#Bicycle thief movie

Yet there is far more to Bicycle Thieves than its parable-like plot suggests. In that sense, it is more poetic and less quasi-documentarian than other works of neorealist movement it is also, in part for the same reason, among the most accessible and universal neorealist films, as well as the best-known and most influential. As a result, The Bicycle Thief works as a sentimental study of a father and son, a historical document, a social statement, and a record of one of the century's most influential film movements.Bicycle Thieves thus has the power of a great parable or fable. (1952), and his late masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), DeSica focuses on the ordinary details of ordinary lives as a way to dramatize wider social issues. As in such other classic films as Shoeshine (1946), Umberto D.

#Bicycle thief movie

The movie focuses on both the relationship between the father and the son and the larger framework of poverty and unemployment in postwar Italy. When it is stolen on his first day of work, Antonio and his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) begin a frantic search, learning valuable lessons along the way. Lamberto Maggiorani plays Antonio, an unemployed man who finds a coveted job that requires a bicycle. Written primarily by neorealist pioneer Cesare Zavattini and directed by Vittorio DeSica, also one of the movement's main forces, the movie featured all the hallmarks of the neorealist style: a simple story about the lives of ordinary people, outdoor shooting and lighting, non-actors mixed together with actors, and a focus on social problems in the aftermath of World War II. This landmark Italian neorealist drama became one of the best-known and most widely acclaimed European movies, including a special Academy Award as 'most outstanding foreign film' seven years before that Oscar category existed.