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Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award-winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio de Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude, and brutal honesty.
the bicycle thief is everyman's search for dignity - it is as though the soul of a man had been filmed. the bicyle thief is about a man, a worker, who must have a bike in order to work at his job. he is desperate, pawns everything to regain his machine, goes to work, has the thing stolen from him while his back is turned, and then goes on a search through rome to find it. that is about all there is to it. but it happens to be very close to a lyrical masterpiece.
and this is not because we see rome as it is, or poor people, or rags. it is because these actual details are organized by a humane view of life. the film is unafraid to examine openly, straightforwardly, the terrible distorted, destructive world which man has made for himself.
it has a point of view. it is genuinely angry, in fact, ferocious. and this anger is not cloaked (angled), got at by indirection and ladies' magazine plot masquerades, but is expressed by means of a head-on collision with the facts of life as they exists.
for many years, while writing my plays, i had tried to find means for expressing my ideas about life. it is the central process of every writer's development. i came, painfully, to the area where there was nothing left, no plots, no cagey angles, but only the possibility of saying openly and clearly and simply what i had in mind to say, uncloaked, naively. the bicycle thief is especially dear to me - as it will be to many others - because it is so sweeetly. (arthur miller)
Lamberto Maggiorani