Vittorio De Sica's neorealist masterpiece. A father and son search post-war Rome for a stolen bicycle. The film that defined what cinema could do without a studio.
Rome, 1948. Antonio Ricci, an unemployed man with a wife and two children, is offered a job pasting up posters around the city. The job requires a bicycle. He doesn't own one; his wife pawns the family bedsheets to buy his bicycle out of hock. On Antonio's first day at work, the bicycle is stolen. The film follows Antonio and his young son Bruno through two days of attempted recovery — the police don't help, the bicycle market in the open-air thieves' market produces no leads, an old man in a church may or may not have information. Antonio progressively unravels.
The film closes on Antonio's own attempt to steal a bicycle — out of desperation, in front of his son — and his failure. He is caught by the bicycle's owner, briefly humiliated in the street, and released. The father and son walk away into the crowd. The film does not resolve.
Bicycle Thieves is, by general critical consensus, the foundational masterpiece of Italian neorealism — the post-war Italian film movement that emerged from the collapse of the Italian studio system after WWII and the Cinecittà studio's destruction by Allied bombing. The movement's directors (De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti) made films on the streets of post-war Italian cities, using non-professional actors, with stories drawn from working-class life.
The movement's influence is impossible to overstate. The French New Wave's debt to Italian neorealism is direct. The American independent tradition from John Cassavetes onwards is in conversation with it. The Iranian New Wave (Abbas Kiarostami), the Romanian New Wave (Cristian Mungiu), the British social-realist tradition (Ken Loach, Mike Leigh) all show its influence. Almost every subsequent realist film tradition is downstream of these few late-1940s films.
Lamberto Maggiorani, who plays Antonio, was a metalworker in real life. Enzo Staiola, who plays Bruno, was an eight-year-old De Sica spotted on the street. Lianella Carell, who plays Antonio's wife Maria, was a journalist. None of the principal cast had professional acting experience. De Sica reportedly worked with each of them across rehearsal to elicit the performances rather than direct them in the conventional sense.
The technique was a deliberate ideological choice. De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini believed that professional actors brought a calibrated artificiality to working-class roles that the films were specifically attempting to refuse. Maggiorani's performance is built almost entirely on his own physical comportment — the way an actual labouring man holds his body, the way fatigue settles into a face. The performance is, in some sense, the film's argument that professional cinema had been falsifying working-class lives for decades.
Almost every working-class drama produced by Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s ended with some form of resolution — the protagonist either prevails or fails in a way the audience can morally process. Bicycle Thieves refuses both options. Antonio's bicycle is not found. His attempt to steal one fails. His employment is, by the film's end, almost certainly lost. The family will continue to be poor. The state will not help. The son who watched the father's humiliation will carry that memory.
The film's defenders argue that the refusal of resolution is the film's moral seriousness. Antonio's story does not resolve because the structural conditions that produced his crisis do not resolve. The film is, in this reading, an indictment of an economic system that pretends to be a story about an individual man's bicycle. The defenders are correct. The film's continued power, almost eighty years after its release, is the function of its refusal to soften.