Bicycle Thieves

"It would be no exaggeration to say that Bicycle Thieves is the story of a walk through Rome by a father and his son."
-André Bazin


Veritá e Poesia (truth and poetry) was the battle cry of Italian neorealist cinema, a development forged in the crucible of prostrate post-war Italy. "Life as it is" would replace the idealized and star-driven studio films of the Mussolini years and provide an alternative to imported Hollywood fare. Perhaps the fullest and finest expression of this school is Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves "Ladri di Biciclette", and Criterion has done their usual superb job in making it available on DVD so a new generation of viewers can discover anew it's power and poetry.

Neorealism self-consciously turned the typical action-oriented protagonist on it's head, instead condescending to document the travails of the common man, especially the common man victimized by societal and economic forces beyond his control. European cinema has always been more entangled with politics than it's American cousin. In post-war Italy political parties of the left and right, as well as the Catholic Church, published dueling film journals castigating or praising the latest releases based on their supposed ideological biases. Not surprisingly, neorealism became associated with left-wing politics. The hugely influential French critic André Bazin, writing in 1949, called it "the only valid Communist film of the whole past decade" even though it has no explicit (or even implicit) ideological message.

In fact, it has no explicit plot. Basically nothing happens beyond the seemingly insignificant: Antonio Ricci, a newly employed poster-hanger, has his bicycle stolen and spends a day fruitlessly searching for it with his son Bruno tagging along. Bazin again: "the whole story would not deserve two lines in a stray dog column." Yet, for those with eyes to see there are layers and layers of significance in every frame of this masterpiece. Part of the neorealist's effort to do away with the typical "man of action" was to do away with the convention of star-driven movies in favor of casting untrained actors. The three leads in Bicycle Thieves are played by a factory worker, a journalist, and a boy that De Sica saw walking in the street one day. The only star in this film is Rita Hayworth, who appears on the poster we see Antonio Ricci rather haplessly pasting up just before it all goes wrong.


The naturalness of the actors fit with the naturalistic style -- no studio sets and almost none of the typical moviemaking artifice (De Sica did bring in the fire brigade to manufacture the rain in one famous sequence). These tactics were enormously shocking for audiences of 1948, and later films like The 400 Blows, Breathless and Wings of Desire seem inconceivable without, at least, the stylistic influence of Bicycle Thieves and Italian neorealism in general. Another homage of sorts is Robert Altman's use of Bicycle Thieves in his darkly comedic take on Hollywood, The Player. You may recall that the unfortunate, proletarian writer played by Vincent D'Onofrio spends his last night on Earth taking in a late-night showing of De Sica's anti-Hollywood ode to the common man.

One wonders what happened to Antonio and Bruno. Did they ever recover the bicycle? Will Maria, the longsuffering wife and mother, have to pawn off another valued possession to keep the family afloat? Earlier she pawns the family's bedsheets so Antonio can get the bicycle out of hock in the first place. This is a world where the poor steal from the poor simply to survive, and an item as banal as a bicycle becomes the most important thing in the world. We'll never know. The film ends abruptly, but perfectly, as Bruno takes his father's hand and they trudge down their own Via Dolorosa into filmic immortality.