"The cinema is unequalled for revealing all the basic truths about a nation." Italian neorealist director Alberto Lattuada
The Bicycle Thief, directed by Vittorio de Sica, was nominated for a Best Writing Oscar at the 1950 Academy Awards.
The film follows working-class Italian Antonio Ricci and his young son as they scour post-World War II Rome for a bicycle stolen from Ricci just hours after he purchased it. Without his bicycle, Ricci has no prospect of finding work in a city teeming with masses of unemployed Italians dehumanized by the economic crisis. Ricci’s desperate hunt eventually turns him into a thief: In the film’s memorable closing sequence, Ricci attempts to steal a bicycle from a struggling worker much like himself.
This scene offers a vivid example of the poverty and desperation of post-war Rome.
This scene offers a vivid example of the poverty and desperation of post-war Rome.
The film’s Italian title, Ladri Di Biciclette, literally translates as The Bicycle Thieves. However, in the late 1940s, the film was shown in the United States as The Bicycle Thief, singular. In his book The Big Screen, the film historian David Thompson argues that the English title downplays the movie’s true political implications: “the way in which theft is the ultimate behavior shared by all the poor in a shattered society.” The softened title reflects the political and ideological forces epitomized by the United States’ anti-communist crusade in post-war Italy.
"The country horrified at the thought of Communist influence suppressed the gentle Marxist interpretation of the title." David Thompson, The Big Screen
In this clip, a crowd of angry Romans engulfs Ricci, illustrating Thompson's argument about the increasingly blurred lines between the personal and the collective.
The Bicycle Thief is a product of the Italian neorealist movement. De Sica, as well as other neorealist directors such as Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini, used film to illustrate profound social issues--war, crime, poverty. The neorealist aesthetic appealed to Italian moviegoers during the country’s dark post-war years. But the advent of the Italian economic miracle, fuelled by American aid, effectively killed the movement, as viewers embraced lighter Hollywood fare. One Italian politician memorably described neorealist films as “dirty laundry that shouldn’t be washed and hung to dry in the open.”
"The question of whether the cinema was or could be ‘unequalled for revealing the basic truths about a nation’...gripped people in many countries after 1945 and amounted to a pressure toward realism." David Thompson, The Big Screen