Bicycle Thieves

In post-World War II Rome, Antonio Ricci desperately needs work to support his wife Maria, his son Bruno and his small baby. He is offered a job posting advertising bills but tells Maria he cannot accept because the job requires a bicycle. Maria resolutely strips the bed of her dowry bedsheetsprized possessions for a poor familyand takes them to the pawn shop, where they bring enough to redeem Antonio's bicycle. On his first day of work, Antonio is at the top of a ladder when a young man steals his bicycle. Antonio runs after him but is thrown off the trail by the thief's confederates. The police file Antonio's complaint but say that there is little they can do. Advised that stolen goods often surface at the Piazza Vittorio market, Antonio and his son go there with several friends. They find a bicycle frame that might be Antonio's, but the vendors refuse to allow them to examine the serial number. They call over a carabiniere, who orders the vendors to allow him to read the serial number. It does not match that of the missing bicycle, but the officer won't allow them to examine it for themselves. At the Porta Portese market, Antonio and Bruno spot someone he believes to be 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. Antonio pursues the thief 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 weakAntonio 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. Their way home takes them to the Stadio Nazionale PNF football stadium. Antonio sees an unattended bicycle near a doorway and after much anguished indecision, 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 in tears 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. File:Ladri di biciclette (film).jpg|The bike redeemed from File:Ladri di biciclette - immagine .jpg|First day File:Ladri-biciclette-pioggia.jpg|In search of the File:Ladri-biciclette folla.jpg|The thief's neighbors File:Ladri-biciclette.jpg|All seems lost ==Cast==

Bicycle Thieves is the best-known work of Italian neorealism, a movement that informally began with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and brought a new degree of realism to Italian cinema. 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, 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. 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. 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. {{Blockquote|Uncovering the drama in everyday life, the wonderful in the daily news. ==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. ==Reception==

Critical response 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. Contemporary reviews elsewhere were positive. 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 majorindeed, a fundamental and universaldramatic 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". 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 "The Great Movies" list. In 2020, A. O. Scott praised the film in an essay entitled "Why You Should Still Care About 'Bicycle Thieves'." 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 and 6th on the 2002 Directors' Top Ten Poll''. It was slightly lower in the 2012 directors' poll, 10th and 33rd on the 2012 critics' poll. 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. The film was voted at No. 99 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008. The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films. The film was included by the Vatican in a list of important films compiled in 1995, under the category of "Values". Bicycle Thieves has continued to gain very high praise from contemporary critics, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reporting 99% of 70 reviews as of April 2022 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." Awards and nominations • Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland: Special Prize of the Jury, Vittorio De Sica; 1949. • National Board of Review: NBR Award, Best Director, Vittorio De Sica; Best Film (Any Language), Italy; 1949. • New York Film Critics Circle Awards: NYFCC Award, Best Foreign Language Film, Italy; 1949. • 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. • British Academy of Film and Television Arts: BAFTA Film Award, Best Film from any Source; 1950. • Bodil Awards, Copenhagen, Denmark: Bodil, Best European Film (Bedste europæiske film), Vittorio De Sica; 1950. • Golden Globes: Golden Globe, Best Foreign Film, Italy; 1950. • Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain: CEC Award, Best Foreign Film (Mejor Película Extranjera), Italy; 1951. • Kinema Junpo Awards, Tokyo, Japan: Kinema Junpo Award, Best Foreign Language Film, Vittorio De Sica; 1951. • Best Cinematography (Migliore Fotografia), Carlo Montuori. • Best Director (Migliore Regia), Vittorio De Sica. • Best Film (Miglior Film a Soggetto). • Best Score (Miglior Commento Musicale), Alessandro Cicognini. • Best Screenplay (Migliore Sceneggiatura), Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Oreste Biancoli, Adolfo Franci, and Gerardo Guerrieri. • Best Story (Miglior Soggetto), Cesare Zavattini. • Listed as one of TCM's top 15 most influential films list, as The Bicycle Thief (1947), • Ranked #4 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. ==Legacy==

Many directors have cited the film as a major influence including Satyajit Ray, Ken Loach, Giorgio Mangiamele, Bimal Roy, Anurag Kashyap, Balu Mahendra, Vetrimaaran and Basu Chatterjee. The film was noteworthy for film directors of the Iranian New Wave, such as Jafar Panahi and Dariush Mehrjui. The film was one of 39 foreign films recommended by Martin Scorsese to Colin Levy. It was parodied in the film The Icicle Thief (1989). and in The Carol Burnett Show sketch "Salute to Foreign Films." The film features incidentally in the 1992 Robert Altman film The Player. A Hollywood studio executive (played by Tim Robbins) tracks a screenwriter to a theater showing Bicycle Thieves and stages what he represents as a chance meeting. Norman Loftis's film Messenger (1994) is considered to be a remake of Bicycle Thieves. The episode "The Thief" from the American comedy-drama series Master of None is heavily influenced by Bicycle Thieves. ==See also==