This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.
"Put the blame on Mame," sang the red-haired girl in the poster, the one that Antonio is gluing to the wall when his bicycle is stolen. If it only it were that easy. Bicycle Thieves has scorn and skepticism aplenty, for the overwhelmed bureaucracy and government of postwar Italy that can't put men to work, for the Catholic Church with its phony sentiments and bourgeois charity offering a shave if you'll grovel low enough, for the pompous bedroom psychics who offer cheap pessimism and recoil from money as if it reminds them what they're really doing. And for the small-minded, jeering mobs who gang up on desperate men, and the snobby little brats who turn up their noses over plates of spaghetti, and even the Communist Party which writer Cesare Zavattini belonged to, which seems distant and rhetorical compared to the desperate needs of the stumbling human beings interrupting its gatherings in the catacombs of Rome.
And yet this is a film of context and, ultimately, compassion. If the film refuses to sentimentalize institutions or ideals, it is ever-attuned to the complications that motivate and mitigate human behavior. As Jean Renoir said, "Everyone has their reasons." And those reasons have an awful lot in common - one of the signature motifs of the movie is that in an atmosphere of competition, desperation, and degradation, every man feels compelled to look out for himself. Bicycle Thieves does not endorse this ethos, nor does it offer a hopeful alternative - this is not a film which offers cheap inspiration, or even much hope at its conclusion. Yet it observes this atmosphere unblinkingly, leaving us to draw our own conclusions, and the climax refuses to let us wallow in self-defeating despair or condescending pity. Instead at its end we feel angry, uncertain what should be done, but knowing that this situation, whether in 1948 or now, is unacceptable.
Does it seem strange to say that this movie is also beautiful, often warm, occasionally quite funny, and suffused with a careworn romanticism and naturalistic poetry? It is also, very pointedly, a "movie" - a slice of life, yes, in a sense, but filtered through the structures, motifs, and payoffs of the movie world.
