BICYCLE THIEF, THE

Details

• Release Year: 1949
• Genre: Crime, Drama, Foreign
• Plot: The Bicycle Thief is Everyman’s search for dignity – it is as though the soul of a man had been filmed.; ; The Bicycle 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 human view of life. The film is unafraid to examine openly, straightforwardly, the terribly 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), get 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 exist.; ; 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 sweetly naïve.;
• Cast: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell, Gino Saltamerenda, Vittorio Antonucci, Giulio Chiari, Elena Altieri, Carlo Jachino, Michele Sakara, Fausto Guerzoni, Giulio Battiferri, Ida Bracci Dorati, Nando Bruno, Eolo Capritti, Memmo Carotenuto, Giovanni Corporale, Sergio Leone, Mario Meniconi, Massimo Randisi, Checco Rissone, Peppino Spadaro, Umberto Spadaro, Vittorio De Sica
• Director: Vittorio De Sica
• Runtime: 1:29
• Company: Image Entertainment
• Media Format: Movie