Bicycle Thieves (Italian: Ladri di biciclette; sometimes known in the United States as The Bicycle Thief)[5] is a 1948 Italian neorealistdrama film directed by Vittorio De Sica.[6] It follows the story of a poor father searching in post-World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose the job which was to be the salvation of his young family.
Adapted for the screen by Cesare Zavattini from the 1946 novel by Luigi Bartolini, and starring Lamberto Maggiorani as the desperate father and Enzo Staiola as his plucky young son, Bicycle Thieves received an Academy Honorary Award (most outstanding foreign language film) in 1950, and in 1952 was deemed the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's poll of filmmakers and critics;[7] fifty years later another poll organized by the same magazine ranked it sixth among the greatest-ever films.[8] In the 2012 version of the list the film ranked 33rd among critics and 10th among directors.
The film was also cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the most influential films in cinema history,[9] and it is considered part of the canon of classic cinema.[10] In 1958, the film was voted number 3 on the prestigious Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo, and number 4 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010.[11] It was also included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."[12]
Plot
In the post-World War II Val Melaina neighborhood of Rome, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is desperate for work to support his wife Maria (Lianella Carell), his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) and his small baby. He is offered a job of pasting advertising bills but tells Maria that he cannot accept because the job requires a bicycle. Maria resolutely strips the bed of her dowry bedsheets—prized possessions for a poor family—and takes them to the pawn shop, where they bring enough to redeem Antonio's pawned bicycle.
On his first day of work, Antonio is atop a ladder when a young man (Vittorio Antonucci) snatches the bicycle. Antonio gives chase but is thrown off the trail by the thief's confederates. The police warn that there is little they can do. Advised that stolen goods often surface at the Piazza Vittorio market, Antonio goes there with several friends and Bruno. They find a bicycle that might be Antonio's, but the serial numbers do not match.
At the Porta Portese market, Antonio and Bruno spot the thief with an old man. The thief eludes them and the old man feigns ignorance. They follow him into a church where he too slips away from them.
In a subsequent encounter with the thief, Antonio pursues him into a brothel, whose denizens eject them. In the street, hostile neighbors gather as Antonio accuses the thief, who conveniently falls into a fit for which the crowd blames Antonio. Bruno fetches a policeman, who searches the thief's apartment without success. The policeman tells Antonio the case is weak—Antonio has no witnesses and the neighbors are certain to provide the thief with an alibi. Antonio and Bruno leave in despair amid jeers and threats from the crowd.
On their way home, they are walking near Stadio Nazionale PNF football stadium. Antonio sees an unattended bicycle near a doorway and after much anguished soul-searching, instructs Bruno to take the tram to a stop nearby and wait. Antonio circles the unattended bicycle and jumps on it. Instantly the hue and cry is raised and Bruno–who has missed the tram–is stunned to see his father pursued, surrounded and pulled from the bicycle. As Antonio is being muscled toward the police station, the bicycle's owner notices Bruno and in a moment of compassion tells the others to release Antonio.
Antonio and Bruno then walk off slowly amid a buffeting crowd. Antonio fights back tears and Bruno takes his hand. The camera watches from behind as they disappear into the crowd.
Bicycle Thieves is the best-known work of Italian neorealism, the movement that formally began with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and aimed to give cinema a new degree of realism.[13] De Sica had just made Shoeshine (1946), but was unable to get financial backing from any major studio for the film, so he raised the money himself from friends. Wanting to portray the poverty and unemployment of post-war Italy,[14] he co-wrote a script with Cesare Zavattini and others using only the title and few plot devices of a little-known novel of the time by poet and artist Luigi Bartolini.[15] Following the precepts of neorealism, De Sica shot only on location (that is, no studio sets) and cast only untrained actors. (Lamberto Maggiorani, for example, was a factory worker.) That some actors' roles paralleled their lives off screen added realism to the film.[16] De Sica cast Maggiorani when he had brought his young son to an audition for the film. He later cast the 8-year-old Enzo Staiola when he noticed the young boy watching the film's production on a street while helping his father sell flowers. The film's final shot of Antonio and Bruno walking away from the camera into the distance is an homage to many of the films of Charlie Chaplin, who was De Sica's favourite filmmaker.[17]
Uncovering the drama in everyday life, the wonderful in the daily news.
—Vittorio De Sica in Abbiamo domandato a De Sica perché fa un film dal Ladro di biciclette (We asked De Sica why he makes a movie on the Bicycle Thief) – La fiera letteraria, 6/2/48
Translated title
The original Italian title is Ladri di biciclette. It literally translates into English as "thieves of bicycles"; both ladri and biciclette are plural. In Bartolini's novel, the title referred to a post-war culture of rampant thievery and disrespect for civil order, countered only by an inept police force and indifferent allied occupiers.[18]
When the film was screened in the United States in 1949, Bosley Crowther referred to it as The Bicycle Thief in his review in The New York Times,[5] and this came to be the title by which the film was known in English. When the film was re-released in the late-1990s, San Francisco Chronicle film critic Bob Graham said that he preferred that version, stating, "Purists have criticized the English title of the film as a poor translation of the Italian ladri, which is plural. What blindness! The Bicycle Thief is one of those wonderful titles whose power does not sink in until the film is over".[19] The 2007 Criterion Collection release in North America uses the title Bicycle Thieves.[20]
Critical reception
When Bicycle Thieves was released in Italy, it was viewed with hostility and as portraying Italians in a negative way. Italian critic Guido Aristarco praised it, but also complained that "sentimentality might at times take the place of artistic emotion." Fellow Italian neorealist film director Luchino Visconti criticized the film, saying that it was a mistake to use a professional actor to dub over Lamberto Maggiorani's dialogue.[17] Luigi Bartolini, the author of the novel from which de Sica drew his title, was highly critical of the film, feeling that the spirit of his book had been thoroughly betrayed because his protagonist was a middle-class intellectual and his theme was the breakdown of civil order.[18]
Bicycle Thieves has continued to gain very high praise from critics, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reporting 99% of 67 contemporary reviews as positive, with an average rating of 9.20/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "An Italian neorealism exemplar, Bicycle Thieves thrives on its non-flashy performances and searing emotion."[21] The picture is also in the Vatican's Best Films List for portraying humanistic values.[22]
Bosley Crowther, film critic for The New York Times, lauded the film and its message in his review. He wrote, "Again the Italians have sent us a brilliant and devastating film in Vittorio De Sica's rueful drama of modern city life, The Bicycle Thief. Widely and fervently heralded by those who had seen it abroad (where it already has won several prizes at various film festivals), this heart-tearing picture of frustration, which came to [the World Theater] yesterday, bids fair to fulfill all the forecasts of its absolute triumph over here. For once more the talented De Sica, who gave us the shattering Shoeshine, that desperately tragic demonstration of juvenile corruption in post-war Rome, has laid hold upon and sharply imaged in simple and realistic terms a major—indeed, a fundamental and universal—dramatic theme. It is the isolation and loneliness of the little man in this complex social world that is ironically blessed with institutions to comfort and protect mankind".[5] Pierre Leprohon wrote in Cinéma D'Aujourd that "what must not be ignored on the social level is that the character is shown not at the beginning of a crisis but at its outcome. One need only to look at his face, his uncertain gait, his hesitant or fearful attitudes to understand that Ricci is already a victim, a diminished man who has lost his confidence." Lotte Eisner called it the best Italian film since World War II and Robert Winnington called it "the most successful record of any foreign film in British cinema."[17]
When the film was re-released in the late 1990s Bob Graham, staff film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, gave the drama a positive review: "The roles are played by non-actors, Lamberto Maggiorani as the father and Enzo Staiola as the solemn boy, who sometimes appears to be a miniature man. They bring a grave dignity to De Sica's unblinking view of post-war Italy. The wheel of life turns and grinds people down; the man who was riding high in the morning is brought low by nightfall. It is impossible to imagine this story in any other form than De Sica's. The new black-and-white print has an extraordinary range of grey tones that get darker as life closes in".[19] In 1999, Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote that "The Bicycle Thief" is so well-entrenched as an official masterpiece that it is a little startling to visit it again after many years and realize that it is still alive and has strength and freshness. Given an honorary Oscar in 1949, routinely voted one of the greatest films of all time, revered as one of the foundation stones of Italian neorealism, it is a simple, powerful film about a man who needs a job". Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list.[23] In 2020, A. O. Scott praised the film in an essay entitled "Why You Should Still Care About 'Bicycle Thieves'."[24]
Bicycle Thieves is a fixture on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' and directors' polls of the greatest films ever made. The film ranked 1st and 7th on critics' poll in 1952 and 1962 respectively. It ranked 11th on the magazine's 1992 Critics' poll, 45th in 2002 Critics' Poll[25] and 6th on the 2002 Directors' Top Ten Poll.[26] It was slightly lower in the 2012 directors' poll, 10th[27] and 33rd on the 2012 critics' poll.[28]The Village Voice ranked the film at number 37 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[29] The film was voted at No. 99 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008.[30]
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.[31]
Filipino action star Nelson Anderson said it was the favorite Italian neorealist film of his contemporary Weng Weng, who cried upon his first viewing in the early 1980s. In a project that never materialized, they intended to depart from their usual fare by remaking it as an action-comedy with a human touch.[42]
The film features in the 1992 Robert Altman film The Player. In this film Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins), a Hollywood studio executive, tracks screenwriter David Kahane (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) to a screening of Bicycle Thieves, and stages what he represents as a chance meeting with Kahane. Kahane's suspicion is roused by the fact that Mill entered the screening only in the last few minutes of the film, and the two have an argument afterwards, resulting in Kahane's death. Anyone otherwise unaware viewing the last few minutes of Bicycle Thieves - comprising Antonio's attempted theft - would gain a distorted perspective on Antonio's motives, just as Mill misjudges Kahane, whom he wrongly thinks has been sending him hate mail.
A theatrical adaptation of the film was created by Littlebrain Theatre, in a devised adaptation with a cast of nine.[45] The production premiered as part of the Rhinoceros Theatre Festival in Chicago, from January 18 to February 22, 2019.[46]
Academy Awards: Honorary Award, as The Bicycle Thief (Italy). Voted by the Academy Board of Governors as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1949; 1950.
Academy Awards: Nominated, Oscar, Best Writing, Screenplay; as The Bicycle Thief, Cesare Zavattini; 1950.
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian film director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement.
Cesare Zavattini was an Italian screenwriter and one of the first theorists and proponents of the Neorealist movement in Italian cinema.
Italian neorealism, also known as the Golden Age, is a national film movement characterized by stories set amongst the poor and the working class. They are filmed on location, frequently with non-professional actors. They primarily address the difficult economic and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy, representing changes in the Italian psyche and conditions of everyday life, including poverty, oppression, injustice and desperation.
The Icicle Thief is a 1989 Italian comedy film directed by Maurizio Nichetti, titled in imitation of Vittorio De Sica's 1948 classic Italian neorealist film The Bicycle Thief. Some feel The Icicle Thief was created as a spoof of neorealism, which predominated Italian cinema after World War II. However, it is generally understood that the film is critical of the impact of consumerism on art, as suggested by the contrast between the nested film and commercials, and the apathy of Italian television viewers in recognising the difference between the two. The film won the Golden St. George at the 16th Moscow International Film Festival.
Umberto D. is a 1952 Italian neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica. Most of the actors were non-professional, including Carlo Battisti who plays the title role of Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a poor elderly man in Rome who is desperately trying to keep his rented room. His landlady is evicting him and his only true friends, the housemaid and his dog Flike are of no help.
My Voyage to Italy is a personal documentary by acclaimed Italian-American director Martin Scorsese. The film is a voyage through Italian cinema history, marking influential films for Scorsese and particularly covering the Italian neorealism period.
Lamberto Maggiorani was an Italian actor remembered for his portrayal of Antonio Ricci in the 1948 Vittorio De Sica film Bicycle Thieves.
We All Loved Each Other So Much is a 1974 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Ettore Scola and written by Scola and the famous screenwriter duo of Age & Scarpelli. It stars Stefania Sandrelli, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Stefano Satta Flores and Aldo Fabrizi, among others. Widely considered one of the best movies by Scola, and a great example of commedia all'italiana, it was dedicated to famous Italian director Vittorio De Sica.
The 15th New York Film Critics Circle Awards, honored the best filmmaking of 1949.
Luigi Bartolini was an Italian painter, writer, and poet. He is known for his novel, Bicycle Thieves, upon which the Italian neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica and of the same title was based. He published over 70 books during his lifetime. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics.
The Nastro d'Argento for Best Director is a film award bestowed annually as part of the Nastro d'Argento awards since 1946, organized by the Italian National Association of Film Journalists, the national association of Italian film critics.
The Stolen Children is a 1992 Italian film directed by Gianni Amelio. The film was selected as the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 65th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, also known as Piazza Vittorio, is a piazza in Rome, in the Esquilino rione. It is served by the Vittorio Emanuele Metro station.
Enzo Staiola is an Italian actor best known for playing, at the age of nine, the role of Bruno Ricci in Vittorio De Sica's neorealist 1948 film Bicycle Thieves. He appeared in several other films including, in 1954, the American-produced The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart. As an adult he became a mathematics teacher.
In Olden Days is a 1952 Italian comedy drama anthology film directed by Alessandro Blasetti and featuring an ensemble cast that included Gina Lollobrigida, Amedeo Nazzari, Vittorio De Sica, Elisa Cegani, Barbara Florian, Aldo Fabrizi, Andrea Checchi and Alba Arnova. It was shot at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The film's sets were designed by the art directors Dario Cecchi and Veniero Colasanti. It is also known as Times Gone By and Infidelity.
Lamberto is an Italian male given name taken from the name Lambert. It may refer to:
The list of the 100 Italian films to be saved was created with the aim to report "100 films that have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978".
Eraldo Da Roma was an Italian film editor best known for his work with Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni.
The Nastro d'Argento is a film award assigned each year, since 1948, by Sindacato Nazionale dei Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani, the association of Italian film critics.
A list of books and essays about Vittorio De Sica:
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