Bicycle Thieves

Ladri di Biciclette
(Bicyle Thieves)

　

　

Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film, Bicycle Thieves was once considered the greatest movie ever made. This was in 1952 when the British Film Institute’s editors of Sight and Sound commissioned its first poll of international critics – What were the ten best movies ever made? The film voted as number one was de Sica’s picture. (A few laters, the film slipped to sixth place and hasn’t been mentioned in this ranking for many years.)

I can attest to the fact that this film had a profound impact on people who saw the picture in theaters when it was relatively new. Twenty five or more years ago, I was in Albert Lea helping Ken Strom try a car crash case. We were defending for the insurance company and Bob Leighton represented the plaintiff who had suffered soft-tissue injuries in the collision. As is the case today, Minnesota lawyers are forced to rely upon depositions to prove the scope and extent of their client’s traumatic injuries. In smaller cases, lawyers took the deposition and, then, read the testimony into evidence before the jury. Terry Meany, a well-known trial lawyer practicing with Leighton, drove over the Freeborn County and he played the role of the doctor, taking the stand and answering the printed questions put to him by his partner. This sort of thing is dull. Strom had me at his side so that I could sit at counsel table with the hapless defendant during the hour or so when the deposition was read into evidence. If I remember correctly, Mr. Strom went outside and made some phone calls and flirted with the court personnel. I sat in the courtroom dutifully following along in my copy of the transcript as the testimony was read into the record. Mr. Strom had told me to withdraw objections that had been made a couple months earlier when the testimony was actually taken. Accordingly, from time to time, I would stand up as an objection approached in the transcript and withdraw it.

After the deposition was read into evidence, the Court adjourned for the day. It was our turn to offer testimony but we didn’t have any witnesses ready and so the Judge recessed around 4:15 pm. Mr. Strom admired Terry Meany, although he also told me often that he was sometimes dishonest and couldn’t be trusted. (I’m sure Meany said the same thing about Mr. Strom.) Strom and Meany decided to have a few drinks after the trial and, so, I met them – I had driven separately – in a gloomy tavern in one of the hotels out on the strip. It was a place across from several used car lots and located behind the lobby in the motel. I think the bar was called something like "The Granary".

Old lions like Mr. Strom and Terry Meany went out of their way to chat-up the waitress. Both of them apparently knew her somehow. We had mixed drinks and, after a several, Terry Meany got a little sentimental. He said that when he was young, he was idealistic and wanted to serve the cause of justice. Meany told us that he had been greatly affected by a movie that he called The Bicycle Thief. Meany said that the movie was a revelation to him and that it had changed his life. "It’s the greatest movie I ever saw," Meany said. Mr. Strom looked to me for a comment. It was pretty clear that he hadn’t seen the movie and had no interest in it and didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. "Beckmann knows about stuff like that," Mr. Strom said. I nodded sagely. Meany said: "Isn’t it a great movie? I know that I was crying at the end of the movie." I said that The Bicycle Thief was, indeed, a great movie and a fine example of Italian neo-realism. But that was all that I knew about the film. I had never seen it and had no interest in the picture. The Bicycle Thief, like the films of Ingmar Bergman, was something that had fascinated by father and his generation. Cinema had moved on since that time. Meany confirmed this thought by saying to me that he thought The Seventh Seal was the second greatest movie that he had ever seen. Mr. Strom was baffled and changed the subject to sports.

In one of her essays, Pauline Kael describes going to de Sica’s earlier movie Shoeshine (1946). She had just suffered a disappointment in love and the film triggered torrents of tears. As she staggered out of the movie theater, she heard another woman say that she couldn’t see "what all the fuss was about." This caused Ms. Kael to cry even more. In her essay, Pauline Kael said that she didn’t know if she was crying over her lost boyfriend or because of the movie or because the world was such a cruel and heartless place that it could harbor people who were not moved by Shoeshine.

Ultimately, Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves are at the root of a thousand later films. The entire Iranian New Wave derives from de Sica’s movies. The little boy who tries to return his friend’s homework in Abbas Kiastoami’s Where is the Friend’s House? (1982) is brother to the characters in Bicycle Thieves desperately searching for the stolen bicycle. Many of Satjayit Ray’s pictures, particularly those in the Apu cycle are unthinkable without the model of Bicycle Thieves and other Italian neo-realist films. Dozens of American independent features are also modeled on these pictures – Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy (2008) about a homeless woman looking for her lost dog is an example of a movie that derives in large part from Bicycle Thieves.

　


Italian Neo-Realism
Italian neo-realism begins with the dingy small-town dives in Visconti’s Ossessione (1942). Visconti shot on location and the sordid tale of lust and murder that his film depicts (based on James Cain’s The Postman always rings twice) brought a new kind of detailed verismo to Italian films. (Ossessione is also regarded as a proto film noir.) As far as international critics were concerned, the break-through picture was Rome: Open City (1945), Rossellini’s documentary-style war-film – when Anna Magnani, not a conventionally beautiful actress but a force of nature, is gunned-down on the city streets, she sprawls on the pavement with her thighs and underpants exposed. This was not something that you could see in Hollywood or British pictures and signaled a new esthetic. Later, Rossellini made pictures in the ruins of European cities using entirely non-professional actors – Paisan (1946) was produced in this way as was his unbearably bleak Germany Year Zero (1948) shot in the wreckage of Berlin. The movement was self-defeating – audiences in the post-war period were looking for escapist fare not pessimistic films about poverty and starvation. Vittorio de Sica, probably the most talented of the neo-realists, made one more picture in that vein, Umberto D. (1952), another film that is so grim that it is almost impossible to watch – the movie is about an old pensioner who is literally starving to death and his only real companion, a small dog named Flike. (Ingmar Bergman said he had seen the movie over a hundred times and it was the film that "(he) most loved.) By the mid-fifties, the Italian neo-realist movement had run its course and was replaced by a series of racy comedies that did very well with American audiences. Estimates vary, but by some accounts there were only 21 actual neo-realist films produced in Italy.) De Sica returned to neo-realism once with his 1961 film Two Women, the film that made Sophia Loren famous, but was content to direct light sex-comedies for the next decade or so.

Neo-realism didn’t emerge from a void. De Sica was familiar with some of Jean Renoir’s films that have an intensely realist, almost documentary slant. Visconti had been an assistant on Renoir’s 1935 Toni, a movie about guest-workers in southern France filmed entirely on location. (Toni is a masterpiece – the movie looks like it was shot yesterday.) In Italy, the director Antonio Blasetti directed the film 1860 (1935), a movie about an anonymous Italian man riding to join Garibaldi’s partisans during the Risorgimento. This film, also shot with natural light and on location, uses non-professional actors and, also, positioned itself as a response (and rebuke) to the so-called Telefoni Bianchi ("White Telephone") movies, mostly light comedies based on American musicals and vehicles for Italian matinee idols. (De Sica was himself fantastically handsome and a major star in romantic comedies produced in Italy in the twenties and thirties – he came to directing after a highly successful career as a leading man.) De Sica’s favorite film maker was Charlie Chaplin and several shots in Bicycle Thieves play homage to the American comedian. Chaplin’s movies in the twenties are generally set in closely observed milieu, generally featuring characters that are poor or just a step above being homeless.

Italian neo-realism is closely related to verismo, that is, realism as a movement in literature and opera in the late 19^th century. (Puccini’s Tosca is considered an example of verismo in opera.) Verismo in turn is an expression of an international trend in novels and literature – in Germany, Gerhardt Hauptmann’s plays are regarded as "realist" in character; in France, Zola’s novels, particularly Germinal belong to this genre. In American literature, Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, among others, wrote realistic novels with the genre culminating in the work of Theodore Dreiser.

In film, neo-realism is characterized by shooting on location and using natural light. To the extent possible, these films cast non-actors in principal roles. The film may have rough edges – sometimes, people on the street gape at the camera and the acting may be uneven. Neo-realist films are set among poor or working class people and may exploit exotic locations – for instance, the fishing villages and remote islands in La Terra Trema (1948) or the slopes of the volcano in Stromboli (1950). Some films are set amidst people and occupations that would seem foreign to urban Italian audiences – Bitter Rice (1949) about the rice harvest and migrant workers in the Po River valley is an example of such a film.

Bicycle Thieves was shot "guerilla-style" in Rome – this means, camera set-ups and locations were not approved by authorities and no licenses were issued for the shoots. De Sica had to work quickly, before local cops forced him to move on. One might think that making a movie in this way is simpler and more efficient than the elaborate studio system for film production. This is untrue. In fact, it is much more difficult to shoot a film using natural light and on location. Studios were devised in order to eliminate the very significant difficulties of making a movie on-location. In general, the neo-realist films were more expensive than studio productions and the film-making process for these pictures was fraught with difficulty.

Neo-realism, which burst through the conventions of the "white telephone" studio films, is sometimes seen as transition to the French nouvelle vague. And, as I have noted above neo-realism remains an important strain in recent films – in Italy, the trend never really died: Ermanno Olmi’s pictures continued to use non-actors in prosaic settings: Olmi’s first two films, Il Posto ("The Job" 1961) and Fidanzati ("The Betrothed" 1963) are distinctly neo-realist in form. Olmi’s great later pictures 1978's The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (which played for two years in Minneapolis) and The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988) are luminously beautiful examples of neo-realist esthetics although rendered more complex by the introduction of magical realism and professional acting (The Holy Drinker stars Rutger Hauer of all people) to the scrupulously ascetic formula. (In researching this note, I was saddened to see that Ermanno Olmi, certainly one of the greatest humanist film makers, died on May 5, 2018).



Some Imaginary Versions of Bicycle Thieves

De Sica was generous in granting credits. Everyone who had an idea that was incorporated in some shot or line in Bicycle Thieves was credited as a screen-writer. Hence, the long list of writers who are credited with the screenplay. (In fact, the only writers who worked with de Sica from beginning to end in the production process were Suso Cecchi di Amico, who wrote most of the dialogue, and Cesare Zavattini, a close collaborator with the director.) Early in the production, Sergio Amidei, worked with de Sica and Zavattini on the movie. Amidei was an ardent Communist. He clashed with de Sica about the film’s ending. Amidei wanted the hero to go the local branch of the Italian Communist party where the film would conclude with the father and son being fully reimbursed for the stolen bicycle.

De Sica sought funding for the movie from the American producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was very interested in the movie and said that his studio would fund the film on the condition that the role of the father be played by Cary Grant.

　


City Symphony
Bicycle Thieves is partly a "city symphony." This is type of film that celebrates a single city, usually organized by the metropolis’ urban activities from dusk to dawn. Most such films are documentaries and range throughout the city that they are portraying. Other films of this sort offer dawn to dusk sojourns through big cities and are semi-dramatic – parts of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)have this characteristic.

In Bicycle Thieves, most of the travel between places is plausible. With a few exceptions, a Roman watching the movie would be able to identify where the action is occurring and, therefore, would also understand the geography of the spaces intervening between shots.

The film begins 5 miles to the north of the City Center in the apartment complex Citta Val Maleina. The hero and his family live in the cheerless modern-day tenements built in that area, structures that were isolated from the rest of the city in 1948. The soothsayer lives in the Trastavere district – this is on the west bank of the Tiber south of Vatican City. When he has his bicycle, the hero travels Citta Val Maleina south into central Rome, dropping his small son off at a gas station and, then, proceeding into the city through the ancient Porta Pia. The bicycle is stolen along the Via de Trafora and the thief rides through the Trafora Umberto tunnel that bores under the Quirinal Hill.

The next day, the hero and his garbage collector friends inspect bikes and bicycle parts at an arcade in central Rome, across from the famous Piazza Vittorio Emmanual. The hero glimpses the thief talking to an old man – the thief flees through the old Porte Portese (this is a block from the Tiber near Trastavere). The chase that follows is in labyrinth of streets in Trastavere. Disappointed the hero crosses the Ponte Palantino, walking behind the old man. Here there is a continuity gap – the church to which old man goes is several kilometers away, far from the Tiber, the Church of Santi Nereo e Achilles by the baths of Caracalla. (De Sica is generally not interested in portraying scenic or famous vistas of Rome – therefore, he avoids shots showing Roman ruins, many of which would intervene between the Ponte Palantino and the Church of Santi Nere e Achilles.) The scene where the hero suspects that Bruno may have drowned also breaks continuity – it is several miles down the Tiber from the Ponte Palantiyo. De Sica needed a place where the Tiber was relatively accessible and not flowing in a deep gorge.

The film concludes in neighborhoods around the Stadio Flamina, the soccer stadium. The hero and Bruno are last scene swallowed by the crowd on the Via Flamina – one of Rome’s most ancient streets and an important thoroughfare that leads out into the campagna.

Examples of city symphonies include Manahatta (based on Walt Whitman’s poem - 1921), Walter Ruttmann’s famous Berlin - Symphony of a Great City (1927), People on Sunday (Ulmer and Siodmak with a script by Billy Wilder - 1930), A propos de Nice (Jean Vigo - 1930), Douro, Faina Fluvial (de Oliveira 1931), and, most recently, Of Time and the City (Terence Davies 2008).

　


Bruno and his Father
The little boy who acts the part of Bruno was cast from about 5000 children who applied for the part. (In fact, in some histories of the film, little boy who plays the role was not seeking an audition – rather, his father was auditioning for the part of the father and de Sica noticed the small boy, immediately felt that he was perfect for the role, and, so, urged him to apply for that part.) The actor’s name is Enzo Staiola. Child stars have a short shelf-life. After appearing in a half-dozen movies, Enzo Staiola retired from the film business at 15, completed his education and became a math teacher.

Lamberto Maggiorani plays the part of Antonio, the father. Maggiorani was a working man – he labored on a lathe in a furniture factory. Maggiorani was paid one-thousand dollars for his performance and used the money to rent a better apartment and take his family on a vacation. Strangely, he couldn’t act and seems to be playing himself in the movie – this was established by attempts to cast him in other pictures. He wasn’t able to perform successfully and, even, de Sica couldn’t coax a plausible performance from him after Bicycle Thieves. (He appears uncredited in a couple shots in de Sica’s Umberto D. made a couple years later.) Maggiorani worked as an extra in a few films and, then, gave up on movies. He tried to return to his job in the factory but found that his job had been given to another man. Furthermore, his former friends and associates didn’t want anything to do with him because he refused to share "the millions that he had made" for his performance in Bicycle Thieves – of course, these millions were an envious fantasy of his former friends and he didn’t have any money at all. Maggiorani never found reasonable employment after Bicycle Thieves and he died in poverty in 1983. Cesare Zavattini was so moved by his fate that he wrote a film scenario called Tu, Maggiorani (You, Maggiorani). But the movie, with its strong Communist message, was never produced.

　


Bazin

Perhaps, the greatest defender of Italian neo-realism was Andre Bazin, the influential French film critic and founder (in 1943) of Cahiers du Cinema. Bazin’s guiding thesis was that film is essentially a "decal" or "fingerprint" that takes an abiding impression of the real world. Accordingly, film is inextricably connected to realism – film shows us a "real world", that is the essence of the medium.

Bazin in his essay "Introduction to Film Style" notes that movies diverged in their very earliest form, bifurcating between fantasy and realism. Melies Trip to the Moon (1902) does not "cancel" the Lumiere brothers 1895 documentary "Train arriving at a Station" – rather, the two streams in film production have been concurrent since the inception of the movies. For complex reasons, some of them related to his Catholic faith, Bazin determined that film’s essential characteristics required that movies show fidelity to the truth. (Bazin is an esthetic essentialist like Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg in art criticism – Greenberg’s argument, for instance, was that Pollock’s action paintings were the culmination of art history since painting involves deploying paint on the field of a two-dimensional canvas.) In order to demonstrate a commitment to the truth, films should eschew vigorous montage, a device that forces the viewer to conclusions foisted upon him or her by the director. Similarly, the viewer’s free will is asserted in shots that are composed "in depth" (using deep focus) to allow the spectator to determine what in the panorama he should focus on. The spectator’s eye should not be forced into any particular frame of reference but allowed to range freely over the image – thus, intrusive close-ups should be avoided and the director should make himself "invisible." For this reason, Bazin and his followers praised Howard Hawks extravagantly – in a movie like Rio Bravo (1959), we don’t have any sense of the director urging us to one position or another. He simply stages the action and allows us to make up our own minds as to what we are seeing.

Needless to say, Bazin highly praised the Italian neo-realists and, particularly, de Sica. But his other favorite director was Orson Welles, a film-maker who is arguably one of the very most manipulative of all auteurs. (Bazin has to engage in extreme contortions to make his fealty to Welles fit into his esthetic scheme – it comes down to Welles use of composition in deep-focus, an inadequate basis to claim that the director, essentially a follower of the most fantastic vein in German expressionist, is some kind of realist.) Bazin thought that de Sica’s Umberto D. was one of the greatest film’s ever produced. At the climax of the movie, the starving and destitute Umberto persuades his little dog, Flick, to hold out his paws over an upturned hat, literally "begging" so that his proud, but desperate, master is spared that indignity. No one can see this sequence without shedding tears. But, surely, it must be conceded that the imagery is profoundly manipulative.

　


Empathy

Roger Ebert wrote that "movies are like a machine that generates empathy."

I’ve noticed that people seem to be divided into two camps. Some people see themselves in the afflicted – this is an affectation because I am not an impoverished Italian working man as in Bicycle thieves nor an ambitious peasant boy from a remote Indian village as in Pather Panchali. However, I can imagine myself in the plight experienced by these characters. Conversely, there are many people who can not imagine themselves under any circumstances as being capable of committing a crime or engaging in a dishonorable act or suffering as a result of discrimination or ignorance or poverty. People of this latter sort fancy themselves as hard-headed pragmatists with a realistic relationship to the world – but, of course, this is a fantasy since no one succeeds except by luck and through the support of others. Those who lack empathy almost invariably believe that they are not among the afflicted because they are better than others, more hardworking and more deserving of good things. The tonic for these people is to be shown movies like Ozu’s films or Bicycle Thieves – perhaps, these films will inspire empathy.

But is empathy a good thing? In itself, I suppose, empathy is just a form of useless sentimentalism. And kindly emotions are not substitutes for kindly acts. Bicycle Thieves succeeds if it encourages you to be generous and understanding and to act in that way. This is to make high claims for the efficacy of the film. But, it was, if you recall, once thought the greatest movie ever made.