Vittorio De Sica; Cesare Zavattini
Ladri di biciclette

“[...] There was a time when the noble rankings of cinema placed this film in second place tied with The Gold Rush, behind the inevitable Potemkin. In the following years, its populist charm was considered suggestion, and the truth was regarded as poetry. Then the interpretation of what the film represented was corrected, even outside our country, with a snapshot of post-war Italy deemed miserable, even squalid. […] For a long time, sentiment was a kind of poison for the film. [,,,] Beyond everything, Bicycle Thieves remains a work of absolute beauty, as a social manifesto in the context of its time, as a cinematic work, and as a monument of general art history” (Pino Farinotti)

Then, at a certain point, neorealism became (almost) a necessity. It was De Sica who proposed it first, with “The Children Are Watching Us” (1943), anticipating some ideas later carried forward, twenty years later, by Truffaut, and in between, there were “Rome, Open City” (1945) by Rossellini and “Shoeshine” (1946) by the same De Sica. Telling the story of the wounded, destroyed, and shabby Italy of those years was a duty, and the most renowned local filmmakers felt the need for it, to the extent of clashing with the politics that did not want to give such a representation of Italy abroad. In this case, the famous disagreement (today they would call it “dissing”) between De Sica and Andreotti at the time of the release of “Umberto D” (1952) is well-known, with the Roman politician claiming that certain films harmed Italy's reputation beyond its borders and that, literally, “dirty laundry should be washed at home.”

But in “Bicycle Thieves” De Sica firmly believes, knowing that it is time to tell a story like this. It is well-known: the unemployed Antonio Ricci, married with a son, Bruno, secures a job as a bill-poster, and immediately, on the first day, his bicycle, essential for his job, is stolen. He will traverse all of Rome to find it.

It's almost a documentary of an Italy that today is hard to believe ever existed. The film begins in Valmelaina, the extreme outskirts of Rome. Here, newly erected houses, and others to be built, represent a first, rustic sketch of what would become, ten years later, the economic boom. But it must be said, it was more mud than homes (similar to what we will see in the subsequent “Miracle in Milan” (1951) in the outskirts of the Lombard capital, at the time the two cities, Rome and Milan, were almost entirely mirror images), then it moves to the more central Rome, what we would today call well-off, Piazza Vittorio, Porta Portese, Lungo Tevere, and finally, outside the stadium, which at the time was not the Olympic Stadium, not yet built.

Shot with non-professional actors, whose “leader” of the gang is Lamberto Maggiorani (but, in one scene, dressed as a young priest, there is also an unknown Sergio Leone), the film is, perhaps more than “Rome, Open City”, the pivotal work of Italian neorealism, capable as it is of narrating types and situations that can only be set in a specific era: the post-war period. Among posters of “Gilda”, fake fortune-tellers who charge heavily, gatherings of the destitute desperately trying to scrounge a hot meal for lunch, rustic taverns entertaining clients with folk songs, Sundays at the stadium watching Roma, with the lightness and disillusion typical of the mid-1940s. But De Sica is a superb director and directs the actors sublimely (the young Bruno, played by Enzo Staiola, is spine-tingling, especially in the finale when, unable to cry as the script required, De Sica devised a clever stratagem, which Scola would pay homage to years later in “We All Loved Each Other So Much” (1974), and I won't reveal it...), but excels even more when pulling the strings of the tale, crafting an Oscar-winning finale (and, in fact, it won) mixing suspense almost like a thriller with fluid camera movements, turning the conclusion (the father attempts to steal a bicycle himself but risks being lynched by the crowd and is saved only because everyone pities Bruno's tears) into a masterpiece not only narratively but also technically, from a total director.

One should then mention the famous “Zavattinian trailing”, here at its peak. Essentially, according to Zavattini, the screenplay writer (and of many other “De Sica” works), the camera, and thus the director, should meticulously and obsessively follow the film's protagonists almost as if it were an extra eye in addition to the viewer's. De Sica would carry this concept forward in many other films (see, indeed, “Umberto D”) and would create a legacy: neorealism was also about narrating reality by following with a detached eye the figures that traverse Italy, and indeed De Sica never judges (is it right for the father to steal a bicycle in turn? Is it right for the trickster fortune-teller to continue her fraudulent work?), narrates, tells what he sees and imposes it upon us, nothing more than reality. Zavattini was one of the most influential intellectuals in Italy, on par with Ennio Flaiano, figures now unthinkable and thus, unattainable.

With some small deviations from neorealist logic:

“[...] It is indeed true that the narrative structure of Thieves […] allows almost involuntary glimpses of reality, so to speak, lateral to the line of the narrative. And this precisely goes in the direction of a realism that does not want to, and strictly speaking cannot be identified at any level with the so-called reality, but which wants and cannot help but be a discourse on a certain reality” (Franco Pecori)

Upon its release, the film proved to be a great success, but not free from criticism, which, for once, did not only come from industry insiders but also from the public. Abroad, however, it went tremendously well. In Rome, at the premiere at the Metropolitan, people asked for a ticket refund, while in Paris, a screening was organized with three thousand cultural and artistic figures. At the end of the film, René Clair embraced De Sica and the famous critic Bazin said: “the ideal center around which the works of other great directors gravitate on their particular orbit”

Over the years, it truly became a reference point for major modern filmmakers. Woody Allen described it as “my favorite film”; Martin Scorsese fell in love with it as a child (along with “Paisan” (1946) by Rossellini) and made it a cornerstone of his future cinema; Robert Altman would pay homage to it gracefully in “The Player” (1992). From here, from “Bicycle Thieves”, there is no going back.