Bicycle Thieves

The archive moves from an American crime epic and a Japanese period ensemble to a small European event: one man, one bicycle, two days. The jump is deliberate. Bicycle Thieves is the dividing line on the question of what cinema is allowed to be about — before it, screen protagonists generally had to be worth filming; after it, a factory worker who has just found work qualified.

It is also unusually legible today: a job that requires you to already own the thing you cannot afford. The film never explains the system. It simply walks two days alongside a father and lets you watch him exhaust every option.

二战结束不久的罗马。城里失业的人比工作多，连一份张贴广告海报的差事都有人抢。Antonio Ricci 拿到了这份工作，但雇主要求他必须自己有自行车——没有车，就没法去贴海报。

他曾经有一辆。为了吃饭，车早就押进了当铺。妻子 Maria 把家里仅剩的值钱东西——陪嫁的床单——抱去当铺换钱，把车赎了回来。

第二天是他上班的第一天。影片从这里开始，讲的就是这之后发生的事：他带着儿子 Bruno 在罗马的街道、市场、教堂和居民区里穿行，试图把车找回来。

这不是一部悬疑片。谁偷了车、能不能找回来，并不是它真正的问题。它真正在看的是：当一个人手里唯一的工具被拿走之后，他还剩下什么可以动用。

Director and screenplay

Vittorio De Sica had been one of Italy's most popular comic actors before turning director; after the war he made The Children Are Watching Us (1944) and Shoeshine (1946). Bicycle Thieves came out of his collaboration with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who supplied the story, adapted from Luigi Bartolini's 1946 novel of the same name. Seven writers are credited on the final script.

Zavattini was the movement's chief theorist. In "Some Ideas on the Cinema" (Sight & Sound, 1953) he argued that cinema should find the drama in everyday life and the extraordinary in the daily news, rejecting engineered plots. This film is the most complete realisation of that argument.

Performance

Almost no professional actors appear. Lamberto Maggiorani, who plays the father, was a factory worker; Enzo Staiola, the son, was eight and was reportedly spotted on the street helping his father sell flowers. This was method rather than economy: a face with no performance history carries no memory of previous roles, so only the character remains on screen.

Cinematography and location

Shot by Carlo Montuori entirely on location in Rome with no studio sets — streets, the Piazza Vittorio and Porta Portese markets, churches, pawnshops and crowded buses are the film's actual narrative space. It was edited by Eraldo Da Roma with music by Alessandro Cicognini, used sparingly enough that the emotion rests almost entirely on the scene itself.

Structure and film language

The film compresses its action into a few days and has exactly one plot spine: a search. That is neorealism's most radical substitution — instead of inventing events, it stretches a single event until every detail is visible. De Sica's real instrument is following: the camera keeps the character's pace and never knows more than he does, so the audience occupies the same position of ignorance.

The other key design is the son. Bruno stays beside his father almost throughout, not as a cute accessory but as a witness to his moral situation. The many walking-together shots let physical distance carry psychological distance. It is the most precise piece of construction in the film.

Historical impact

In 1950 it received an Academy Honorary Award as the most outstanding foreign-language film released in the United States in 1949 — there was no competitive foreign-language category yet — plus a nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay. That year also brought the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film; the year before, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film and the National Board of Review awards for Best Film and Best Director.

In Sight & Sound's decennial poll it was voted the greatest film of all time by critics in 1952, the magazine's second such poll, topped by a film released only four years earlier. It placed 7th in 1962, 11th in 1992, 45th (critics) and 6th (directors) in 2002, and 33rd (critics) and 10th (directors) in 2012. It was 3rd in the 1958 Brussels World's Fair "Brussels 12" poll, and 2nd in BBC Culture's 2018 poll of 209 critics from 43 countries on the greatest foreign-language films. Rotten Tomatoes records 99% from 70 reviews.

Its influence is broad: Satyajit Ray, Ken Loach and Iranian New Wave directors including Jafar Panahi have all spoken about what it did for them, and Kurosawa listed it among his favourite films. Ray's Pather Panchali uses exactly this method — real locations and non-professional actors — and this film had shown that the method could hold.