Bicycle Thieves: De Sica, 1948
1948 · movie
A man in postwar Rome is offered a job pasting advertising posters on walls. He can only take it if he owns a bicycle, so his wife sells the bedsheets from their marriage bed to redeem his from the pawnshop. On his first morning at work the bicycle is stolen. He spends a Sunday searching the city with his young son, and the film follows the two of them through markets, churches, a police station and a rainstorm.
Bicycle Thieves was directed by Vittorio De Sica from a script by Cesare Zavattini and released in 1948. Almost nobody in it was a professional actor. Antonio was played by Lamberto Maggiorani, a factory worker, and his son by Enzo Staiola, a boy De Sica noticed in the street. It was filmed in real locations in a city still full of rubble and unemployment, which is the essence of the movement known as Italian neorealism, born partly of necessity, since the studios had been damaged and money was short.
De Sica is said to have turned down American finance that came with the condition of casting a famous star in the lead. The choice kept the film small and made it universal. Its subject is not really a bicycle, it is what poverty does to the dignity of a father in front of his child.
The film received an honorary Academy Award in 1950 and topped the first international critics poll of the greatest films in 1952. It has stayed near the top of such lists ever since. Directors from many countries have described watching it as the moment they understood that a film could be made out of an ordinary person having an ordinary catastrophe.