Ladri di biciclette aka The Bicycle Thief or Bicycle Thieves
The Bicycle Thief in a newly restored 35 mm print is into the second week of a run at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre. I saw this classic of Italian neorealism at least twice before last Sunday afternoon, but it had been many years and I forgot just how good it is. So it was I ventured to the Hollywood more from a sense that I ought not miss an opportunity to catch an old classic and should support theaters that show these films than from genuine enthusiasm. Sometimes we are rewarded for doing the right thing.
Directed by Vittorio de Sica, The Bicycle Thief was made in 1948 and released in the U.S. in 1949. The setting is Rome just after the war, where armies of unemployed men are desperate for work. Antonio Ricci is offered a job for which he needs the bicycle he pawned to buy food for his family. His wife pawns the bedsheets to get the bicycle out of hock, and Antonio happily goes to work plastering film posters featuring Rita Hayworth on building walls, only to have some lowlife steal his bicycle the first day on the job.
Antonio files a report with the police, who do not have resources to spare to search for a stolen bicycle. The only good the police report will do is to serve as evidence if he finds the bicycle himself. So Antonio and his son Bruno embark on a desperate but fruitless search that takes them all over the city, to bicycle markets, a mission, the river where a boy almost drowns, a cafe, and a brothel.
The camera loves Bruno, a tousle-haired little boy in shorts and a jacket, with a scarf worn jauntily around his neck. Somewhere in the neighborhood of eight years of age, the little fellow has a streetwise air and just a little bit of a swagger as he runs after his father, eyeballs an assortment of bicycle horns looking for one that belongs to the stolen bike, hastily genuflects before the cross as they are chased from the mission when Antonio disrupts the service questioning an old man he thinks has a connection to the thief, eyes a little girl from a well-to-do family enjoying a sumptuous meal in the restaurant where Bruno and his father eat bread and mozzarella as Antonio exclaims today we are free and pours a little wine into a glass for Bruno.
Antonio is not a deep thinker, just an ordinary fellow trying to provide for his family. His thoughts are in the main pedestrian, his focus entirely on the job and getting the bicycle back. At the film’s end he and Bruno find themselves outside a stadium where a soccer match is in progress. Antonio spots a bicycle leaning unattended against a building around the corner and up the street and is overwhelmed by temptation. Anguished, he turns away from the bicycle and back to Bruno, sitting on the curb. Then back to the bicycle. He gives Bruno money and tells him to take the streetcar to a place where they will meet up later. It goes badly, and the film ends with Antonio walking grim-faced, without hope, through the darkening city, Bruno at his father’s side, clutching his hand.
Somerset Maugham said there are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are. There are many ways to go about making a novel or movie or a poem or a painting. The Bicycle Thief is devoid of dazzling pyrotechnic special effects. The dialogue is not snappy, the plot turns neither convoluted nor complex. The characters do not exhibit the psychological and spiritual torment we find in Bergman or Fellini’s special brand of ennui mixed with joie de vivre. The Bicycle Thief succeeds as the unadorned but compelling story of an unexceptional man caught up in the most human of conditions. When I walked from the theatre I felt moved…and alive.
Roger Ebert’s 1999 review is an exceptional tribute to exceptional film.
David :: May.15.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »