Foreign Pick: The Bicycle Thief/Bicycle Thieves (1948)
Antonio Ricci has failed to get a job for quite some time in post-World War II Italy, and his family starves and lives in an extremely impoverished neighborhood. Despite his powerlessness and despair, Antonio finally manages to secure a job posting advertising bills — much to the joy of his wife Maria and their son Bruno — but he’s specifically told to bring a bicycle to work. Knowing their family would succumb without steady income, Maria convinces him to pawn their sheets and blankets in order to afford a new bike.
On his first day on the job, while gluing a poster to a wall, he notices a young man stealing the precious, life-altering bicycle. An accomplice misleads him, and Antonio subsequently loses track of the thief. Despite filing a police report, he notices that the authorities are not even remotely interested in his case, thus he decides to take matters into his own hands. With Bruno and several friends’ help, he sets out to find the thief across a ruined, devious Rome, fully aware that his bike holds the key to a better life for his family.
Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 neorealist film is widely regarded as a masterpiece, with many critics dubbing it one of the greatest movies of all time. While there’s a vast selection of foreign language movies on Netflix, I eventually settled on The Bicycle Thief for this week’s article because it’s an essential, emotionally powerful piece of cinema that confidently portrays a father’s struggle to provide for his family and the lengths he’s willing to go in order to accomplish his ultimate goal – and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t recommend it early on.
I described last week’s entry Live-In Maid as a “slow-burner. That’s not even remotely the case with this Italian gem – please head to your closest convenience store and grab a few hundred tissues if you decide to immerse yourself in Antonio Ricci’s search.
