The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Italian neorealism

DIRECTOR

Vittorio De Sica

WRITER

Cesare Zavattini; Luigi Bartolini (novel)

STARS

Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell, Vittorio Antonucci

BEFORE

1935 French filmmaker Jean Renoir pioneers a realist style using untrained actors in Toni.

1943 Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti directs Ossessione, an early Italian neorealist movie.

AFTER

1959 François Truffaut’s gritty drama The 400 Blows is shot on location in Paris.

Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette) was made using untrained actors and shot on location on the dusty streets of Rome. It has almost no plot, beyond that of the fruitless search by an ordinary man and his son for a stolen bicycle. The movie’s style contrasts sharply with the glossy Hollywood movies of the day, with their sophisticated scripts, lavish sets, and slick acting. Yet the movie packs such an emotional punch and grips so powerfully from first to last that it is regarded as one of the most important movies of the post-World War II era. It influenced generations of young filmmakers, who see capturing real life, rather than producing a neatly turned plot, as the object of their work.

"While Hollywood may sometimes deal with these facts by analogy, the Italians deal with the facts, period."

Arthur Miller
The New York Times, 1950

Cycle of hope

Adapted for the screen by Cesare Zavattini from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the movie focuses on hard-up father Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), who finds a job after a long period without work. To do the job, he needs a bicycle, and must redeem his old bicycle from the pawn shop, Antonio’s wife (Lianella Carell) must pawn the family’s only sheets. Despite this, husband and wife are overjoyed at the prospect of him earning at last. But while Antonio is up a ladder on his first day at work, sticking posters up around Rome, the bicycle is stolen by a young thief.

Taking his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) with him, Antonio embarks on a desperate hunt to recover his bicycle. With the aid of friends, they scour the local Porta Portese market, which is infamous for selling parts of broken bicycles, until finally, through a mix of determination and luck, Antonio spots the thief and pursues him into a brothel. The thief’s family and friends furiously protest the culprit’s innocence, and a policeman admits there is nothing that can be done without proof. In desperation, Antonio himself steals a bike, but is quickly caught. Only the kindness of its owner, after catching sight of the distressed Bruno, saves Antonio from prison. The movie closes with one of the most heart-rending sequences in cinema, as the little boy holds hands with his humiliated father.

For Antonio, his bicycle means he is a part of the world of work, and a source of pride for his son.

A universal story

The brutally simple story of The Bicycle Thief recounts one man’s day of misfortune—one of countless similar days occurring around the world. Yet the realism of its narrow focus has a message that is universal—for those struggling to make a livelihood in an unfair world, a minor crime, such as the theft of a bicycle, assumes the scale of a great tragedy. For some critics, it is not a political movie, because, like Chaplin’s City Lights, it offers no solutions—just the transformation of a victim into a tragic hero. For others, this is what makes it a true socialist movie, because it depicts the devastating consequences of leaving people to sink or swim alone. Even before Antonio’s bicycle has been stolen, a beggar foreshadows his later, troubled, situation: “I mind my own business, I bother nobody,” he says, “and what do I get? Trouble.”

Toward realism

The Bicycle Thief is often considered the high point of Italian neorealism. In cinema, the neorealist movement was a reaction against the so-called white telephone Italian movies of the 1930s, which depicted the frivolous lives of the rich, characterized by the white telephones seen in their gilded homes—movies such as I Will Love You Always (T’amerò sempre, 1933), that, while not overt tools of propaganda, portrayed an image of prosperity that implicitly endorsed Italy’s Fascist regime.

It was not only in Italy that filmmakers tried to break from the milieu of high society. Chaplin attempted it in Modern Times (1936) in Hollywood. But Italian neorealists went further. They did not simply focus on the poor; they also wanted to make movies in a new way that would show the reality of people’s lives as they were lived.

Neorealism took the director’s camera away from the set and out onto location. The goal was to capture real life, and part of the brilliance of The Bicycle Thief’ cinematography in particular is the sense it gives of a world that is continuing beyond the frame—by briefly following incidents away from the main characters, or including real life going on in the background of a frame. To strip away the artificiality of studio movies, neorealist directors often cast untrained actors, as Vittorio De Sica did in The Bicycle Thief. Enzo Staiola, the boy who plays Bruno with such tough and emotional directness, was spotted by the director in the crowd watching him film while on location.

Bruno watches his father anxiously as he sits, despondent, on the roadside, all hopes of a new life shattered.

“You live and you suffer. To hell with it. You want a pizza?”

Antonio Ricci / The Bicycle Thief

Lasting influence

Italian neorealism had already been championed by directors such as Luchino Visconti, with his 1943 masterpiece Ossessione. Yet what gives De Sica’s movie in particular its lasting power is the magnificence of its filmmaking. The sweep, design, and movement of its black-and-white photography as it follows Antonio and Bruno on their quest give an epic quality that engrosses the viewer in their lives. Directors such as Ken Loach and Satyajit Ray have cited De Sica’s movie as the most important influence on their careers. Such was its impact on its release that it was hard for innovative filmmakers not to think in terms of real streets, snatches of life, and ordinary people as the stuff of cinema. In the years that followed, movements such as the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) in France and the “kitchen sink” dramas of the UK marked a shift in filmmaking toward this more naturalistic and candid approach.

"This is poverty’s authentic sting: banal and horrible loss of dignity."

Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian, 2008

On its release in Italy, the movie met with some hostility for its negative portrayal of the country. However, it received great reviews around the rest of the world.

Born in 1901 to a poor family, Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, Italy, working as an office boy to support his family. He got his first movie part at just 17. His good looks and natural screen presence soon turned him into a matinee idol. When he met writer Cesare Zavattini, De Sica became a serious director and a leading exponent of Italian neorealist movie. With Zavattini, he made Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief, both heart-breaking studies of postwar poverty in Italy that won special Oscars in years before the foreign movie category was established. After the box-office disaster of relentlessly bleak Umberto D. (1952), De Sica returned to lighter movies, such as a trilogy of romantic comedies Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963), and to acting. He died in 1974.

1948 The Bicycle Thief

1952 Umberto D.

1963 Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

What else to watch: The Kid (1921) ✵ Rome, Open City (1945) ✵ Shoeshine (1946) ✵ Force of Evil (1948) ✵ Pather Panchali (1955) ✵ Kes (1969) ✵ Slumdog Millionaire (2008) ✵ The Kid with a Bike (2011)