The Bicycle Thief
He lost his life when they stole his bike!
Antonio (Played by Lamberto Maggiorani) is a poor man who is overjoyed when he is at last offered a job, delivering and putting up movie posters. But he needs a bicycle, and is required to supply his own, so when he tells his wife Maria (Played by Lianella Carelli) she pawns the family's entire collection of bed linen to get the bicycle he had already pawned. On his first day at work, the unlocked bike is stolen (now isn’t that a good enough reason to put a chain around your bike) and Antonio drops the glue and brush to go on a desperate chaise through the streets after the thief and is then miss leaded by a man and goes after the wrong person on a bike. Then he goes home and tells his wife and goes on a manhunt for the person who has his bike. He looks through the streets of Rome with his little boy Bruno (Played by Enzo Staiola) to get his bike back, demanding, accusing, and uncovering scenes of poverty similar to theirs wherever they go this is due for the end of the depression. They create pandemonium in classic crowd moments: in the streets, in a market, in a church and many more places. Faces always gather eagerly around the pair, all commenting, complaining and generally magnifying the father and son's distress and embarrassment. This is a story that magnificently withholds the comic or dramatic palliatives. The son is the one who had be a witness of the father's humiliation, his failure as a provider. The scenes at the beginning of the film, when Antonio casually leaves his bicycle unlocked and it remains for the moment miraculously un-stolen, have to be watched through your fingers because you don’t know if they would steal his bike then and the movie starts from there or further in the film. Antonio seems unable or unwilling to embrace the obvious redemptive moral - that his son is the important possession, not the wretched bicycle, perhaps because it is too obvious, or because this moral is a luxury that only well-off people can afford. The father is obsessed with finding a stolen needle in the urban haystack, obsessed with getting his job back. Again and again, he ignores his little boy while scanning the horizon for his bicycle. At one part, he hears an uproar from the riverbank about a "drowning boy". With a guilty start, he looks around. Are the people meaning Bruno is drowning? No: there he is, safe and sound waiting were his father left him. But the lesson is not yet learned. He doesn't even hold Bruno's hand! And, in a later scene, we see the poor boy almost run over by a car because his father isn't looking out for him as they cross the street. Bruno's simple physical survival is the movie's secret miracle, and he is finally to be his father's savior, but in such a way as to turn into Antonio's humiliation complete, when he saves him from being arrested for stealing a bicycle witch is probably where the film gets its name because first it was called Bicycle Thieves and was later changed to “The Bicycle Thief” because of the surprising twist at the end. This is poverty's authentic sting: dull and horrible loss of dignity. The Bicycle Thief is a brilliant, tactlessly real work of art but it’s not really the type of movie I would enjoy watching a lot just because it doesn’t have a happy ending but overall I this film deserves at least a 8 out of 10 in my perspective.
