La Belle Dame sans Merci

Xi Huang

Following its world premiere in Rome, Vittoria De Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES (Ladri di biciclette) opened across Italy on November 24, 1948.

One of the many things I love about Bicycle Thieves is the omnipresence of bicycles. At the beginning of the film, we spot them whizzing by the bike-deprived Antonio, as incidental and elusive as birds in the sky. But by the climactic scene, when Antonio and Bruno are sitting despondently on the curb, they are everywhere: There are hundreds of them parked outside the nearby sports arena; a bike race zooms by only inches from the father and son; and of course there’s that fateful bike outside a doorway just around the corner. Bikes become as tempting to Antonio as bottles and glasses would be to a recovering alcoholic in a bar. I wonder how much of the greatness of Bicycle Thieves depends on that list of no less than seven screenwriters: Did Vittorio De Sica really need six other people to tell what is essentially one of the simplest of stories? I think perhaps he did, for the film is crowded with incidentals, with scenes and details that give it such a wonderful texture, from the relationship between Antonio and Maria to the crowd of job-seekers outside the employment office to the bustling bike market scene, and so on. Details such as Antonio’s ignoring the fact that Maria is carrying two heavy buckets of water when he finds her to tell her of his job add immeasurably to our sense of his flawed, self-obsessed character. Did the scene in which Antonio watches a man climb up and up and up stacks of shelved, pawned sheets arise from observation on location, or was it suggested by a writer as a way of signaling the depth of poverty in postwar Rome? There are small, non-essential but telling moments in every scene, such as the man at the bicycle market who is clearly a pedophile trying to lure Bruno astray. De Sica and his writers have loaded every rift of Bicycle Thieves with ore. But only De Sica could have been responsible for drawing such miraculous performances from unknown actors like Lamberto Maggiorani, who has the haunted look of a young Robert Duvall, and Enzo Stailolo, whose Bruno verges on cute – especially when his face lights up at the thought of food – but never becomes cloying, and at the end exhibits a wonderful mixture of disappointment and love for his father.

One of the most devastating endings in cinema history.

FILMS in 2026: 05 | Bicycle Thieves Ladri di biciclette (1948) — dir. Vittorio De Sica    

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