Bicycle Thieves Review

De Sica's premise would not sustain a short story: a man needs a bicycle to keep a job putting up posters, the bicycle is stolen, he spends a Sunday looking for it with his son. The film's power comes from what it puts in that empty container. The pawn shop is a single crane move up a wall of shelved bedsheets, thousands of them, each one somebody's identical Sunday. The market is a lesson in how a bicycle disappears, stripped to frame and pump in minutes.

Lamberto Maggiorani, a real factory worker, cannot act in the trained sense, and that limitation reads as exhaustion rather than technique. Enzo Staiola's Bruno does the film's hardest work simply by looking up. The trattoria scene, father and son eating mozzarella they cannot afford while a rich boy's family eats better at the next table, is the whole class argument in three minutes without a line of speech about class. Some staging shows the method's seams. The ending, a hand taken in a crowd, has never been improved on by anyone.