The Bicycle Thieves/The Bicycle Thief Film Review

The Bicycle Thieves was made by Vittorio de Sica in 1948 and tells the story of a poor man having his most essential material possession stolen from him, namely his bike, and the long search for it with his son.The bike is what enables the male protagonist, Antonio Ricci to have his job, which is putting up film posters on the streets of Italy. His very job; putting up posters for films is very controversial, because in one shot, Antonio is putting up a poster of Rita Hayworth, a well known Hollywood star, this is to reflect the parallel universes that Italy and America are in.The disgust with Hollywood and the money making business it is, is always present in Italian Neo-Realist films.

There is a Marxist message which flows through Bicycle Thieves, the poster being one of them; Antonio our poor man has succumbed to putting up Hollywood film posters in a Depression struck Italy.In the scene where Antonio and Bruno go to the church to follow the mysterious old man who they hope will lead them to the bike, the church is penalised. Here we see each person present at church is given their free shave, salvation, and soup in an unsympathetic and mechanical manner.

The middle classes untouched by the immediacy of the poverty and unemployment of the reconstruction are seemingly timeless, attending church, football games and patronising restaurants.However this marks them as hypocritical. This reflects the church as a money making machine, but furthermore that people did not have much faith in them and attending not out for worships sake, but for survival sake.

Another scene which supports my argument is when Maria (Antonio’s wife) goes to the fortune teller, who turns out to be a money grabbing fraud.We see people lining up around her cosy living room waiting to hear their fortune, and even see Antonio skip the line, and the people getting angry, this reflects the desperation that many Italians felt about their future.

Desperation is constant in Italian-Neo-Realist films, as well as poverty and the existence of the class system. The trade union is attacked in Bicycle Thieves, another supposedly helpful institution. Antonio and Bruno are alone, alienated by the untouchable bourgeois culture; deprived of the trappings of silver cutlery in the restaurant, and from the movements of Rome, so often used as spatial signifier in other films.

In The Bicycle Thieves Rome is unsympathetic and selfish. This is a conscious break from Hollywood gloss. We see this when Antonio goes to the Italian restaurant with Bruno, from their mannerism we learn they never dine out.There is a wealthy family behind them on another table and we see their child look at Bruno in disgust, childhood innocence being corrupted is represented here.

The fact that Antonio takes Bruno with him on his search for his bike across the city just reflects this too, Bruno is more like Antonio’s mirror than a son, when he goes missing near the lake, and Antonio hardly cares.The scene where a screaming child is heard from the lake, Antonio finally looks worried but when he realises it is not his Bruno he turns around with a fed up facial expression. He does not even go to see if the child is okay, here we see the idea that people are out for themselves in the midst of poverty and desperation.

Italian Neo-Realist films offer progressive analysis of the world they represent; however they are not merely documentary films. Despite their realism there is a lot of poetic justice to their films, the use of dubbing in films not only reflect a realistic view point but an artistic one.

To my knowledge, all the directors in the central corpus of the loosely defined ‘neo-realist movement’ were left-wing like Visconti was Marxist. The patriarchal family and later the premature adulthood of Bruno are defined by the material object of the bicycle.According to Marxist analysis, the superstructure of society, including human relations, is defined by an economic base. In terms of neo-realist aesthetics, this was determined by restricted, sometimes whimsical filming equipment and technique. The realism of the long take, for example, influenced the message of the film, which portrayed working-class life and human reactions.Another subsequent theme of Italian Neo-Realist films were of open spacelocation shooting.

We see this is Bicycle Thieves and in Rossellini’s Rome Open City. They primarily did this as studios were hard to come by and expensive, but also to convey a raw image of post-war Italy.The use of non professional characters gave it that extra authentic trade mark, and a real life vision on Italians and how they lived. ‘Like many of the neo-realist directors, his primary aim in the Bicycle Thieves was to use the camera to show how people lived, whilst maintaining an objective distance’, I agree with this quote to an extent because in the scene near the end of the film when Antonio is procrastinating on stealing a random bicycle on the street.

The very act of stealing another man’s bike just shows again, the desperation of Italians in post-war Italy and how it is a never ending selfish battle.A better example of this is right at the end of the film when Bruno and Antonio have lost their pride by attempting to steal a bike. Having been embarrassingly caught, we see a high shot of a crowd of Italians. Bruno and Antonio start walking towards an unknown destination.

This gives us an objective view in once stance, as we see don’t know where they are actually walking to or what will become of Bruno and Antonio but the ending also directs us in thinking that their life will constantly be a struggle.

Going back to the scene when Antonio steals the bicycle, the police, in informing the journalist that “nothing” has happened, “It’s just a stolen bicycle” highlights the gulf between the unsympathetic law and the absolute dependence of Antonio on the bicycle.

This is a protest against the decadence of pre-war fascist cinema and Hollywood, which would feel compelled to choose a more exciting subject matter such as the modern Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Here we have suspicions the thief may be for entertainment value and the bike looks attractive and exists merely for pleasure value.

Unlike Antonio, where the loss of his bike, means a loss of his job. It shows us that their films might provide entertainment to the forces of sensationalism, but it is empty in relation to the personal drama of one man.All Italian-Neo Realist films carry a similar pattern, and constant themes in reflecting the depiction of glamorous America and the desperation of Italy. The films were brutally honest scenarios with a simple yet important plot line, important, in terms of its social message.

Whilst Italian Neo-Realist films were being produced, Hollywood continued producing films based idealism, glossed films as a form of escapism from the chaos that the rest of the world was going through. On one hand this is necessary as it may have given hope to the masses or even a healthy form of escapism.However the naivety of the subject matter in Hollywood films at the time gave a negative view stigma- Being ruthless, unaware and unsympathetic. Italian Neo-Realist films offered a cathartic impact to audiences during post-war Italy and in my opinion that is what films should be appreciated and respected for.