If De Sica was looking for casual, unromanticized images, why does a new print of The Bicycle Thief matter? Isn't adequate photography good enough? Maybe, but De Sica, for all his realism, enjoyed artistry.
BICYCLE THIEF MOVIE MOVIE
In an obvious bit of irony, Antonio's hard-won job, his first in two years, is a gig putting up movie posters with pictures of Rita Hayworth on them. "My idea is to deromanticize the cinema," De Sica said.
He wanted to remove the gloss from movies and take them out of the context of lovely factory-made objects. These people may be dirt-poor, but they aren't bored-thus, they're not boring.ĭIRECTOR De Sica is noted for being one of the first to use actual slum locations and nonprofessional actors. Something's always coming up: a quarrel, a conversation, a soccer game or the hue and cry after a thief. Still, the Romans are bustling, always interested in what crosses their paths. The poor people here are guarded, tense, unsmiling and often mean they haven't found out that there's supposed to be something spiritual in being broke all the time. Before you quite realize it, De Sica has turned the small tale of one man and his son into a story of thousands upon thousands in the poor and crowded city. They search the poor parts of Rome: the flea market, a union rescue mission, the banks of the Tiber and, finally, a brothel where the thief is hiding. Desperately, Antonio enlists his friends and his son, Bruno, to help track the bicycle down. No lecture on poverty could be quite as much to the point as this image.ĭuring his first day on the job, Antonio's bicycle is stolen by a small gang of thieves.
BICYCLE THIEF MOVIE SERIES
After they're pawned, they're taken into the back of the shop, where a little clerk climbs up a three-story-high series of shelves to stash them away alongside the mountain of hundreds of other pawned bedclothes. With great reluctance, his wife pawns the sheets off of her bed to raise the money to redeem the bike.ĭe Sica includes a devastating moment, taken right off the streets of postwar Italy: The prized sheets, family heirlooms, are washed and bundled up. Unfortunately, his bike is in the pawn shop. Against much competition, Antonio nets a job hanging advertising posters, work for which a bicycle is required. Despite its reputation as a film that revived the use of real life in cinema, The Bicycle Thief has all of the compelling drama of a detective story.Īntonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) lives with his two children in a Roman slum at the end of World War II. The Bicycle Thief (now being rereleased in a silvery new print) is a regular entry on most critics' lists of the best films ever made. Since then, Rossellini's Open City (1946) and De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948) have demonstrated how deathless films can be made on practically no budget. Directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica brought their cameras out of the studios and into the city streets. This is how the neorealist movement grew in an Italy starved and shamed after the war. The gulf between harsh reality and studio-created fantasy became too much for some artists to ignore. World War II temporarily fractured cinema's thick layers of artifice. Over the decades, however, cinema developed into an expensive commercial enterprise dependent on artifice and fantasy.
A century ago, the pioneering moviemakers Louis and Auguste Lumière set up their camera outside a factory's gates in Lyon to film the workers at quitting time.
SOME OF THE FIRST movies ever made were taken completely from life. Down and Out in Rome: Enzo Staiola (left) and Lamberto Maggiorani try to survive hard times in postwar Italy.Ī new print of 'The Bicycle Thief' confirms the film's status as a cinema classic
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