THE BICYCLE THIEF Movie Review

Ladri di Biciclette

Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis can be found on America's postage stamps, but in Italy, for 650 lira, you can mail a letter featuring the trusting, confused, heartbreakingly eloquent face of little Bruno (Enzo Staiola), son of the desperate and shattered character whose story is at the heart of Vittorio de Sica's masterpiece, The Bicycle Thief. I mention this only because in an age of instantly proclaimed greatness and ever-escalating critical hyperbole, it's reassuring to know that this 1948 triumph of Italy's neo-realist cinema movement is indeed regarded as a national treasure. It is. Bruno's father is a decent man who, like so many after the war, is in need of a job. He's finally hired as a poster-hanger, but when the bicycle that he needs for the job is stolen, he and his son commence a hopeless search through the streets, alleys, and black markets of Rome to retrieve the thread that is tenuously holding the family's lives together. The image on that stamp is of Bruno's face at the end, after the inevitable yet still shocking climax of the film, which gives a full and deep resonance to the movie's title (which is in the more accurate plural form, Ladri di Biciclette, in its original Italian title). Cesare Zavattini's screenplay was actually nominated for a 1949 Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and the film itself received an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Though the film seems to go in and out of fashion over the years, appearing near the top of critics’ ten-best-of-all-time lists and then disappearing from the lists completely, this trendiness is meaningless. The Bicycle Thief is a great, timeless cry of despair that many of us like to put away during good times, especially good economic times. Yet just like an undeniable conscience, The Bicycle Thief—a truly inspired masterwork and one of the most indelible of all cinematic visions of the human condition—returns to us whenever its needed.

NEXT STOP … Shoeshine, Forbidden Games, Los Olvidados

1948 90m/B IT Lamberto Maggiorani, Lianella Carell, Enzo Staiola, Elena Altieri, Vittorio Antonucci, Gino Saltamerenda, Fausto Guerzoni; D: Vittorio De Sica; W: Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini; C: Carlo Montuori; M: Alessandro Cicognini. Academy Awards ‘49: Best Foreign Film; British Academy Awards ‘49: Best Film; Golden Globe Awards ‘50: Best Foreign Film; National Board of Review Awards ‘49: Best Director (De Sica); New York Film Critics Awards ‘49: Best Foreign Film; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘49: Best Screenplay. VHS, LV NOS, MRV, FCT