BICYCLE THIEVES

De Sica's use of non-professional actors, social engagement and firm roots in society, paved the way for neorealism, cinema of the real.

About this Event


"I saw Bicycle Thieves in the late 1950s, when I was in my late teens. I'd left school, was heading towards an unsuccessful year as an actor and theatre director and the film has a big effect on me.
It made me realise that cinema could be about ordinary people and their dilemmas. It wasn't a film about stars, or riches or absurd adventures. I was able to see cinema in another light, outside the Hollywood nonsense... I love this idea of telling a story in microcosm; if you get the story right and the characters right, the film will say everything about the wider picture without having to generalise. Of course, that's how I rationalised it later. At the time, I just thought : Wow." Ken Loach

Bicycle Thieves won an Academy Award for outstanding foreign language film (1949) and topped Sight and Sound's inaugural 'Greatest Films of All Time' poll of critics in 1952.

A landmark of humanist filmmaking, it was a key work in the 1940s film movement known as Italian neorealism. Vittorio De Sica heralded a new kind of cinematic naturalism, taking the camera onto the streets to record the social realities of a Europe struggling to recover after the Second World War.

Adapted from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the quiet tragedy of a desperate hunt for a stolen bicycle has a fable-like simplicity. For all its vivid documentation of a downtrodden Rome, it's as a universal tale of human striving that De Sica's film has proved influential.

Vittorio De Sica on 'Bicycle Thieves'

"To see is very useful for an artist. Most men do not want to see, because often the pain of others troubles them. We, on the contrary, want to see. Our one aim is to see.

How many times the workman Antonio passed close to me: I met him in the street, at church, at the door of the cinema while he read the programme outside. I saw him several times with his son. In Italy, men often go out with their sons. Children converse and argue with their fathers, become confidants, and very often become no longer children, but 'little men'.

This, I think, is universal, and that is why the image of these two beings, which I always saw united, made me decide to choose the story of Antonio and Bruno.

Lamberto Maggiorani, a simple workman of Breda, was very kind to me. He left his own work for two months to lend his face to me. I never had any difficulty with him... He lived with great truth and naturalness the part of Antonio, from whom was stolen the tool he needed for living - his bicycle. It was not hard for me to direct Maggiorani.

Enzo Staiola is the most lovable child in the world. He is good, sensitive, intelligent. I don't think it is possible to create a character like that of Bruno without having the qualities which Enzo possesses. He is a poor child, son of refugees, whom I met by chance in the street. His open, communicative face appealed to me at once. His expressions are half comic. His eyes have a soft and melancholy look. With his large nose and chubby cheeks, he has the unmistakable look of a child who has known suffering. I had no difficulty whatever in directing this child."[Sight and Sound, March 1950]

ITALY | 1948 | B&W | HD | 89 mins

Italian, with ENGLISH SUBTITLES AT TOP OF SCREEN

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