If you think about this story and NEBRASKA there are a lot of similarities that struck me right away as I read Bob Nelson’s award winning screenplay recently. The ending is nihilistic with his failure to get a bicycle, but that is part of the neorealism. One he doesn’t want to make, but he must. This causes him to make a desperate decision (late in the third act, by the way). There are obstacles that ultimately prove to be too great. The central character of the story has a clear goal: find his bicycle. The themes of family, struggle, and those hard choices that must be made create a gritty and realist story of post war Italy.Īs for screenwriters there are lessons abound here in the simplistic, yet tight and focused narrative. Of note, the touching scene is made more so by Bruno taking his father’s hand and leading him away.
#Bicycle thief movie movie#
The movie ends with the two walking away into the abyss of the streets of Rome. The men who catch him see his son weeping and realize the family's desperation, and they allow him to go. The father and son fail to find their bicycle and this leads to Antonio making the difficult choice to try and steal one of his own. The other writers and especially the director Vittorio De Sica, created such a masterpiece. This is part of the reason for the birth of the neorealist film which screenwriter Cecchi d’Amico gets a lot of deserved credit for but it wasn't all her work obviously. And as noted, they often used regular people from the streets. The story is filmed on the streets of the city and according to an interview in the magazine Cineaste, they at times adapted the story according to what they found in and around Rome. With his son Bruno, Antonio (played by a non-professional actor) must recover the bicycle before Monday or he'll lose his job. There are numerous scenes that capture the essence of the film’s technique. The neorealist nature of the film is in the visceral presentation of the reality of Italian life: destitution, desperation, and hardship. After getting his bicycle back he commences with his new job only to have his bicycle stolen, this leads him and his son on an adventure through the streets of Rome in search of their stolen property. This meant pawning the family’s linen to get back their bicycle (he had already pawned it) in order to fulfill the job.
However, the prerequisite is that he has to have a bicycle. The father, Antonio, struggles to support his family without a job after the war, then one day he is offered employment as a poster hanger (in Rome). The story centers on a nearly destitute family, the Ricci's.
With regard to modern times and American cinema, I will point out how the recent film NEBRASKA has interesting similarities to this Italian film. as THE BICYCLE THIEF), directed by Vittorio De Sica and co-written by Suso Cecchi d’Amico and others including Cesare Zavattini. This was perhaps best expressed by the movie THE BICYCLE THIEVES (released in the U.S. So the intellectual atmosphere took on political undertones, but most importantly for film, neorealism (neorealist). It's the 1940s and post-WW2 Italy was ravaged economically, it was also recovering from a brutal and oppressive fascist regimen authored by Dictator Benito Mussolini. Suso Cecchi d’Amico is probably one of the greatest screenwriters you (the American) have never heard of.
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