Most everyone has heard of Bicycle Thieves. Even those who have never heard of neorealism. Even those who might not know the name Vittorio De Sica. It is the original film celebrity — famous for being famous. Woody Allen named it one of his five favorite films. Martin Scorsese introduces it for Turner Classic Movies in the attached video clip linked below.
De Sica’s films often feel less spiritual and more political than those of his neorealist counterpart, Roberto Rossellini. In the documentary Vittorio D., he claims to believe in “the socialism of Jesus Christ.” What that term means, perhaps, is a set of values borne from the cultural ashes of World War II. The film also depicts a spiritual poverty and humility unimaginable, perhaps even unrecognizable to affluent Western Christians weaned on a health and wealth gospel. In one of the film’s few visual flourishes, the camera pans backwards in a pawn shop to reveal a warehouse of small items, each representing a dream deferred, a chance taken, a final capitulation to the forces of capitalism.
Much like It’s a Wonderful Life, this film puts a family in financial distress under the microscope. It is not a coincidence that both Capra’s film and De Sica’s have been on every Arts & Faith Top 100 since the list’s inception, two of only twenty films that can make such a claim. It is appropriate they should be so linked, for like the Book of Ecclesiastes, they insist that neither triumph nor defeat can claim to be the unequivocally “real” story of man’s destiny. De Sica’s film, the darker of the two, invokes emotion not through catharsis but rather through genuine empathy. We do not fear this man’s poverty nor loathe him for falling into it. We only recognize how terribly thin is the line that separates the respectable man from the desperate one and how easily we could all cross it if faced with similar circumstances.
—Kenneth R. Morefield
- Directed by: Vittorio de Sica
- Produced by: Giuseppe Amato Vittorio de Sica
- Written by: Cesare Zavattini
- Music by: Alessandro Cicognini
- Cinematography by: Carlo Montuori
- Editing by: Eraldo Da Roma
- Release Date: 1948
- Running Time: 89
- Language: Italian
Arts & Faith Lists:
2005 Top 100 — #81
2006 Top 100 — #87
2010 Top 100 — #28
2011 Top 100 — #24
2020 Top 100 — #38