ragged earlier DVD, plus it offers a superior Italian language soundtrack. And don’t forget Gary Teetzel’s recommendation: as an adaptation of The Odyssey, it’s right up there with O Brother Where Art Thou!

Ulysses

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1954 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 94 104 117 min. / Street Date November 17, 2020 / Ulisse / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Silvana Mangano, Anthony Quinn, Rossana Podestà, Jacques Dumesnil, Daniel Ivernel, Sylvie, Franco Interlenghi,...

Mubi's retrospective Fellini at 100 is showing April 29 - July 13, 2020 in many countries.As someone raised in a town of 500, itching to escape to the nearest city for the best part of my childhood, Fellini’s characters have always felt familiar. “His films are a small-town boy’s dream of the big city,” Orson Welles told Playboy in a 1967 interview, and indeed, dotting them are heroes and eccentrics who either share the director’s provincial origins or dance through the frame with the stupor of perpetual strangers in strange lands. “He’s right,” Fellini said about Welles’s remark, “and that’s no insult.” For that naïve awe is the source of the ageless charm of Fellini’s whole cinema. If the films he made over a career spanning five decades still feel so alive and vibrant, it’s because they nurture the same childlike wonder of their protagonists, and their inordinate lust for life.

This remake of a pre-Code classic adds amazing European locations, glorious Technicolor and entire armies on the move, yet doesn’t improve on the original. Producer David O. Selznick secured Rock Hudson to play opposite Jennifer Jones, but the chemistry is lacking. Why did the man spend twenty years trying to top Gone With the Wind?

A Farewell to Arms

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1957 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 152 min. / Street Date April 18, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jennifer Jones, Rock Hudson, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge, Elaine Stritch.

Cinematography: Oswald Morris, Piero Portalupi

Production Designer: Alfred Junge

Art Direction: Mario Garbuglia

Film Editors: John M. Foley, Gerard J. Wilson

Original Music: Mario Nascimbene

Written by Ben Hecht from a play by Laurence Stallings from a novel by Ernest Hemingway

Produced by David O. Selznick

Directed by Charles Vidor

What happens when a major Hollywood producer thinks he has all the answers?...

Italian film and stage actor best known for his role in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni

The Italian film and stage actor Franco Interlenghi, who has died aged 83, will be remembered for two masterpieces of postwar Italian cinema. He was the elder of the two Roman urchins in Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and went on to be the semiautobiographical Moraldo in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni – big calves, or loafers (1953). In this he played the youngest of the band of provincial layabouts and the only good-looking one, who at the end of the film decides to quit the Adriatic seaside resort, intended to be Rimini (though it was not actually filmed in that town, Fellini’s birthplace, which he left for Rome in search of a more interesting future). This character would evolve into Marcello in La Dolce Vita, played by Marcello Mastroianni, with whom Interlenghi had acted...

I vinti

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Written by Michelangelo Antonioni, Giorgio Bassani, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Diego Fabbri, Roger Nimier, Turi Vasile

Italy/France, 1953

In 1953, Michelangelo Antonioni directed the episodic I vinti (The Vanquished), quite possibly the least “Antonioni-esque” feature he ever made (the roster of credited writers above is some indication of the impersonal nature of the film). Comprised of three vignettes about troubled youth in France, Italy, and England, the film at times comes across almost as a moralizing after school special, whereby it attempts to draw attention to the desperate and destructive state of young people during this period. But while the film’s obvious didacticism is its least laudable characteristic, I vinti is nevertheless a fascinating examination of this “burnt out generation.”

These young people were just children during World War II. They’ve grown up in a time of upheaval and violence, and now as...

Michelangelo Antonioni’s third feature, I Vinti, translating as The Vanquished, gets a Blu-ray upgrade from Raro Video, serving as a definite collector’s item for aficionados of the director. A rather stilted and stuffy moral tale about lost youth, it’s a title championed by some as serving as an index for the turning point in Italian cinema, which was heavily influenced in the post-war period by a Catholic revival. Certainly, this is the auteur still struggling to find his stride, and the title most notably serves as an influential precursor to his most celebrated work, 1966’s Blow-Up. Beyond this, it’s a rather lukewarm trio of segments based on ‘ripped-from-the headline’ scenarios concerning privileged youths and their apathetic ambivalence toward their fellow man, supposedly caused from growing up through war.

Bouncing from France, to Italy, and finally, London, England, we get a series of disturbing acts of violence...

In 1946, Italian director Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief) released his first major work Shoeshine, a neorealist film about two boys in Rome who get arrested for a crime they didn’t commit. The film is beautiful, deep and thought-provoking. It won an honorary Oscar the following year causing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create the Best Foreign Language Film category. This cinematic milestone is an absolute treasure and now yours to own on DVD.

Shoeshine follows friends Giuseppe (Finaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi), two young boys living in Rome shining shoes for money. They test-ride horses in their spare time and both have a dream of one day owning their own horse. They live life as mere peasants, hungry and dirty shining shoes day in and day out to feed themselves and to own day become owners of an equine. Their dream of owning...

The recipient of an honorary Academy Award and from Vittorio De Sica, director of The Bicycle Thief, Shoeshine is the heartbreaking tale of two brothers growing up on the street and sent to prison for a crime they didn't commit. Shoeshine stars Franco Interlenghi and Rinaldo Smordoni as the young shoe shining brothers Pasquale and Giuseppe. It's a beautiful film from an incredible director, and Entertainment One released it on DVD on May 17th. We've got one copy to giveaway, so if you want to win it, this could be your lucky day.

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Raro Video U.S. will release a restored version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s (Blow-up) 1953 I Vinti, one of the Italian master’s first feature films, on DVD on March 29.

Passion and murder collide in Michelangelo Antonioni's I Vinti.

I Vinti is a unique triptych film revolving around three murders, one taking place in Paris, another in Rome, and another in London. All of the perpetrators are affluent youths, each killing for dubious motives. In the France segment, a group of adolescents kill for money, even though they don’t need it; in the London segment, a poet uncovers a woman’s body and tries to profit from the discovery; and in the Italian segment, a student becomes caught up in a smuggling ring, with deadly results.

The film is told with Antonioni’s trademark splintered chronology, which weaves multiple story lines, in this case. The director remains one of...

'Dostoevskian' French actor with an aura of tormented youth

With his emaciated but hypnotically handsome face and lithe body, the French actor Laurent Terzieff, who has died of respiratory infection aged 75, graced the stage and films for more than half a century. There was always an aura of tormented youth about Terzieff which he carried into the classic roles of his maturity such as Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV (1989) and Shakespeare's Richard II (1991). His perfect diction and rhythmic precision made his rendering of Jean Cocteau's narration of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex in Bob Wilson's production at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1996 particularly exciting.

Terzieff's special talents were used by many of the great theatre producers of the day: Jean-Louis Barrault, Peter Brook, Roger Planchon, Maurice Garrel, Roger Blin and André Barsacq. He also directed dozens of plays, many at the Théâtre du Lucernaire in Montparnasse. Paradoxically, given his tormented persona as an actor,...

Distinguished Italian director noted for art documentaries

Though the Italian media prefer to remember him as one of the inventors of the first popular programme of television commercials – called Carosello (Carousel) and broadcast each evening at peak viewing time on the only channel of the Italian public broadcaster Rai in the mid-1950s – Luciano Emmer, who has died aged 91, was a distinguished Italian cinema director. He directed a dozen features during 70 years as a film-maker, the first of which, Domenica d'Agosto (Sunday in August), became an international arthouse hit in 1950. He was, however, best known for scores of documentaries on art.

Born in Milan, Emmer spent most of his childhood in Venice, where his father was the city's municipal engineer. As a boy, he made good use of his father's free pass to the local cinemas, where his preference was for Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, but he also...

Here’s a list of some of the new DVD and Blu-ray releases this week we’re particularly interested in. Plus, some old favorites (and not so favorites) coming out this week for the first time on Blu-ray.

Movies

Race to Witch Mountain ~ Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, AnnaSophia Robb, and Alexander Ludwig (DVD and Blu-ray)

The Soloist ~ Robert Downey, Jr., Jamie Foxx, Catherine Keener, and Stephen Root (DVD and Blu-ray)

Obsessed ~ Beyoncé Knowles, Idris Elba, Ali Larter, and Jerry O’Connell (DVD and Blu-ray)

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 ~ Tommy Lee Jones, Brian Dowling, Vic Gatto, and Frank Champi (DVD and Blu-ray)

My Cousin Vinny ~ Joe Pesci, Ralph Macchio and Marisa Tomei (Blu-ray)

Mutant Chronicles ~ Thomas Jane, Ron Perlman, and John Malkovich (DVD and Blu-ray)

The Tigger Movie ~ John Hurt, Ken Sansom, Kath Soucie, and John Fiedler (DVD and Blu-ray)

Ulysses ~ Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Franco Interlenghi, and Daniel Ivernel (DVD)

Fragments ~ Marshall Allman,...