Description
A beautiful, simple story of a man in post-war Rome who needs his bicycle in order to work at his job. No sooner does he retrieve it from pawn, then it is stolen. The heartwrenching search teaches the man and his son much about the meaning of life and just how far we will go when pushed to the edge. Winner of a special Academy Award.Amazon.com essential video
Vittorio De Sica's remarkable 1947 drama of desperation and survival in Italy's devastating post-war depression earned a special Oscar for its affecting power. Shot in the streets and alleys of Rome, De Sica uses the real-life environment of contemporary life to frame his moving drama of a desperate father whose new job delivering cinema posters is threatened when a street thief steals his bicycle. Too poor to buy another, he and his son take to the streets in an impossible search for his bike. Cast with nonactors and filled with the real street life of Rome, this landmark film helped define the Italian neorealist approach with its mix of real life details, poetic imagery, and warm sentimentality. De Sica uses the wandering pair to witness the lives of everyday folks, but ultimately he paints a quiet, poignant portrait of father and son, played by nonprofessionals Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, whose understated performances carry the heart of the film. De Sica and scenarist Cesare Zavattini also collaborated on Shoeshine, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D, all classics in the neorealist vein, but none of which approach the simple poetry and quiet power achieved in The Bicycle Thief. --Sean AxmakerAmazon.com
Vittorio De Sica's remarkable 1947 drama of desperation and survival in Italy's devastating post-war depression earned a special Oscar for its affecting power. Shot in the streets and alleys of Rome, De Sica uses the real-life environment of contemporary life to frame his moving drama of a desperate father whose new job delivering cinema posters is threatened when a street thief steals his bicycle. Too poor to buy another, he and his son take to the streets in an impossible search for his bike. Cast with nonactors and filled with the real street life of Rome, this landmark film helped define the Italian neorealist approach with its mix of real life details, poetic imagery, and warm sentimentality. De Sica uses the wandering pair to witness the lives of everyday folks, but ultimately he paints a quiet, poignant portrait of father and son, played by nonprofessionals Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, whose understated performances carry the heart of the film. De Sica and scenarist Cesare Zavattini also collaborated on Shoeshine, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D, all classics in the neorealist vein, but none of which approach the simple poetry and quiet power achieved in The Bicycle Thief. --Sean AxmakerAlso Recommended...
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Who Is The Thief?The Italian neorealist filmmakers were left-wing political philosophers, filled with moral indignation and opposed to the Fascist regimes of both the Nazis and Mussolini. Rejecting the escapism of pre-war Italian cinema, they were inspired by a resurgence of a realist aesthetic in Italian literature. They believed that non-professional actors filmed in real locations would create a revolutionary cinema of truth and ideas. There was also a practical consideration, since money was scarce, film and equipment were hard to come by and the studios were in ruins, like the rest of Rome. Devastated by World War II, Italy was occupied in defeat by Allied troops. Poverty was suffocating, and unemployment rife. The poor workman in The Bicycle Thief or more accurately translated, Bicycle Thieves needs his modest transportation in order to continue posting the image of the insanely unattainable Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Vittorio De Sica used the neorealist philosophies to make what was surely the most universally praised movie produced anywhere on the planet during the first decade after World War II.
De Sica had been a matinee idol in the 1930s, "the Italian Cary Grant" in what were called the "white telephone films" as Italian cinema attempted to recreate the gloss of Hollywood moviemaking. He had started out as an accountant, but his father insisted he abandon the profession for show business, in what Martin Scorcese calls in Mi Viaggia in Italia "surely a first in the history of the world." Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini had discovered a book he thought director De Sica would find appealing after his earlier neorealist success, Shoeshine. Little from the novel migrated to the screenplay, since the main character was a disgruntled and supercilious artist who opines the most reactionary prejudices about the poor and who owns another bicycle when one is stolen. De Sica's vision synthesized two of his idols, King Vidor, whose silent film, The Crowd, dealt with the universal needs and desires of the working poor, and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin himself had grown up in bitter poverty and films like A Dog's Life and especially, The Kid evoke the universality of being desperate and broke. Chaplin was a great admirer of De Sica's as well. Appropriately, French film critic Andre Bazin concluded that "the Neopolitan charm of De Sica becomes, thanks to the cinema, the most sweeping message of love that our times have heard since Chaplin."
De Sica's heroes, in his great neorealist trilogy, Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D are not unique or heroic compared to other men, but tell one story of countless stories. His indispensable scriptwriter and collaborator for all three films was Cesare Zavattini. Shoeshine, like Roberto Rossellini's groundbreaking Open City, had been a failure in Italy, where film critics and audiences alike were contemptuous of filmmakers who showed the underside of Italian society. Shoeshine won an American Oscar for Best Foreign Film (as would The Bicycle Thief) but was denounced in the Italian press as "stracci all'estero."
De Sica struggled to raise the capital for The Bicycle Thief. American producer David O. Selznick expressed a desire to supply the funding on the condition that Cary Grant be cast as the lead. Eventually, the budget was raised from several Italian sources, and the film was appropriately cast. The Bicycle Thief was eventually re-released in Italy following international acclaim, but Italian audiences were reluctant to embrace a cinema that emphasized the post-war woes of poverty, hunger, rubble, housing shortages and faces of the suffering children as embodied by neorealism's stubbornly drab non-professional casts. De Sica's tenderness in dealing with a set of complicated emotions between father and son create what many consider the peak achievement of neorealism. The film's timeline suggests one resonant in Italian Catholic culture, Friday through Sunday at dusk, echoing the death of Christ on Good Friday and the resurrection, as well as Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
The city of Rome, far from the tourist's playground shown in a film like Roman Holiday, made only a few years later, is an endless nightmare of twisting streets and shabby plazas. Lamberto Maggiorani brought his sons to audition for the role of Bruno, but was himself singled out of the crowd and cast as the father. Despairing of finding the right child, De Sica began filming with Maggiorani, attracting an unwelcome crowd. "I noticed amongst them an odd-looking child with a round face and a weird nose and large expressive eyes. It was Enzo Staiola. "I felt our Neapolitan Saint Jannarius had sent him to me." Indeed, it was proof that everything was alright...that first day's shooting of Bicycle Thieves was one of the most satisfying of my life." The close-up of Staiola's face towards the end, as he watches his father do something he thought he would never see, is one of the most heart-breaking images in cinema. Enzo Staiola made a handful of other films; you may have noticed his unmistakable face as a busboy earlier this season in The Barefoot Contessa, filmed in Italy in 1954.
De Sica's understanding of the acting profession provides a sensitive touch with his untrained cast, sometimes lacking in other neorealist films. De Sica said, "The man in the street, particularly if he is directed by someone who is himself an actor, is raw material that can be molded at will. It is sufficient to explain to him those few tricks of the trade which may be useful to him from time to time; to show him the technical and in the best sense of the term, of course, the histrionic means of expression at his disposal. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for a fully trained actor to forget his profession. It is far easier to teach it, to hand on just the little that is needed, just what will suffice for the purpose at hand."
What this means, in effect is, like Chaplin, he acted each part himself, and expected his actors to copy him scrupulously. So, unlike the actor who directs himself in a starring role, all the actors here are, in fact, De Sica. Far from being improvised, The Bicycle Thief required careful preparation. The actual theft of the bicycle was filmed simultaneously by six cameras, opening up the criticism that the film, rather than simulating documentary is actually a work of art, as if that is a failing rather than a strength - not "pure cinema." Its influence is felt most keenly these days in many of the films coming out of Iran, which use non-professionals in both a portrait of what to Americans is a truly foreign way of life, but using the simple humanity of the stories to promote social change, and social acceptance.
Cesare Zavattini wrote: "Neorealism it is also said, does not offer solutions. The end of a neorealist film is particularly inconclusive. I cannot accept this at all. With regard to my own work, the characters and situations in films for which I have written the scenario, they remain unresolved from a practical point of view simply because 'this is reality.' But every moment of the film is, in itself, a continuous answer to some question. It is not the concern of an artist to propound solutions. It is enough, and quite a lot, I should say, to make an audience feel the need, the urgency for them. In any case, what films do offer solutions? 'Solutions' in this sense, if they are offered, are sentimental ones, resulting from the superficial way in which problems have been faced. At least, in my work, I leave the solution to the audience."
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A great film!0 out of 0 people found this review helpful:
A Timeless Film1 out of 6 people found this review helpful:
All Emotion, Little PlotThe main problem I have is with the plot. Okay, so it's called "The Bicycle Thief," so you know that a bike gets stolen. I thought the movie would show perspectives of both the thief and the victim perhaps, or that there is more to the thief than just stealing bicycles. Well, you never get to learn much about the thief. I won't give any more away, but basically the plot goes nowhere. Nothing much happens until basically the very end and even then I found it anticlimactic. The ending is totally unresolved. Basically, I spent the whole movie feeling anxious for the main character, gritting my teeth hoping things turn out for the best, and after and hour-and-a-half all I got for my nervous hope was a screen saying "fine." It's not just that the ending doesn't turn out for the best, it doesn't turn out for the worst either. It just isn't satisfying and it didn't make me stand up and say "Whoa. That was incredibly deep!"
All that said, maybe the point of this film is to linger on the details of everyday life, rather than address what is ostensibly the plot. If you are interested in something that primarily glorifies the mundane details of life, then you may enjoy this.
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A Symbolic Movie That Fits in This CenturyAntonio and Bruno both ride their bicycles to work. Unfortunately children Bruno's age had to scrape money so families like his can put food in their mouths and clothes on their back. While Antonio is plastering posters on the concrete walls, an unsuspecting passserby steals his bike. Antonio and his son are on a quest to look for the bicyle that he needs to work. Without his bicyle, he can't work, and without work, he isn't able to provide for his family.
The Bicycle Thief is a sad story because people are struggling to survive the aftermath of WWII. The bike that was stolen could have been sold for parts or needed for transportation and work. The search for Antonio's bike is futile and hopeless. No one seems to know where his bicycle has gone to. As father and son search for the bike they see the faces of despair and misery at the mission church and enjoy a nice dinner they can't afford.
Sixty years after the movie came out, The Bicycle Thief is a reminder of what is currently happening in our own backyard. Even with the advancement of technology, we can still fall victim to unemployment, homelessness, and economic instability. But this movie does offer a glimmer of hope.
Listmania!
- Movies Watched in 2010 Part 4
- Best films of 1948-1949 (in order)
- Cycling Advocate's Top Picks
- 1949 Academy Award Winners & Nominees
- Foreign Films for Children Ages 8-12
- some of Todd's favorite movies
- 25 must see films
- Top Movies of 1949
- Directors that Missed the Cut/Too Artsy for "Greatest" List (Part I)
- Best Film School Movies, Part 1