Within a few years, the import and export of movie stars would become a fixture of Italy’s cultural and economic boom. The first work we see Antonio doing is hanging up a poster of Rita Hayworth, a sign that Hollywood is part of the Italian landscape. While it is free of those genre trappings, “Bicycle Thieves” has a sometimes playful, sometimes poetic self-consciousness. (The Venice Film Festival was another.) The leading lights of neorealism - including De Sica, a prominent actor before he took up directing - had started out working in Mussolini’s movie industry, which specialized in slick melodramas and high-society romances as well as propaganda. Cinecittà had been built by Mussolini as one monumental expression of his belief in the natural affinity between fascism and film. Right after the war, money and equipment were in short supply, and the vast Cinecittà studio complex on the southern edge of Rome was a refugee camp. Neorealism was partly an aesthetic of necessity. Part of what draws filmmakers (and film lovers) to “Bicycle Thieves” is its purity and simplicity, but to emphasize those elements - the unvarnished honesty of the performances, the gritty realness of the Roman streets, the raw emotions of the story - is to risk underestimating its complexity and sophistication. His love of the movie costs him a job and causes him embarrassment on a television quiz show. One of them, a left-wing intellectual played by Stefano Satta Flores, is obsessed with De Sica and “Bicycle Thieves,” a preoccupation with absurd, unhappy consequences. My own favorite is Ettore Scola’s “We All Loved Each Other So Much,” which traces the postwar lives and loves of four anti-fascist partisans. It has been quoted and referenced in countless later movies. “Bicycle Thieves” itself has become an essential part of the cultural patrimony, a touchstone to be treasured, teased and taken for granted. In Italy, the neorealist impulse has been refreshed in each generation, in the work of filmmakers like Ermanno Olmi and, most recently, Alice Rohrwacher, whose “Happy as Lazzaro” infuses a story of hardship and exploitation with literal magic. Films like Ramin Bahrani’s “Chop Shop” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy,” which tally the moral and existential costs of economic precariousness, have a clear affinity with “Bicycle Thieves.” The spirits of Maria and Antonio Ricci - and perhaps especially of the impish, vulnerable Bruno - live on in the work of Satyajit Ray in Bengal in the late 1950s, in the Brazilian Cinema Novo in the 1960s, in Iran in the 1990s and the United States in the first decade of this century. I prefer to think of neorealism as an impulse, an ethos, a spore that caught the wind of history and sprouted in the soil of every continent. The tragedy it depicts arises partly from poverty, injustice and the aftereffect of dictatorship, but more profoundly from a deficit of empathy. More than 70 years after Crowther’s enthusiastic notice - during which time Vittorio De Sica’s fable of desperation has been imitated, satirized, analyzed and taught in schools - I’m tempted to let my predecessor have the last word.īut why should you see it, or see it again? Why should you (still) care? These are fair questions to ask of any consensus masterpiece - skepticism is what keeps art alive, reverence embalms it - and especially apt in the case of “Bicycle Thieves.” The movie is about seeing and caring, about the danger of being distracted from what matters. It’s “Bicycle Thieves” (“Ladri di Biciclette” in Italian) not only because more than one bike is stolen, but also because the cruelty of modern life threatens to make robbers of us all. The English title has since been adjusted to reflect the original. “People should see it - and they should care.” Those are the concluding words to one of the more passionate raves in the annals of New York Times film criticism: Bosley Crowther’s 1949 review of the Italian movie introduced to American audiences as “ The Bicycle Thief.”
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