Metro Cinema Society: The Bicycle Thief

The Bicycle Thief (Ladi di biciclette)

Italy 1948, 93 min, 35mm, Dir: Vittoria de Sica

Special thanks to Corinth Films, who are responsible for this 60th anniversary restoration and new 35mm prints of this timeless classic.

"As A.O. Scott recently noted in an essay in The New York Times, Bicycle Thieves [The Bicycle Thief] continues to be one of the most influential films of postwar cinema, a wellspring for recent films from Italy to Iran and India, and, most recently, the new wave of neorealist American independents that is one of the most heartening developments of recent times. Thieves “has figured prominently in every critics' poll for ‘The Best Film of All Time’; it won an Oscar in 1949. Certainly it is regarded as the supreme achievement of neorealism in the Italian cinema” (Peter Cowie). An unemployed man will get a job posting bills if he has a bicycle. His wife pawns their sheets to buy one, but it is almost immediately stolen. The man's desperate search through Rome for the precious bike becomes an odyssey in which he encounters the best and worst of humanity, struggling to survive amidst the city's postwar confusion. (Sergio Leone was an unpaid assistant on the film, and appears fleetingly as a priest.) As Pauline Kael has noted, the film is “deceptively simple. . . . [Its] richnesses and enigmas sneak up on you. . . . This neorealist classic, directed by Vittorio De Sica, and written by Cesare Zavattini, is on just about everybody’s list of the greatest films.” (James Quandt, tiff Cinematheque)