Locating the Child in the Postwar Landscape in Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief

Kenneth Pearl

Vittorio De Sica's classic work The Bicycle Thief (1948) offers one of the most powerful portrayals of the parent-child relationship ever put on film. While some critics have seen his use of children as being overly sentimental, others have credited him with revolutionizing the way children are used in film.  Andre Bazin, the pioneering film critic, noted that "Before De Sica, filmmakers had managed to make children play-act..." but that now for the first time "one can see here a ten- or eleven-year-old youngster express in ten minutes a gamut of feelings whose variety equals that of his grown-up partner, in this case De Sica himself." (1)  Yet The Bicycle Thief offers something more for those who wish to incorporate it in courses dealing with the history of childhood.  The film offers a compelling look at the physical and emotional environment facing children in Europe at the end of the Second World War, while also offering an introduction to postwar neorealist cinema -- a brief moment in film history when children appeared at the center of the narrative.

The plot of The Bicycle Thief is deceptively simple.  In postwar Rome Antonio Ricci, who has been unemployed for over a year, gets a job as a hanger of movie posters.  The job, however, depends on the possession of the bicycle, which has previously been pawned. While Ricci is quick to give up, his wife Marie gathers up the family's bed linen and brings it to the pawnshop to retrieve the bicycle. The financial stability promised by the new job, however, comes immediately into jeopardy when the bicycle is stolen on Ricci's first day on the job. The remainder of the film consists of Ricci and his young son Bruno in a desperate search through the streets of Rome in a vain search for the bicycle. 

References to the Odyssey abound throughout The Bicycle Thief, but Ricci is burdened with something that Ulysses never had to consider -- his journey through Rome takes place under the telling gaze of his young son, Bruno, and it is this relationship that remains at the center of the film. Due to the fraught reality of the postwar situation, the child displaces the father and even the dangers of the journey are mostly borne by the child, who has to dodge out of the way of buses and trains, while a pederast offers to buy him a bell. Bruno works at a gas station, so he has gainful employment before his father. The son knows the bicycle better than his father and criticizes his father for not complaining to the officials at the pawnshop over a dented pedal, while the childlike father leaves the precious bike with strangers as he goes into an apartment building. Even in their increasingly desperate search through the streets of Rome it is Bruno who is more practical, leading the frustrated Ricci to strike the child's face and yell, "You act like a father-in-law!" The son ultimately proves to be the father's savior, as it is pity for him that leads the angry mob to stop brutalizing the father after being caught attempting to steal another bike.  The famous last image of the film shows the father in tears as father and son walk off hand in hand.

The Bicycle Thief is not an overtly political film. While some critics, including Bazin, view the film as being deeply sympathetic to the ideals of the political left, others, such as Frank Tomasulo, have criticized it for not showing enough solidarity among the poor. (2) Sergio Amidei, who worked as a screenwriter on several of De Sica's earlier films, dropped out of the project because he thought it was unrealistic that Ricci's friends, good unionists, would not just provide him with another bike. (3) For the instructor seeking to use this film in a course on the history of childhood, essentially the entire political background of Italy would need to be provided, with an emphasis on how 1948, the year that The Bicycle Thief was made, was the most critical year in the immediate postwar period. That year witnessed the first elections held under the new constitution, marking Italy’s transformation from constitutional monarchy to republic. This election would also set the course for the remainder of the century, with a fully democratic franchise, most notably for the first time allowing the political participation of women, leading to the victory of the conservative Christian Democrats over the combined forces of the left, setting the stage for the dominance by that party in Italy until 1996. These are all subjects that De Sica’s film doesn’t overtly address. Where De Sica does seem to be making a political statement, it apparently takes the form of a general criticism on all sides, ranging from the police, representing the forces of order, who show scant interest in trying to locate the lost bike, to the Communists, whose collectivist approach leaves little room for the individual plight of Ricci.

Neorealist cinema, a response to the total control of the film industry by the Fascist government, offers some of the most compelling use of children in the history of film, in part due to the stress on everyday themes as well as the need to use nonprofessional actors. De Sica's own neorealist work displays a rare sympathy for the plight of children and often focused on the theme of childhood disillusionment. In Children are Watching Us (1942) a child witnesses the suicide of his father, while Shoeshine (1946) shows the harsh life of street boys in Rome. One should not, however, mistake neorealism for reality, since as De Sica noted, "It is reality filtered through poetry, reality transfigured," and in Shoeshine the director substituted other children for the two actual boys who served as the basis for the story, since he found them to be too ugly.(4) 

Italian neorealist cinema proved to be more popular in Britain, France, and the United States than in the country of its birth, where such films were derided in the press as "stracci all'estero (rags for abroad)."(5) The Italian public preferred the movies on offer from Hollywood and it is a telling detail that the poster that Ricci is putting up when he starts his job is for Gilda, a Rita Hayworth film. While the Italian public may have yearned for more escapist fare, for the classroom instructor, The Bicycle Thief offers a moving view of the ever-complex parent-child relationship placed in the historical context of a Europe burdened with the herculean task of reconstruction.

Notes:

(1) Andre Bazin, "Bazin on Post-Neorealistic Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti: Three Original Reviews" Massachusetts Review, vol. 43, no. 1: Spring 2002, p. 96. Reprinted from André Bazin, Qu'est-ce que le cinema? (Paris: éditions du Cerf, 1958-1962), pp. 97-99.

(2) Frank P. Tomasulo, "Bicycle Thieves: A Re-Reading," in Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder (Eds.), Vittorio de Sica: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 163.

(3) Bert Cardullo, Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. 2002), p. 37.

(4) Charles Thomas Samuels, De Sica on De Sica, in Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder (Eds.), Vittorio de Sica: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 31; Bert Cardullo, "Actor-Become-Auteur: The Neorealist Films of Vittorio De Sica" Massachusetts Review vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 2000, p. 179.

(5) Bert Cardullo, Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. 2002), p. 43.