Week Thirty-Three: Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Producer: Giuseppe Amato

Writer: Vittorio De Sica, Orseste Biancoli, Suso D’Amico, Adolfo Franci, Gherardo Gherardi, Cesare Zavattini

Cinematography: Carlo Montuori

Music: Alessandro Cicognini

Starring: Lamberto Maggiorani (Antonio Ricci), Enzo Staiola (Bruno Ricci), Lianella Carell (Maria Ricci), Gino Saltamerenda (Baiocco), Vittorio Antonucci (Alfredo Catelli), Elena Altieri (the Charitable Lady)

Before You Watch the Movie
(First make sure you have read the introduction to this series)

If you hadn’t noticed, this journey through film has for the most part been focused on films made in America and Britain for English-speaking audiences. This hasn’t been by design but rather a result of historical interference in the major film producing countries: Germany, which dominated the silent era, lost a majority of talent because it was lured to Hollywood – Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Michael Curtiz, Karl Freund, Fred Zinnemann – or forced to flee after the Nazi’s came to power in 1933 – Fritz Lang, Max Ophüls, Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Douglas Sirk, Eugen Schüfftan – while the one notable director who remained in Germany, G.W. Pabst, saw his work severely limited as censored. Likewise, in Japan, master directors Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi lost years to the war and the burgeoning cinema of Italy was also derailed by Mussolini and the War. In France, directors like Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Marcel Pagnol, Jacques Feyder, René Clair and others oversaw an extremely creative and fertile period of filmmaking that was brought to an end by the fall of France at the hands of the Nazis in 1940. With the exception of a few films made by Marcel Carné, including Les Enfants du Paradis, the birthplace of cinema was mostly quiet throughout the war. ­America, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, was never invaded and Hollywood benefited from the wartime economy and conditions. Britain was also never invaded – though the Blitz certainly slowed down the film industry somewhat – and the countries resilience can be seen in the continued output of films throughout the war.

(It should be noted that many of these countries, Germany especially, were producing films during this time, but they were heavily leaning on propaganda and pushing unpleasant agendas. For more on this watch the 2017 documentary Hitler’s Hollywood.)

Post-war, film around the world began to slowly piece themselves back together. The first to recover was Italy, not by appealing to audience’s desire to forget the tough times past and to come but by visualizing the world around them. What would become known as the Italian neo-realist movement has a number of characteristic elements all of which serve the purpose of cinematic realism. Most readily apparent is the almost exclusive use of location shooting: any studio work at all is rare in neorealism as the desolate urban landscapes of ravaged and war-torn Italy is a crucial component of the movement. This is due to the fact that neorealism focuses on lower classes and the impoverished first and foremost, on the average Italian who during and after the war was often struggling just to survive. In order for these people to be portrayed with the highest degree of realism, non-professional actors were often used, even in leading roles, so as to divorce the viewer from any level of cognitive dissonance. A glamorous movie star playing a poor person is quite a different thing than a poor person playing a poor person. Neorealist films did still use professional actors – notably, Ingrid Bergman starred in several films for director Roberto Rossellini – but even then the vast majority of the actors in those films were still non-professionals.

None of the three main actors in Bicycle Thieves had ever acted in a movie before.

The Italian neorealist film that had the most international influence during the forties was Vittorio Di Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, literally translated as Bicycle Thieves, but also known as The Bicycle Thief, though this latter title doesn’t really make much sense once you have seen the film. Di Sica filmed almost the entirety of Bicycle Thieves on location around the city of Rome, which was still being rebuilt post-war, and utilizing many real-life locations like the Stadio Nazionale stadium and Piazza Vittorio market. 

None of the main actors were professionals – Maggiorani was a factory worker, Staiola the son of a flower seller – and those in the film that were had only minor roles in other movies.  In almost every way, Bicycle Thieves strives for realism from a production standpoint but all this is to serve the story, which is entirely fictional. The story is what divorces neorealism from documentary or pseudo-documentary, which document real-life events with (obviously) non-actors and real-life locations. However, neorealism eschews stylization and glamorization of story and focuses in on the lower classes, mostly neglected in film to this point. The main characters of Bicycle Thieves – a poor, out of work laborer and his family – are not the type of people that cinema usually gravitates to and yet, for those going to the movies, their story is much closer to their experiences than the vast majority of Hollywood’s more escapist output. Neorealist stories are current, not set in the past or the future: the story of Bicycle Thieves could have been happening right outside the movie theater in 1948.

Post-war Rome for many: desperate for work, pawning all they own, living simply, children working.

After You Watch the Movie (Spoilers Below)

There are several remarkable aspects of Bicycle Thieves that have made it such a lasting piece of art which is still regarded as a masterpiece to this day. Unlike most Hollywood dramas, the stakes appear at first to be remarkably small. There is no cataclysmic event on the horizon, the world isn’t at stake, no one is even falling in love. And yet, once you have become invested in the struggle the stakes couldn’t seem higher. That is one of the brilliant things about the movies: once you are invested in a story, no matter how trivial it might seem, absorbs the audience fully. Scale doesn’t matter one iota if a story is well told, be it about the fate of the universe or the fate of a poor Italian family.

However, just as you become so absorbed into the search for the bike, the film pulls the rug out from underneath you. Like many films of neorealist movement, the ending has no resolution to this surface story: the bike isn’t found and the Ricci’s future is still uncertain. A Hollywood ending with the bike being found and the day saved would work against the film’s point. If everything turned out alright, then the reality of the poor’s struggle would be undercut. The audience would leave with a false happiness, thinking that maybe things in Rome really weren’t so bad after all. Instead, it is the father and son that are at the heart of the film. 

So much of the film – on the surface about a stolen bike and the struggles of a poor family – is really about the relationship between Antonio and Bruno. Antonio, knowing his family is on the brink of starvation, must find his bicycle in order to survive and so he brings Bruno, who knows the bike better than anyone, along with him. 

In Antonio, we see every parent that has ever faced the impossible balancing act of sheltering their child from a terrible truth yet also knowing they must grow up and face that truth some day. In Bruno, we see a true tragedy as he sees his father forced to steal a bicycle, his hero fallen and his shamed father surrounded by chastising men.

Which brings us to the ending, in which Antonio tries to steal the bike, fails, and then walks off into the crowd with Bruno. The correctly translated title of the film – Bicycle Thieves – refers to the two thieves in the film, Alfredo who steals Antonio’s bike and Antonio himself, forced to steal for the sake of his family as well as every lower-class character in the movie. In the desolation of post-war Italy, everyone is a potential bicycle thief, just one step away from such an act. We sympathize with Antonio even after he tries to steal the bike and hate Alfredo because we know Antonio’s circumstances, the backstory that leads him to try to steal the bike. Yet might Alfredo not have a similar reason for stealing the bike? Mightn’t anyone? 

As Antonio and Bruno walk off hand-in-hand and disappear into the crowd, we realize that throughout the whole film we have focused on the story of a single struggling family when there are millions of poor on the brink of devastation and we have seen just the slice of one story when in fact there is a city, a country, a world full of bicycle thieves.

A desperate father...

...a child growing up...

...just one of millions of similar stories.

Following Italy’s film renaissance, other countries would soon be following. The fifties would be the golden age for international cinema with France, Japan, and Italy all producing some of their most famous and well-regarded films during this decade. In 1948 Hollywood lost an anti-trust case that radically changed the industry, must crucially it ended studio-owned movie theaters and gave rise to independent, art house cinemas that could import and play international films to the general public to enjoy. These countries weren’t just producing some of the best films in their history, they were also breaking through all across America, which in turn influenced many important Hollywood filmmakers. Even the starkly anti-Hollywood neorealism movement would prove to be a significant influence on American movies in the next decade.  

See Also

Rome, Open City (1945) dir. Roberto Rossellini

One of the first and greatest neorealist films, Rome, Open City takes place during the Nazi era and was filmed right after the liberation of Rome. A remarkably powerful and stirring image of the effects of war and occupation.
Le Silence de la mer (1949) dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
The debut film by one of the world's greatest directors, Melville's first film deals with the war in his own unique fashion.

Umberto D. (1952) dir. Vittorio De Sica

De Sica’s other most famous film, Umberto D. plays on the heartstrings in a different way than Bicycle Thieves and marks an end or at least an evolution in both the neorealist movement and Di Sica’s career.
Journey to Italy (1954) dir. Roberto Rossellini
One of several masterpieces made by Rossellini and his then wife Ingrid Bergman, Journey to Italy strides the gap between forties neorealism and modern cinema with a powerful but sparse narrative.

Panther Panchali (1955) dir. Satyajit Ray

The first film by Bengali master Satyajit Ray. Strongly influenced by neorealism but seen through the lens of an entirely different culture and a unique filmmaker. Ray has said that seeing Bicycle Thieves was the primary influence on his decision to become a filmmaker.

Let me know what you think either here or on Twitter @bottlesofsmoke