Antonio and Bruno are a world away from Chaplin and his Kid. This is a story that magnificently withholds the comic or dramatic palliatives another sort of film might have introduced. Faces always gather avidly around the pair, all commenting, complaining and generally magnifying the father and son's distress and mortification. They create uproar in classic crowd moments: in the streets, in a market, in a church mass. On his first day at work, the unlocked machine is stolen and Antonio drops everything to go on a desperate odyssey through the streets of Rome with his little boy Bruno (Enzo Staiola) to get his bike back, pleading and accusing and uncovering scenes of poverty similar to theirs wherever they go. But he needs a bicycle, and must supply his own, so his wife Maria (Lianella Carelli) pawns the family's entire stock of bed linen to redeem the bicycle he had already hocked.
For me, it is as unbearable as any horror film.Īntonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) is a poor man who is thrilled when he is at last offered a job: delivering and putting up movie posters. This study of poverty in postwar Rome is now revived in cinemas as a somewhat astringent Yuletide treat. It turns out that there are two thieves: one at the movie's beginning, another at its end. N eorealism never got more real than in Vittorio de Sica's 1948 classic Ladri di Biciclette, or Bicycle Thieves - occasionally mistranslated as "The Bicycle Thief", though the plural is surely crucial.