Bicycle Thieves (1949)

The title Bicycle Thieves, known in Italy as Ladri di biciclette, is often translated as The Bicycle Thief although there is more than one such thief in the film. This classic of Italian neorealism has a fairly straightforward plot, but its power is truly in simplicity of the emotions that it can still arouse. A man’s bicycle is stolen, and he attempts to find it and get it back so that he can continue to work—that’s about it. Antonio Ricci (played by Lamberto Maggiorani in his first ever acting role) is one of a group of poor, desperate men hoping to find work when he gets chosen for a job as a poster hanger. He needs to have a bicycle in order to keep the job, so his wife Maria (Lianella Carell) pawns her bed linens to reclaim Ricci’s pawned bike. The family, which also includes son Bruno (the amazingly empathetic Ezno Staiola) and a small baby, is overjoyed for a brief time, but the bike is stolen about 18 minutes into the film when Ricci goes out on his first day of work. He loses the thief in a crowd and then spends much of the rest of the movie trying to locate it and/or the thief who stole it. Some friends and Bruno join him to look in the flea market for the bike but cannot find one with the right serial numbers to match his model. A couple of encounters with the thief also end unsuccessfully. Ricci sees him talking to an old man, and he follows the old man into a church but gets no useful information. He also encounters the thief at a brothel, but the crowd steps in to defend the thief and a police officer discourages Ricci from pressing charges since there are no witnesses who will support his story. Frustrated, Ricci tries to steal an unattended bike, but a crowd leaving a soccer match catches him and tries to get him arrested—the opposite of what happened to Ricci himself when his bicycle was stolen. The film ends with Bruno taking his distraught father’s hand, and they walk off into the darkening night, hardly the sort of upbeat ending you might expect from a Hollywood version of this story. As Ricci says at one point, “I’ve been cursed since the day I was born,” and it often feels like that bleak sentiment is accurate. The film rarely gives much respite from the sad state of the poor after World War II with the exception of a few moments of levity, such as when Ricci and Bruno stop in their search to eat at a restaurant. The film’s director, Vittorio de Sica, selected non-professionals to act in the movie and shot much of it on location in the streets of Rome. Bicycle Thieves retains all of its power to move viewers with its depiction of the desperate lives of people like Ricci and his family, and much of that is due to the clarity and simplicity with which the story is presented.

Oscar Win: Honorary Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Oscar Nomination: Best Screenplay