Massimo Randisi	The middle class boy in the restaurant
Vittorio Antonucci	the thieve
Ida Bracci Dorati	the holy woman
Lianella Carell	Maria Ricci
Carlo Jachino	the beggar
Lamberto Maggiorani	Antonio Ricci
Michele Sakara	secretary to the charity
Gino Saltamerenda	Baiocco
Enzo Staiola	Bruno
Elena Altieri	Mrs. Benefactress
Fausto Guerzoni	an amateur actor
Spoletini
Peppino Spadaro	the sergeant
Mario Meniconi	Meniconi the street sweeper
Checco Rissone	The vigilant in "Piazza del Popolo"
Giulio Battiferri	a citizen that defends the true thief
Sergio Leone	a seminarist
Memmo Carotenuto
Nando Bruno
Emma Druetti
Giovanni Corporale
Eolo Capritti
Giulio Chiari	a billsticker

Antonio Ricci, married and father of two children, is jobless. He was offered a job as billsticker on condition that he owns a bicycle. Ricci goes to the Mountain of the Pawns and he gets it in exchange of the house sheets. The following day he goes to work and, while he is applaying the manifest of Gilda, the bicycle is stolen him. It is not an isolated theft, in fact every day in Rome a big number of cycles disappears and the police is not able that to recommend Ricci to do the necessary investigations on his own. Accompanied by his child of 10 years old, Bruno, Antonio begins his searches going without getting the end of nothing, to Vittorio Square where it’s not difficult to find stolen commodities. From there, the two move to Porta Portese and here Ricci recognizes the thief that is confabulating wiht an old man. The thief vanishes and Antonio pursues the old man to get some information in a room next to the church where a committee of beneficence has assembled. the old mendicant answers in an evasive way to Ricci’s questions on the boy who has robbed him and then disappears. After having unjustly slapped Bruno, Antonio, to be forgiven, accompanies his child to the restaurant and reflects on what to do. He goes to a holy woman, but she is not able to give him any indication. Remembering an address whispered by the old beggar, father and child goes there and Antonio meets again the thief, he pursues him in a brothel, he tries to force him to confess but he denies and fells, prey of an epileptic crisis. Desperate, father and child go in front of the town stadium where the crowd from the inside follows the game noisily. Ricci invites the little child to take the bus, and he appropriates of a bicycle approached to a front door. The owner gathers on the fact Antonio. Immediately reached, he is maltreated and insulted; Bruno has lost the bus and assists to the humiliation of his father. The stolen man seems to understand the mute desperation of Antonio and touched in front of his child Bruno’s tears, he leaves him free without denouncing him. His child offers the hand to his father and together they come back home.

PRIZES

Prize OSCAR (1949) for the best foreign film
Big Prize at the World Festival of the Film and of the Arts of Belgium (1949)
Silver ribbon (1949) for the best film, subject, direction, screen-play, photography and music.
Special prize of the jury at the IV Festival of Locarno (1949)
Prize of the British Film Academy (1950)
Besides, it has been judged “the best second film of every time” at the Confrontation of Bruxelles (1958)

CRITIQUE

It is one of the best work of Neorealism “center around which the work of the other neoralists orbits”. Shiny and deep analysis of the hard reality of that years, it is the highest point of the collaboration between De Sica and Zavattini, where “theirs poetics of the daily and of the tailing harmonize together”( discovering on the tracks of the common men a world of poverty and problems ever resolved) and their love for the characters, and that is trues sense of pity”. De Sica won his second Oscar for the best foreign film (after Sciuscià) and showed how much his choice to use non professional actors was winning (the tradition wants that some possible American co-productors proposed Cary Grant for the main role).(P. Mereghetti “Dixionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)

“The anecdote is weak, essentially in the departure: a bicycle of third hand is not so difficult to get in Italy. Overcome the small initial obstacle, the story slides genial and happy. [...] It is a masterpiece made of nothing, between the fist Clair and the second Chaplin, full of delicate observations of scene, of atmosphere ideas: an elegy born under the sign of the grace, and that will be difficult to repeat [...]”. (P. Bianci, “Filmcrictica”, 6/7, giugno/luglio 1951, translated by Alice Castoldi).

NOTES

The title of the second film realized by Vittorio De Sica in the postwar period, with proper means, since nobody wanted to finance him after the commercial flop of Sciuscià (1946), is borrow from a book of Luigi Bartolini, eccentric writer and fine engraver. But of the fancies that distinguish the “adventures of a poor literate” of Bartolini remains nothing in Bicycle Thieves. And also a few remains in the images of the films contribution of many scriptwriters, and of the same director too. De Sica, impressed by the speech on the “return to reality” with which the Italian critics, but above all the foreigners, have explained the artisic result fo Sciuscià, he unleashes them for the city, Rome, to see what there is of unusual and of meaningful. Each of them, of old, very old or new (or desirous to appear such) school, brings at home something. That “notes from the truth”, those vivacious descriptions of types of knowledge of of recent mintage, that squirts of popular environment serve to De Sica to discharge his love for the acting, to color a little character on the background, to free him of what belongs to his past of actor and director of comic-sentimental entertainment. After been purified he is able, finally, to throw in an adventure, entirely unpredictable, in the city behind two figures “of the road”, unacceptable in a film that wants to like to the public: Antonio, a poor of Valmelaina that will lose his job if he won’t find the bicycle they have stolen him, and his child Bruno. The screen-play of Bicycle Thieves, polished up and arranged by Zavattini, is dense of “signals” that could push the director in every direction: towards the pleasant sketch, the weeepy big drama, the picturesque sight of and Italy for “tourists”, full of thieves and prostitutes, fanatics and people with good heart. There is the local little theatre that is not very differnet from that of Teresa Venerdì (1941) where Anna Magnani listened, yawning, the actor-manager’s lesson on the sacred love and the profane love. There is “the poor men table” with pert priestling and swindler beggars. There is Porta Portese with the querulous seminarists, a “queer” that gives some bother, but not so much, to the small Bruno and that scoundrels and make crazy the photographer of the Sunday. There is the middle class family with the pretentious and annoyng little boy, that looks down the poors that “dare” to enter in the restaurant. There is the “holy woman” that, in return of a few lire, foretells the destiny, and discloses you if you will find the girl or the lost bicycle. There is, since that we are able to talk about some environments in cinema, the brothel. There is a lot, in short, of color in the postwar period. De Sica, with a taste that never comes less, use all this elements satisfying, in that way, the pleasure of the acting that he brings with himslef. But, doing it, he never loses of sight, rather, the central motive that pushed him to throw in his adventure in the heart of the city: the human factor. He studies him in the relationship between a father, Antonio, and a child, Bruno, whose motivaitons are not born from an abstract “civilization of the feelings” but derive from a real situation and, for some verses, typical in the first postwar period. The analysis of the director is very penetrating, dense of rare, and perhaps equalized by him, humanity. Some film sequences - Antonio that fears that his child has thrown in the Tevere, Bruno that runs to help his father that has tried to steal a bicycle and has been stopped by the people gone out of the stadium - also seen after years of distance , they fully preserve their emotional strength. Standing always behind the characters (she must not be forgotten, for the delicacy of the planning, his mother’s figure), De Sica doesn’t neglect to carry back them in a particular environmental context. The city, returned in a soft white and black, deprived of contrasts, is an unifying presence in Bicycle Thieves that, still today, beyond the failure of public, is judged by many critics one of the best films of the cinema history. (From “Il Cinema Grande storia Illustrata, third volume of De Agostini 1981, translated by Alice Castoldi)