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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 9786305081036
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, NTSC
ISBN: 6305081034
Label: Image Entertainment
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
Number Of Items: 1
Picture Format: Academy Ratio
Publisher: Image Entertainment
Release Date: November 24, 1998
Running Time: 93 minutes
Sales Rank: 9096
Studio: Image Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: December 13, 1949
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Description:
A beautiful, simple story of a man in post-war Rome who needs his bicycle in order to work at his job. No sooner does he retrieve it from pawn, then it is stolen. The heartwrenching search teaches the man and his son much about the meaning of life and just how far we will go when pushed to the edge. Winner of a special Academy Award.
Amazon.com essential video:
Vittorio De Sica's remarkable 1947 drama of desperation and survival in Italy's devastating post-war depression earned a special Oscar for its affecting power. Shot in the streets and alleys of Rome, De Sica uses the real-life environment of contemporary life to frame his moving drama of a desperate father whose new job delivering cinema posters is threatened when a street thief steals his bicycle. Too poor to buy another, he and his son take to the streets in an impossible search for his bike. Cast with nonactors and filled with the real street life of Rome, this landmark film helped define the Italian neorealist approach with its mix of real life details, poetic imagery, and warm sentimentality. De Sica uses the wandering pair to witness the lives of everyday folks, but ultimately he paints a quiet, poignant portrait of father and son, played by nonprofessionals Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, whose understated performances carry the heart of the film. De Sica and scenarist Cesare Zavattini also collaborated on Shoeshine, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D, all classics in the neorealist vein, but none of which approach the simple poetry and quiet power achieved in The Bicycle Thief. --Sean Axmaker
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - a human voice
During postwar Italy a man seeks a job with great desperation and dire need, to support his family. When he finds one, he needs a bicycle to keep it. In one of those great subtle moments of this fantastic movie, his wife finds the resources to buy him one. Then in a split moment, the bicycle is stolen. The film has an incredible human voice projected into stunning scenes. Arthur Miller, said it best; "It's as if the soul of man had been filmed." In my words; the soul of the creator of this film, reached out with spiritual abandon.
Rating: - Well deserving of its "classic" label
Despite this movie's strong placement in the annals of those deemed "classics", I was a bit hesitant to check it out because I'm not the biggest fan of neorealism, and, strangely enough, a lot of my friends with opinions I respect really didn't like it. I've got to say that I'm going to have to side with those who call it a classic this time around. More specifically, I've never before seen a neorealist film I would ever have called "gripping" and I've not seen any neorealist film as good since "Roma, citta operta".
Let me quickly go through some of the myths and the more popular interpretations: it is true that the movie completely revolves around a man and his son searching for the man's stolen bicycle, but it is not true at all that there's nothing else to it. More specifically, it's about the man's relationship with his son as a main theme and an exploration of post-war Rome as subtext. It is true that it has quite a lot of communist themes placed through-out, but honestly those themes are entirely engulfed in the much more personal, tragic aspects of the movie. The more poignant political commentary is in the way the plot works, where people are forced to own property--a certain type of property--in order to get a job and thus get more property. Truly you can't blame the movie for that, because it has a point.
What this movie is really good at is shifting the emotions of the viewers to match those felt by the protagonist Antonio Vicci. The movie quickly establishes ... Read More
Rating: - Great
Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (Ladri Di Biciclette), made in 1948, in black and white, is one of the all time great films, and, in its Neo-realistic cinema verité simplicity, it shows how utterly creatively bankrupt most filmmaking these days is. And by that I mean worldwide, not just the obvious flaws of the Hollywood crap factory. Lean, spare, poetic- it tells one story, but tells it very well, and that story becomes universal, and is applicable to all people who have ever suffered, or been driven to do desperate things. Its screenplay is deceptively slight, but that does not mean it is not great. Oftentimes, it is assumed that a great screenplay must be witty like Woody Allen films, deep like Ingmar Bergman films, or characteristically complex like Robert Altman films, but great screenplays can also be the antithesis of those things. A great screenplay may be like that in Stanley Kubrick's for 2001: A Space Odyssey, full of symbolism writ large, and on the other hand, it can be like The Bicycle Thief, which is symbolic precisely because it is so intensely personal.
The film is almost pitch perfect from beginning to end, yet, as often happens, something is lost in the translation of its title, Ladri Di Biciclette, which literally means Bicycle Thieves, but in America is known as The Bicycle Thief. The original title is more literally true, as both the `real' thief and Antonio, steal bikes, and it also allows for a deeper look at their differing motivations. When we see the original thief's ... Read More
Rating:  - It Retains Its Power
"The Bicycle Thief," a dramatic, grainy black and white Italian film released in the United States in 1949, has long been considered one of the greats, for several reasons. The strongest must be that, along with Roberto Rossellini's 1946 "Open City," it gives us an unvarnished look at Rome, shortly after the end of World War II, which the Italians definitively lost. The city is devastated; its people are desperate for jobs, food, and shelter.
The movie was written by Cesare Zavattini, frequent collaborator of its director, Vittorio De Sica, erstwhile matinée idol, who took his camera onto the streets of Rome, used amateur actors, and filmed in natural light. He and Rossellini were therefore described as adherents of the "neorealist" school.
The plot of "The Bicycle Thief," as it was called in America is, of course, well-known. Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), one of the city's throngs of long-term unemployed, finally gets a job, and a good one with the city: putting up posters. But ownership of a bike is a prerequisite. His wife Maria (Lianella Carell) gets his out of hock by pawning the sheets in her dowry. On Ricci's very first day on the job, while he's hanging a poster of Rita Hayworth in "Gilda," his attention wanders from the bike. And it's gone, stolen just like that. He and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) frantically search the city for it. Maggiorani and Staiola, though both amateurs, turn in intense, fully inhabited performances. Staiola's, as the son Bruno, ... Read More
Rating: - Big fish, little fish, loser fish, thief fish
De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (plural, in the Italian) reminds us that hope takes many forms. In the case of Antonio Ricci and his family, hope is a bicycle. Ricci, one of the tens of thousands of unemployed workers in the Italian depression that followed WWII, finally gets a job in Rome as a sign-hanger. But the job requires that he have a bicycle. Ricci's bike is stolen his first day on the job, and he and his son Bruno embark on a fruitless search for it that occupies the bulk of the movie. They come close to it once, but the bike--a symbol of hope--remains elusive. Finally, in desperation, Ricci himself becomes a bicycle thief--but an unsuccessful one. The film ends with a heartbreaking shot of Ricci's face, despairing, humiliated in front of his adoring son, and hopeless because futureless.
Many commentators have focused on what they see as de Sica's moral theme: that poverty and the despair it brings erodes moral fiber. Ricci, the victim of robbery, himself stoops to robbery. But I think this misses the broader point. In a capitalist society, given the intensity of competition, the imperative to climb the social and economic ladder, and the merciless disregard for people who can't "cut it," everyone necessarily becomes a thief (hence the plural "thieves" in the title) just to survive. But only a handful--the movers and shakers, the beautiful people who live in penthouses and are relatively unaffected by the economic crises periodically churned up by the capitalist system--are successful ... Read More
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