Most profound is the relationship between the father and son and their journey together to find his stolen bicycle so that he can make money and feed his family again. This is a movie without a climax. And that's a big part of what makes it great.
They frequently used non-professional actors, with Lamberto Maggiorani, at that time a factory worker, playing the lead role in Bicycle Thieves, and Enzo Staiola, playing his son, both non-professionals making their first film.
In closing, De Sica's Bicycle Thieves has strong Marxist leanings. There is clear evidence of a class divide in the world of the film: the proletariat and bourgeoisie.
The Bicycle Thief as a Prominent Neorealism Work
The de-dramatization of the events in the film contributes to the neorealism characteristic that has very close relations to the existing reality. The lives of the characters are not set in a particular logical sequence they are messy stories that nowhere.
Bicycle Thieves (1949) discusses themes of struggle and desperation causing one to sacrifice their morality and become the evil they initially fought. De Sica expresses such themes to the viewer through the culture of poverty and the continuous pain that poverty is capable of inflicting.
A bicycle symbolizes progress, freedom, even liberty. If Hannah had decided to go to New York, her life would be taken over, and at her age and mindset she was not ready for the commitment of a life with nothing but piano.
The protagonist of Bicycle Thieves, a working-class man who suffers from the pressing economic necessities, represents the whole Italy's impoverished masses. De Sica's neo-realist approach was shown in his use of on-location shootings and non-professional actors that result in high visual believability.
(De Sica thought this episode important enough to use six cameras to film it.) Incidentally, the bicycle itself becomes a symbol for this relationship between the one and the many. It is one and entire. It is contrasted to the hundreds or thousands of bicycle parts in the two flea markets.
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.
The neorealist nature of “Bicycle Thieves” makes for a documentary visual style, avoiding artificial editing, lighting, cinematography, and camerawork. A Hollywood production would have done the opposite of those trademark neorealist thumbprints.
The theme of “The Bicycle” by Jillian Horton is that you shouldn't let anybody dictate how you should live your life, and you should do what makes you happy instead. This theme is powerful and pronounced all throughout the story, especially after Hannah started to realize what she had been missing out on.
Bicycle Thieves, inspired by Luigi Bartolini's book of the same name, differs from its original contents. The story, while quite cheerful and colorful in the book, is sad and melancholy in the film. The main character in the film is a poor worker from the suburbs of Rome.
While the film meets many of the characteristics of the Classical Hollywood Narrative, there was one important difference: There was no happy ending in this film. Antonio never recovers his bicycle, and his life continues on a downward spiral.
Types of offenders
Acquisitive: These thieves steal bicycles for financial gain and usually trade them for cash or goods. The bikes may also be sold in pieces for drugs or money. In Portland, Oregon bike thieves are often drug addicts who provide stolen bicycles to drug dealers in exchange for drugs.
Today, some movie stars do their own stunts. For example, movie star Jackie Chan got his start as a stunt person. Still, most actors leave the more complicated, dangerous feats for the stunt people to handle. Today, many of the most dangerous stunts are created with special effects.
Bicycle Thieves is the best-known work of Italian neorealism, the movement that formally began with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and aimed to give cinema a new degree of realism.
A cyclist may sustain life-threatening injuries if the person's bike trips. Abrasions, cuts, and fractures are common from such an accident. Brain injury may also result if the head hits the ground with great force when a rider falls.
154,009 bikes were reported stolen in the US in 2019 according to the FBI. This continues a downward trend, with the number of reported bicycle thefts in the US consistently falling, every year between 2015 and 2019.
Across cultures and generations, the bicycle is a powerful symbol of hope and progress. Mikael Colville-Andersen at Network blog Copenhagenize has been doing his research: The Bicycle as a symbol of progress, of renewal, of promising times ahead -- this is not a new concept.
From a Marxist perspective, Bicycle Thieves highlights the influence money and class have on society by exploring how the industrialized workers struggle against societal imbalance between abundance and scarcity.
Waxing philosophical, Marjane describes to her friends that “the revolution is like a bicycle, when the wheels don't turn, it falls.” She suggests that often in the history of Iran the wheels haven't been turning.
Neorealism or structural realism is a theory of international relations that emphasizes the role of power politics in international relations, sees competition and conflict as enduring features and sees limited potential for cooperation.
The film ends with the man and his son, sad and let down from what has just happened, they walk along in a crowd, leaving us with a dim outlook for the two. Holding hands, they are both reduced to tears.
Neorealism revolves around three core assumptions: (1) the contemporary world has anarchic character; (2) states as sovereign units are the main actors in this system; and (3) the distribution of capabilities among units is of utmost importance in the system.