“You live and you suffer,” Antonio Ricci says in despair as he realizes his stolen bicycle, the sample yet profoundly significant metaphor in Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 classic Italian film Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), will never be returned. The film remains today as one of the best ever made and an iconic example of Italian neorealist drama, simple stories about ordinary people, shot in the actual, stripped down reality of their environment to capture the truth of their lives. Using a mix of non-actors together with actors, and a focus on social problems in the aftermath of World War II, the neorealist genre blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction to raise serious questions about the human condition and striving to find one’s place within the social order.
Shot completely on location in Rome, The Bicycle Thief tells the story of Antonio Ricci, an unemployed family man who finds a job that requires him to have a bicycle. As the man plainly tells Ricci as he hands him the job description, “Remember, if you don’t have a bicycle, nothing doing.” And so while the conditions of the job are simple and clear-cut (use the bicycle to hang posters throughout the city), the sacrifices Ricci must make to conform reflect his larger problem in navigating an uncaring, sometimes hostile society. This is post-World War II Italy, a population of people striving to regain its sense of identity and purpose in the world, and in Antonio’s individual struggle with poverty and unemployment this larger message is beautifully, subtly played out through De Sica’s masterful direction and in non-actor Lamberto Maggiorani’s incredible performance as Ricci.
At virtually every moment of the film, some sacrifice must be made. In order to keep the new job Ricci must first recover his own bicycle (a “Fides” frame, a name which suggests the idea of belief or faith—in Italian the word is fede) from a pawnshop; his wife sells their bed linens so he is able to get his bicycle and start work. On the first day on the job, the bicycle is stolen by a young man in a “German” cap (signifying the lasting memory of the spring of 1945, when Mussolini was executed and Italy was liberated from German occupation) and together with his son Bruno, Ricci is faced with the desperate and discouraging job of somehow recovering it on the swarming streets of Rome.
As Ricci searches for his bicycle, and thereby attempts to regain his life and faith, the film reveals Italy itself—in it’s various aspects. The crowds, congestion and confusion of city, the bedroom of Santona the clairvoyant, the police station, an underground political meeting room, the Porto Portese market filled with bikes, parts and vendors, the trattoria—all serve to capture the heart and soul of the Italian people at this particularly time in history. And yet, while Rome is explored and the film widens the viewer’s scope of Italy, the city slowly closes in on Ricci as time passes and he becomes more isolated in his quest; no one can offer him any real assistance or answers. The response he receives at the police station is disheartening (“Anything, Captain? Nothing, just a bicycle.”) while the advice he gets from Santona, “the one who sees,” is equally hopeful and pessimistic, as she tells him, “Find it now or not at all. It’s that simple.” Ricci is left to continue his search—and suffer along the way.
When he finally finds the thief and confronts him, the men of the neighborhood intimidate Ricci and accuse him of harassing an innocent man. Again, he is swept up in an oppositional force he cannot control, and so, even having found the one rightful connection to his bike and thereby the ability to correct the wrong that was done to him, Ricci is unable to gain redemption. And finally, when he succumbs to the pressure of his situation and decides himself to steal a bike, becoming a thief himself—the object of his own undoing—it seems the entire city closes in on him as he tries to ride away. A group of men detain him as his son watches close by in terror, and one makes a final remark to Ricci, twisting the knife further into the wound he already feels: “ A fine example you set for your son. You’re lucky you got off easy. If it had be me, you would be in jail.”
What The Bicycle Thief details is the tragedy of the ordinary man, an idea that American playwright Arthur Miller detailed in an essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” published just one year after the film, in 1949. He writes: “I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense of personal dignity … the underlying struggles that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.” Credit the Italians for bringing this sensibility—and sensitivity—to the art of neorealist filmmaking. It was the response of such directors as Luchino Visconti (Ossessione, 1945) and Roberto Rossellini (Rome, Open Road, 1946) to the social, economic and political conditions of their day to develop a new, more accurate and artistic method of capturing the reality of the Italian spirit. Out of the ashes of Mussolini’s demise arose this new portrayal of Italy through the lens of everyday experience and common men and women. Arthur Miller puts it this way: “It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possible lead in our time—the heart and spirit of the average man.”
In the end, what remains is not so much a story of pessimism as of resilience—and the lasting lessons that are learned from having struggled and endured.
The Italian celebration of the “heart and spirit of the average man” took shape in another form the very same year The Bicycle Thief was released in 1948. The Tour de France that year was special for Italy, as it marked the return of an official Italian team to the race. Both Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi wanted to be the team leader, but Coppi was not fully ready. This left Bartali as the only Italian star at the Tour, but at the age 34 (the second oldest in the race) and ten years after his Tour victory in 1938, not many expected a victory for Italy, although the nation was closely watching.
The 1948 Tour was a monster—21 stages covering 4,922 km, 1,492 km longer than the 2011 Tour—and Bartali immediately found himself in a compromising position. After winning stage one, a 237-km “plain stage” from Paris to Trouville, Bartali and the Italians watched the French, specifically the phenom Louison Bobet, take over the race. Going into stage 13, Bartali was twenty minutes behind Bobet when he received a phone call from Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, informing him that an assassination attempt in Rome had critically wounded Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the powerful Italian communist party. Given this news, an already fragile, war-torn Italy was on the brink of self-destruction and De Gasperi was looking for a diversion, something or someone Italy could believe in and root for. That someone was Gino Bartali (“Gino the Pious”), a common man from a humble background (like the character of Antonio Ricci) who could inspire a nation. Bartali recalls how “[De Gasperi] told me that there was a great crisis unfolding in Italy, and that the country could really use a victory. I told him I would do my best, but I was by no means confident that I could overcome the stiff competition.” Bartali went on to win stage 13 by a large margin, followed by winning stages 14 and 15 as well. The motivation for Bartali’s attack could not have come at a better time in the race since he was known as a phenomenal climber and the race had just reached the high mountains through Aix-les-Bains.
Faith, fate, timing and the suffering of an entire nation inspired Gino Bartali to go on to win seven stages, the KOM jersey and the overall title at the ’48 Tour—thereby proving that once again that the average man can be as apt a subject for heroism as the noblest of kings.
Italiano, (presented by Peloton, sponsored by Cannondale), Issue 01
Images: The Bicycle Thief