Viewed in retrospect, much of modern cinema can seem to flow from twin fountainheads: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). Though separated by World War II, the two movies symbolize the cardinal impulses that came to captivate serious audiences, critics, and filmmakers after the war. Where Citizen Kane heralded the age of the auteur and a cinema of passionate individual vision, Bicycle Thieves renounced "egoism" for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience. The film exemplifies De Sica's stated desire to "reintroduce the dramatic into quotidian situations, the marvelous in a little news item... considered by most people throwaway material."
The quotidian anecdote dramatized here concerns Antonio Ricci, a young husband who has been suffering a prolonged spell of unemployment when he is offered a job as a bill poster. The catch is that he must have a bicycle, and his is in hock. Rescued by his wife's willingness to pawn their bedsheets, Antonio set's out proudly and confidently on his new job, only to have his bicycle stolen on the first day. Desperate to stay employed, he mounts a wide-ranging search across Rome, accompanied most of the way by his young son, Bruno. (Godfrey Cheshire)
[...] it is a spectacle, and what a spectacle! Bicycle Thieves, however, does not depend on the mathematical elements of drama; the action does not exist beforehand as it were an "essence". It follows from the preexistence f the narrative, it is the "integral" of reality. De Sica's supreme achievement is to have succeeded in discovering the cinematographic dialectic capable of transcending the contradiction between the action a "spectacle" and of an event. For this reason Bicycle Thieves is one of the first examples of "pure cinema": no more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema. (Andre' Bazin)
The quotidian anecdote dramatized here concerns Antonio Ricci, a young husband who has been suffering a prolonged spell of unemployment when he is offered a job as a bill poster. The catch is that he must have a bicycle, and his is in hock. Rescued by his wife's willingness to pawn their bedsheets, Antonio set's out proudly and confidently on his new job, only to have his bicycle stolen on the first day. Desperate to stay employed, he mounts a wide-ranging search across Rome, accompanied most of the way by his young son, Bruno. (Godfrey Cheshire)
[...] it is a spectacle, and what a spectacle! Bicycle Thieves, however, does not depend on the mathematical elements of drama; the action does not exist beforehand as it were an "essence". It follows from the preexistence f the narrative, it is the "integral" of reality. De Sica's supreme achievement is to have succeeded in discovering the cinematographic dialectic capable of transcending the contradiction between the action a "spectacle" and of an event. For this reason Bicycle Thieves is one of the first examples of "pure cinema": no more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema. (Andre' Bazin)