Bicycle Thieves

"There's a cure for anything... except death"

A tale of tenacity and desperation in the downtrodden streets of post-war Italy, Bicycle Thieves is considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made. In this humble film, one man and his son spend a day searching for their stolen bike, an object that represents gainful employment in a poverty-stricken city. The mode is one of realism, and Vittorio De Sica's film is a highly influential entry in the Italian neo-realist movement - a post-war period of cinema started by the director Roberto Rosselini a few years earlier, where cinema shifted focus to and themes of social justice and the concerns and plights of the common man. The point of this new cinema was to eschew the glamour and artiface of Hollywood-style movie-making in favour of increased naturalism.

De Sica achieves this naturalism with several techniques. Foremost amongst these is perhaps the casting of non-actors in the main roles... De Sica originally contemplated Cary Grant or Henry Fonda for the role of Antonio before deciding on using amateurs. I don't think it would've been anywhere near as effective with stars of that calibre, the key to De Sica's illusion of realism is the suspension of disbelief, somethingthat would've been much harder to attain with the involvement of recognisable actors.

Another effective technique is the director's attention to detail... for instance, the roads remain wet after a period of rain, and the location-filming features hundreds of extras all going about their business as if this were a documentary about Rome in the 1940s. There are also long sections of the film that take place in real time, making the it feel like it isn't working off a script with constructed scenes - a lot of the time it's more a case of the camera just unintrusively following these characters.

Bicycle Thieves looks deceptively simple on the surface. True, the film is just about one man searching for his stolen bike as time runs out for him to claim a job (a precious commodity in this era of Europe's history; where Italy has been sucked dry by the war to end all wars), but it's also a story of social injustice and the value of things. Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) puts his son through poor weather and exposes him to various dangers in his myopic quest, and is even reduced to hitting the boy as the bike becomes an overriding symbol in his mind. These two characters are really put through the ringer, with Antonio beginning to question his perspective and only holding the most tenuous grip on his status as a responsible citizen. The film is, inevitably, about his transformation from the lowest part of the working class to criminal... in a strictly Catholic nation like Italy it must've been shocking for Italian audiences to see Antonio acting so disrespectfully inside a church, grilling an old man relentlessly for information about his bike while the clergy try to deliver their mass for the poor. Soon he resorts to vigilante justice, placing himself outside of the law, and it's only a small step from here for him to turn into the same kind of villain he himself has spent the best part of the film hunting.

When Antonio finds his thief it shouldn't, by this point, come as a surprise that the criminal is worse off than he is. Antonio has tried to do the right thing but the system and society is against him, the inequality of wealth in this society has created a criminal class. Poverty begets crime, and it becomes less a question of morality and more a point of giving in to one's survival instinct. The point where Antonio steals a bike for himself (only to be promptly caught) is a devastating payoff to a slow and meaningful construction of a detailed picture. It's both horrible and englightening, and as a lesson in reality and the mechanics of criminal origins, it couldn't be more convincing. If only all education could be administered with such emotional punch!

DIRECTOR: Vittorio De Sica
WRITER/SOURCE: Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Gerardo Guerrieri, Oreste Biancholi and Adolfo Franci. Based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini.
KEY ACTORS: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel Bicycle Thieves by painter, poet and writer Luigi Bartolini.
- Bicycle Thieves has inspired several other films in world cinema about poverty: Beijing Bicycle, Pather Panchali, Two Acres of Land, Polladhavan,
- The Italian neorealism movement started with the film Rome: Open City. Other early examples include Shoeshine, Paisa and Germany: Year Zero.
- Neorealism was partially satirised in the '80s film The Icicle Thief.
- For more on poverty in the big city, see Umberto D, The Crowd, Messenger, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Killer of Sheep.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Honorary Award. Nominated for Best Screenplay.
BAFTAs - won Best Film.
Golden Globes - won Best Foreign Film.