I adore a hundred scenes from this film and it captures the rhythms and sorrows of the Italian peasants who no longer owned their own land but were virtual serfs. Till the ending I would have given this10 stars easily. The detailed and loving and closely observed world of the film is a treasure in itself. The color is soft, subtle and dreamy. The no-actors are jaw-droppingly good. (Spoiler alert) Now the classic peasant is if anything resourceful, sparing and wastes nothing. So my credulity goes OUT the window when the father cuts down an entire tree to make one wooden shoe for his son so that his son can go to school AND that tree is one of a very long avenue of venerable, trained and neatly spaced trees belonging to the landowner and that entire landscape of trees is ruined by the destruction of one tree my next thought after the waste of an entire tree is that the peasant is insensitive to the simple harmony of the regularly spaced avenue of trees that is part of his own life as well. I am being kind giving this eight stars out of ten. When a poor peasant and his family are thrown out of their homes and I, in the audience are cheering their departure - the filmmaker has screwed up his message.

This is one of the most moving films I have watched. It depicts the lives of several peasant families living in Italy around (I guess) 1900. The movie includes beautiful tales of human struggle in everyday life. It shows very simply and clearly how we human beings find ourselves puny in a world whose unexpected events we cannot control and how we try to cope with them: we work harder, we use our ingenuity, and when they all seem not to work we ask for divine intervention or resort to crime. The movie had a very sad end, which brought me very close to crying, but it also includes tales of love and sacrifice for your family.Although the movie shows the sort of peasant life that is almost impossible to find today anywhere in the world (I mean in terms of the feudal order dominating the lives of the people in the movie), the dilemmas and challenges that the characters of the movie are faced with are very common to human nature and it is very interesting to see how the characters try to resolve them. The main message of the movie, to me as someone who was born in a poor family in a developing country, is that although the nature of human condition has not changed since the dawn of history, most people live their lives and face this predicament (the human predicament) in a comfort far greater than our ancestors 100 years ago had. And this is something we all should be thankful for.

I'm Italian and I grown up with the charming stories of my grandparents, about the works in the countryside, the long walks for go to school and to the church, the frugal diet, the attempts of cheat to the bailiff (il fattore) and to the owner (il possidente), the killing of the pigs (la pista, that I saw more times in my childhood), the meeting between young men and women... this movie is a perfect reconstruction of their stories. I have some books too, written by old men and women of my region lived at the beginning of the century, and all the scenes in this masterpiece are written in these books. Some scenes could seems cruel to the eyes of a citizen, and the seven minutes where you can see the killing of the pig would be impossible to make in this century (the animalists would became crazy), but this is history, and make more sweet the history doesn't have sense. This is the history of Italy, history that you can find yet in some part of the peninsula, and watching "L'albero degli zoccoli" can help you in understanding better my country. It isn't an action movie, and if you are looking for sci-fi or action be aware that even a masterpiece like this one could be boring to wrong eyes.

This starts off as a well made, nice Italian film. But shortly after its first 20 minutes, there is this scene of a pig getting mutilated ALIVE. That is something I can't stand watching. As if it wasn't enough what they do to these and other poor animals in real life, they also did it in the name of a film? And knowing that the animal was gutted for real makes me cringe even more. So much cruelty on the animals, makes me wanna cry and feel ashamed of being human and eating meat.This horrible part with the pig nearly made me stop watching the movie right there, but I still managed to watch the rest of the thing. After this awful scene, the movie improves a lot and becomes generally good but later it gets somewhat boring and dull. Besides, it's very long (3 hours). Even if the whole movie was good or even excellent, the pig scene alone prevents me from liking it or recommend it.This film has still some clues from the popular Italian neorealism: it's a take on the life of the poor ones and the cast consists in real farmers and locals instead of actors.Apparently this is Al Pacino's favorite film. He didn't directly say it was his favorite, however when questioned what was his favorite film, he revealed that he «always liked 'The Tree Of Wooden Clogs'».