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Select media
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Film details
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Featuring
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Director
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Country
Italy
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Year
1948
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Genre
Drama
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Type
Film
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Category
Fiction
Alternative titles
- Ladri di biciclette Original Italian
- Bicycle Thief Alternative
Introduction
“A heartbreaking, endlessly affecting piece of humanist cinema, sharp in its social criticism, yet ultimately life-enhancing in its belief in the decency of ordinary people.”
Phillip French, The Observer, 2008
A landmark of humanist filmmaking, Bicycle Thieves was a key work in the 1940s film movement known as Italian neo-realism. Like the wartime trilogy that Roberto Rossellini began with Rome: Open City (1945), it heralded a new kind of cinematic naturalism, employing non-professionals as actors and taking the camera out onto the streets to faithfully record the social realities of a Europe struggling to get back on its feet after WWII.
Adapted from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the quiet tragedy of a father’s desperate hunt for a stolen bicycle that he depends on for his work has a fable-like simplicity. For all its vivid documentation of a downtrodden Rome, it is as a universal tale of human striving that De Sica’s film has proved influential.
De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) is another important neo-realist film, about the misadventures of two boys scraping a living shining shoes in the aftermath of WWII.
Cast & Credits
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Cast
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Antonio Ricci
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Bruno Ricci
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Maria Ricci
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patroness
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Baiocco
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the pauper
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the thief
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charity secretary
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amateur actor
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beggar
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.
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[young boy in restaurant]
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[the 'saint']
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[police sergeant]
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[Meniconi, the dustman]
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[policeman in Piazza Vittorio]
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[man who defends the real thief]
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[seminarist sheltering from rain]
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[.]
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[.]
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[.]
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[.]
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[.]
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Credits
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Direction:
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Director
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Assistant Director
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Assistant Director
Production:
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Production Company
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Production Manager
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Production Inspector
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Production Secretary
Writing:
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Screenplay
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Screenplay
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Screenplay
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Screenplay
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Screenplay
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Screenplay
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Screenplay
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Story
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Based on the novel by
Photography:
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Director of Photography
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Camera Operator
Editing:
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Editor
Design:
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Art Director
Music:
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Music
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[Song]
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Music Director
Sound:
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Sound
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[Boom Operator]
Subtitles:
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[1949 US Version Subtitles]
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The Greatest Films of All Time 2012
Ranked 33rd in the critics’ poll