Bicycle Thieves (1949)

a human voice

During postwar Italy a man seeks a job with great desperation and dire need, to support his family. When he finds one, he needs a bicycle to keep it. In one of those great subtle moments of this fantastic movie, his wife finds the resources to buy him one. Then in a split moment, the bicycle is stolen. The film has an incredible human voice projected into stunning scenes. Arthur Miller, said it best; "It's as if the soul of man had been filmed." In my words; the soul of the creator of this film, reached out with spiritual abandon. November 9, 2008

Well deserving of its "classic" label

Despite this movie's strong placement in the annals of those deemed "classics", I was a bit hesitant to check it out because I'm not the biggest fan of neorealism, and, strangely enough, a lot of my friends with opinions I respect really didn't like it. I've got to say that I'm going to have to side with those who call it a classic this time around. More specifically, I've never before seen a neorealist film I would ever have called "gripping" and I've not seen any neorealist film as good since "Roma, citta operta".

Let me quickly go through some of the myths and the more popular interpretations: it is true that the movie completely revolves around a man and his son searching for the man's stolen bicycle, but it is not true at all that there's nothing else to it. More specifically, it's about the man's relationship with his son as a main theme and an exploration of post-war Rome as subtext. It is true that it has quite a lot of communist themes placed through-out, but honestly those themes are entirely engulfed in the much more personal, tragic aspects of the movie. The more poignant political commentary is in the way the plot works, where people are forced to own property--a certain type of property--in order to get a job and thus get more property. Truly you can't blame the movie for that, because it has a point.

What this movie is really good at is shifting the emotions of the viewers to match those felt by the protagonist Antonio Vicci. The movie quickly establishes the importance of the bicycle and its emotional value to Vicci. The search itself is desperate, but it is given depth by the relationship of Antonio to Bruno, his son. As the two of them share a love for the bike and a need to retrieve it, they also share a shifting and dynamic relationship to each other that runs from full support to quiet alienation and everything in between. The strongest moments in the film are the ones in which their relationship seem the most damaged. The father eventually must depend on the son to share his pain.

In terms of the concept of neorealism itself, it's debatable where this movie fits. The most clear features of it are its focus on class struggle, a taste of the melodrama, and a plot lead on by a simple, singular desire. However, the production values are much higher than the famed "Roma, citta aperta", and at this point de Sica is well established as an auteur working under the awareness of a more popular and mainstream international audience. Genre debates aside, it's a strong film that well deserves its lasting appreciation, no matter how many people find it boring or disagree with its politics.

--PolarisDiB September 26, 2008

Great

Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (Ladri Di Biciclette), made in 1948, in black and white, is one of the all time great films, and, in its Neo-realistic cinema verité simplicity, it shows how utterly creatively bankrupt most filmmaking these days is. And by that I mean worldwide, not just the obvious flaws of the Hollywood crap factory. Lean, spare, poetic- it tells one story, but tells it very well, and that story becomes universal, and is applicable to all people who have ever suffered, or been driven to do desperate things. Its screenplay is deceptively slight, but that does not mean it is not great. Oftentimes, it is assumed that a great screenplay must be witty like Woody Allen films, deep like Ingmar Bergman films, or characteristically complex like Robert Altman films, but great screenplays can also be the antithesis of those things. A great screenplay may be like that in Stanley Kubrick's for 2001: A Space Odyssey, full of symbolism writ large, and on the other hand, it can be like The Bicycle Thief, which is symbolic precisely because it is so intensely personal.
The film is almost pitch perfect from beginning to end, yet, as often happens, something is lost in the translation of its title, Ladri Di Biciclette, which literally means Bicycle Thieves, but in America is known as The Bicycle Thief. The original title is more literally true, as both the `real' thief and Antonio, steal bikes, and it also allows for a deeper look at their differing motivations. When we see the original thief's one room apartment- with mother and two other siblings- we see that he, too, is poor, and we have to wonder if he is Antonio on the future, with just a bit more desperation. Yes, he's obviously a skilled con man, but he may have started out pure, as well. This deeper look is lost in the Americanized title, for while technically Antonio is a thief, he is truly forced into it, lest his family will be even more degraded, while the young thief is likely merely using external circumstances to justify his black soul. De Sica wisely does not opt out for that simplistic end, though, for we still have the contrast between the professional thief, and the rank amateur, Antonio.
Many critics have reduced this film to De Sica's supposed refutation of a simple false dualism- that De Sica is merely trying to show good and evil are relative, but the film clearly is NOT doing that, for we know, all along, that the young professional thief would likely be a con man regardless. All of his neighbors are cheats and liars, as he has likely been accused many times before, and even his mother lies for her manifestly guilty son. De Sica recognizes that there IS good and evil, but that sometimes an act that appears evil- such as thievery, can be born of different circumstances; pure evil and greed, as in the case of the young thief, and mere desperation, as with Antonio. Ironically, many of the critics who chide viewers for their supposed biases against the young thief, show their own biases in wholly missing De Sica's actual point- which is not to show that there are differing reasons for similar acts, but that the reasons CAN be night and day, yet still be confused, and that usually, and regardless, it is the honest who are screwed either way.
Even worse, are those stolid critics with a political ax to grind. Marxists somehow got it into their heads that Antonio, who is clearly shown as living in squalor, is a member of the bourgeoisie, simply because he wears a fedora, not a cap, or because his wife has clean bedsheets, thus when he gets a job, it is symbolic of governmental favoritism for an elite class, and the young bike thief, who wears a German hat, is a member of the international proletariat, although he clearly is a member of the criminal class, and in that conflation much of Marxist theology bogs down. The theft of Antonio's bike is therefore claimed as a revolutionary act, and his lying neighbors are just good workers defending a comrade. That Antonio is left bereft, at film's end, to Marxists, symbolizes a perverse justice. To point out all the ridiculous flaws in such super-simplistic ideas would waste time, but, clearly, the only reason such absurd claims were made were because the screenwriter, Cesare Zavattini, who adapted the film from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, was a member of the Italian Communist Party, at the time. Interestingly, the film has also been seen as a very Conservative film, praised by Christian groups and even William F. Buckley's The National Review, not because it delineates good and evil, as described above, but because they see it as a refutation of Marxist ideals, in that Antonio and the other laborers do not find work degrading, but a fundament of their self worth; so much so that when the young thief kyboshes Antonio's ability to gain that self respect, he loses all hope, and is reduced to dishonesty himself.
Neither reductivist outlook adequately deals with the many subtleties and nuances this great film portrays, and the fact that The Bicycle Thief is shorn of Freudian psychobabble and preaching is one of its strengths. Yet, it is not pure cinema, either, as many European critics have labeled it. Although the visuals convey the milieu well, they do not get inside the characters. This is where the writing and acting ability of Maggiorani and Staiola works magic. Great art is simply not so easily reducible as political panderers want it to be, and one can be thankful for that, lest The Bicycle Thief would not be what it is, nor would we still be watching it with such easy appreciation for its simple virtues.
September 18, 2008

It Retains Its Power

"The Bicycle Thief," a dramatic, grainy black and white Italian film released in the United States in 1949, has long been considered one of the greats, for several reasons. The strongest must be that, along with Roberto Rossellini's 1946 "Open City," it gives us an unvarnished look at Rome, shortly after the end of World War II, which the Italians definitively lost. The city is devastated; its people are desperate for jobs, food, and shelter.

The movie was written by Cesare Zavattini, frequent collaborator of its director, Vittorio De Sica, erstwhile matinée idol, who took his camera onto the streets of Rome, used amateur actors, and filmed in natural light. He and Rossellini were therefore described as adherents of the "neorealist" school.

The plot of "The Bicycle Thief," as it was called in America is, of course, well-known. Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), one of the city's throngs of long-term unemployed, finally gets a job, and a good one with the city: putting up posters. But ownership of a bike is a prerequisite. His wife Maria (Lianella Carell) gets his out of hock by pawning the sheets in her dowry. On Ricci's very first day on the job, while he's hanging a poster of Rita Hayworth in "Gilda," his attention wanders from the bike. And it's gone, stolen just like that. He and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) frantically search the city for it. Maggiorani and Staiola, though both amateurs, turn in intense, fully inhabited performances. Staiola's, as the son Bruno, is extraordinarily expressive: his eyes can speak volumes. Many critics will tell you that, stolen bicycle aside; the movie is most moving in its depiction of a strong father/son bond. And many more will point out that the relationship shown here strongly influenced the Oscar-winning World War II Holocaust film, "Life Is Beautiful," by Roberto Benigni.

"Bicycle Thief" is certainly realistic. There's a scene where Bruno is trying to cross a street to join his father; he's brushed back twice by traffic. As De Sica was filming on actual, live location, these two near accidents really happened, and were left in the picture. Furthermore, Maggiorani had been one of the city's unemployed before filming, and he would continue to struggle for work afterwards.

It's said that prospective producer David O. Selznick proposed Cary Grant for the lead, and that De Sica countered by asking for Henry Fonda. "Bicycle Thief" received a Special Oscar before the Best Foreign Film Category was established.

De Sica was born into poverty in a village near Rome, and grew up in always poor southern Naples. His first job was as an office clerk, but he made his screen debut, as an actor, in his teens. He joined a stage company in 1923, and became a theater matinée idol; he would soon become a cinematic matinée idol as well. He was a compulsive gambler, and a communist (there were many of them in Italy after the War), and his politics surely influenced his work. In 1970, shortly before the director's death, he made "Garden of the Finzi-Continis," about Italian Jews leading doomed lives during WWII, and its attendant Holocaust, that won another Oscar. In 1961, he made another WWII picture, "Two Women," based on a novel by Alberto Moravia that won its star, Sophia Loren, a Best Actress Oscar, an extremely rare one, as given for a performance not in English. Throughout his acting career - De Sica continued to act, to pay for his movie making --he was best known for light earthy sex comedies, and played opposite the great female Italian stars of the day, Loren, and Gina Lollobrigida.

This picture was called "The Bicycle Thieves," in the original Italian, as in its English release: De Sica certainly had an eye for irony. His film retains much of its power to the present day, and probably will, into the future. Between them, "The Bicycle Thief" and "Open City" will quite likely last as long as celluloid does, giving us a closely-observed look at a great city, and its people, in defeat.
August 27, 2008

Big fish, little fish, loser fish, thief fish

De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (plural, in the Italian) reminds us that hope takes many forms. In the case of Antonio Ricci and his family, hope is a bicycle. Ricci, one of the tens of thousands of unemployed workers in the Italian depression that followed WWII, finally gets a job in Rome as a sign-hanger. But the job requires that he have a bicycle. Ricci's bike is stolen his first day on the job, and he and his son Bruno embark on a fruitless search for it that occupies the bulk of the movie. They come close to it once, but the bike--a symbol of hope--remains elusive. Finally, in desperation, Ricci himself becomes a bicycle thief--but an unsuccessful one. The film ends with a heartbreaking shot of Ricci's face, despairing, humiliated in front of his adoring son, and hopeless because futureless.

Many commentators have focused on what they see as de Sica's moral theme: that poverty and the despair it brings erodes moral fiber. Ricci, the victim of robbery, himself stoops to robbery. But I think this misses the broader point. In a capitalist society, given the intensity of competition, the imperative to climb the social and economic ladder, and the merciless disregard for people who can't "cut it," everyone necessarily becomes a thief (hence the plural "thieves" in the title) just to survive. But only a handful--the movers and shakers, the beautiful people who live in penthouses and are relatively unaffected by the economic crises periodically churned up by the capitalist system--are successful at it. The rest of us are losers. We may succeed every once in awhile, but sooner or later either another loser, or the system itself, will come along and steal our bikes/futures/hopes.

How can hope survive in a predatory society built along these lines, where almost everyone is a loser and even losers are thieves too? This, I believe, is the real tragedy de Sica is exploring in this wonderful and sobering film. In giving us the particular tragedy of the Ricci family, he points to a wider tragedy in which all of us are players.

August 10, 2008

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