Sometimes regarded as his first masterpiece, the film follows two shoeshine boys who get into trouble with the police after trying to find the money to buy a horse.

One day Giuseppe's older brother, Attilio, visits the boys and tells them that Panza (a fence) has some work for them.

They accuse the fortune teller of handling stolen goods, and finding Giuseppe and Pasquale, force them out and pretend to take them into custody.

The police accuse the boys of stealing 700,000 lira from the fortune teller's home, which obviously was stolen by Panza and Attilio, posing as the policemen.

The con men send Giuseppe a parcel filled with food and he shares it with his fellow inmates in his own cell.

[5] The film's use of non-professional actors, on-location shooting, and a focus on the struggles of ordinary people were characteristic of the neorealist style.

The performances of the two young leads, Rinaldo Smordoni (Giuseppe) and Franco Interlenghi (Pasquale), were particularly lauded for their naturalism and emotional depth.

Commercially, the film performed well in Italy, drawing large audiences and becoming a significant box office success.

Its critical acclaim and Oscar win likely contributed to its continued success in international markets, further establishing Italian neorealism as a significant cinematic movement.

Pauline Kael, in a 1961 review published, commented: "Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.

We receive something more naked, something that pours out of the screen...Shoeshine has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in film works that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium — if Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty...This tragic study of the corruption of innocence is intense, compassionate, and above all, humane.