Bicycle Thieves

At nearly every turn, De Sica asks the viewer to consider the nature of theft and to what extent an individual could become a complicit component of systemic thievery. Ultimately, the thefts referenced in the film’s title prove to be not just a description, but also a confession, since the film’s ultimate thief is De Sica himself, who dangles the prospect of the bicycle’s recovery just beyond Antonio’s grasp, almost to the point of cruelty.

Bicycle Thieves wasn’t even that “neo-real,” being a studio film that used back projection and employed a number of supporting-role pros. But it remains one of art film’s most powerful gateway drugs, still haunting in its painful simplicity, laced with the unforgettable behavioral moments that may be De Sica’s greatest claim to posterity.

Revealing the catastrophic impact of seemingly minor events on people who are struggling to subsist, De Sica endows slender side business and incidental pictorial details with high suspense and tragic grandeur. With a keen succession of tracking shots amid crowds at a market and a church, he transforms the sheer scale of the city and the vast number of residents in similarly desperate straits into a symphonic lament for the human condition.