Bicycle Thieves
Ladri di biciclette
Vittorio De Sica (1948)
Hard to overstate how highly Bicycle Thieves was praised in the years immediately following its release. The film opened in Italian cinemas in late 1948 and internationally (in the US, Britain and France, at any rate) in 1949. Numerous prizes came its way, including an honorary Oscar. In Sight and Sound’s inaugural ‘best-ever’ films poll in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s drama took first place. Ten years later, Bicycle Thieves had slipped to seventh in the S&S list; it placed only joint forty-first in the 2022 poll. Was it initially overrated? Perhaps but it still seems a kind of masterpiece.
Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine (1946) are often referred to as twin peaks of Italian neo-realism and plenty of cinephiles prefer the earlier De Sica film. I’m not among them. The heartbreak in Shoeshine emerges from a more involved, occasionally melodramatic storyline (although the two films are of nearly identical length, around ninety minutes). Bicycle Thieves, which De Sica and others adapted from a novel of the same name by Luigi Bartolini, is, in plot terms, remarkably simple yet its meanings seem more expansive. In contemporary Rome, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is desperate for a job in order to support his wife and two children: he’s among the legion of men who turn up every day in the city centre, hoping to be one of the fortunate few offered work. His surname may be designed as an ironic misnomer: ricci can mean curly-haired (as in dai capalli ricci) but also implies rich man.
Even so, Antonio appears to be one of the lucky ones. He gets the offer of a job posting advertising bills; in order to accept the offer, he has to have a bicycle; his wife Maria (Lianella Carell) willingly pawns their best bedsheets – part of her dowry – in exchange for redeeming the bike that her husband pledged to the pawnbroker previously. Antonio has barely started his new job when another man (Vittorio Antonucci) steals his bike, while Antonio is up a ladder. After vainly chasing the thief, he reports the crime to the police, who can offer little hope of retrieving the stolen goods. The remaining narrative mostly comprises Antonio’s dogged but fruitless attempts over the course of the weekend to get his bicycle back. He’s accompanied throughout by his eight-year-old son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola). (Antonio’s and Maria’s other child is still a babe in arms.) Eventually, in desperation, Antonio steals a bicycle and is immediately apprehended. The bike owner, seeing Bruno’s distress, tells other men who are jostling the thief towards the police station, to let him go. Antonio is almost in tears as Bruno takes his hand and they walk off, if not into the sunset then into the Sunday evening crowds into which they disappear.
Most of De Sica’s cast – including all three principals – hadn’t acted professionally before Bicycle Thieves: Lamberto Maggiorani was a factory worker. The acting certainly has a simplicity that distinguishes it very clearly from conventional performing styles of the time in Hollywood or British cinema. What’s more remarkable, though, is that, under De Sica’s sensitive direction, the playing of Maggiorani, Lianella Carell and Enzo Staiola is pure yet accomplished. You never see them do anything artificial yet they create characters – they don’t come over as a people in a documentary whose lives the camera has happened to capture. The same goes for their line readings – at least as far as we viewers without much Italian are concerned[1]. These performances are at the heart of De Sica’s neo-realism, in conjunction with the brilliant black-and-white images of his cinematographer, Carlo Montuori.
The visuals, even when epic in meaning, avoid bombast. For example, when Antonio is temporarily separated from Bruno, he hears shouts of alarm that a child has fallen into a lake. Terrified it could be his son, Antonio hares up a long flight of steps to get a better vantage point: the long shot of this small figure in dark clothes against the vast white steps suggests not only human powerlessness but also how important, and potentially world-shattering, these moments may prove to be for Antonio. In the event, it’s not Bruno in the lake and the boy who had fallen in, is rescued alive. Neither of these things detracts from the impact of the preceding shots. More generally, De Sica and his editor, Eraldo Da Roma, get a lot of mileage from emphasising speed of movement in Antonio’s urgent, increasingly hopeless quest.
The film’s picture of typical Roman locations and occupations is unforced but consistently expressive (and some of these elements are strikingly linked): church services; a barber’s shop; street vendors and barterers; an eatery where Antonio, in a rare what-the-hell moment, buys lunch for his son and himself. (Bruno locks eyes with a memorably snotty child (Massimo Randisi) at a neighbouring table.) And football: at the climax of the story, a match at the Stadio Nazionale PNF is taking place – we mostly hear from outside the stadium[2] the sound of the crowd inside. A further significant character is the commercially hard-headed fortune-teller, La Santona (Ida Bracci Dorati): Maria, despite being pragmatic enough to pawn bed-linen with sentimental meaning, has gullible faith in the old woman’s clairvoyance: when Maria reminds Antonio that La Santona foresaw that he would get a job, he pooh-poohs the idea. Although these different aspects of Maria combine effectively, the irony of Antonio’s paying ‘the wise woman’ for information on the whereabouts of his bicycle (info that he doesn’t get, of course) is a bit too neat, even allowing for his rising desperation.
The plangent strings in Alessandro Cicognini’s score anticipate Antonio’s tragic experiences. (The music seems also to anticipate the melodic tradition developed by Cicognini’s countrymen Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone.) The score isn’t needed as often as it’s used; it’s lovely and affecting nonetheless. Enzo Staiola is far superior to the boy actors in Shoeshine. De Sica told Sight and Sound (March 1950) that ‘I do not think I have to explain why I had no difficulty whatever in directing this child, who my good fortune enabled me to meet by chance in the street’. Staiola’s loyal Bruno is a pint-sized toughie, gradually worn down by events into fearful protectiveness of his father. At the end of Bicycle Thieves, you realise that Bruno will never forget this day for as long as he lives. (Enzo Staiola is still alive, by the way, and in his mid eighties. After appearing in several more films, including as a busboy in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), he gave up acting for maths teaching.) Bruno’s father, whose final public shame is ardently painful, won’t forget the day either – or that his nearly complete defeat is mitigated by his son’s gesture of love.
14 November 2023
[1] It should be said that, according to the film’s Wikipedia entry, Lamberto Maggiorani’s voice was dubbed by a professional actor. It’s not clear from Wikipedia whether other voices were similarly dubbed.
[2] The Stadio Nazionale PNF would close in 1957 – just as well, since the abbreviated part of its name is also, but unfortunately, expressive: it stands for Partito Nazionale Fascista.