- Sometimes life is just miserable, and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves understands that fundamental fact incredibly well. Its main character, Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), is an essentially honest man who wants nothing more than the opportunity to work and support his family. One day, he gets selected for a poster-pasting job that requires the worker to own a bicycle. He had to hock his bike a while back, but his wife Maria (Lianella Carell) has some heirloom bedsheets they could sell to buy it back. Now that Antonio has a job, they're sure to get their lives back on track, right? Let's just agree that a fortune teller's predictions regarding Antonio are ambiguous at best.
- While Antonio is hard at work one day, the bike gets stolen. Antonio gives chase, but how can you outrun a bike? He drags his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) to one of Rome's many outdoor markets where a stolen bike would be likely to surface. That one sure looks like his bike, but an examination of the serial number reveals that it is not. Maybe those are the wheels? Could that be the man who stole it? The alleged thief takes off down the street, but Antonio and Bruno trail his elderly companion into a crowded church. When it's your word against theirs, how can you ever win?
- Bicycle Thieves' greatest strength is surely the way in which it captures Antonio's increasing desperation. It's easy to imagine that his family's future hinges on whether or not he can recover the bike, and Antonio knows it. He's a man who would never normally hit his son or steal someone else's possessions, but when he does both of these things the story turns from sad to truly tragic. Helped immensely by its excellent location filming in postwar Rome and memorable shots of towering stacks of bedsheets and endless rows of bicycle parts, Bicycle Thieves is the kind of movie to make you thankful for what you've got. One expects that Antonio reaches the same conclusion by the film's end, but for him the lesson is a painful one.
- A young Sergio Leone plays a seminary student.
