Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 18 June

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

Editor’s note

Grateful thanks to all of you who have been recom­mend­ing F&S over the past few weeks. Don’t for­get, if your recom­mend­a­tion turns into a paid sub­scrip­tion, you get a reward!

I’ve picked up a con­tract that’s going to take up a bit of time so I’m going to be look­ing at the pro­duc­tion sched­ule to see how effi­ciently I can keep everything run­ning here.

Probably the biggest change will be that I won’t be able to spend every Thursday in vari­ous loc­al cinemas (as I have been doing). That will have a knock-on effect on the “Friday new releases” sec­tion which may have to move to Monday (after the weekend).

Your thoughts and pref­er­ences would be appreciated.

The most imme­di­ate impact will be this Friday as I have travel all day so there won’t be a news­let­ter at 3.15pm. Apologies in advance.

Last year, for RNZ, I spent a bit of time watch­ing and writ­ing up the top 50 films in the BFI/Sight & Sound “Greatest Films of All Time” list.

They have decided that they don’t want these any longer which has brought the pro­ject to a grind­ing halt with Fritz Lang’s M at #36. I’ll get back into it one of these days, prob­ably here.

Anyway, M isn’t today’s recom­mend­a­tion (although it eas­ily could be).

I want to talk about one of the most heart­break­ing dra­mas ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neor­eal­ist clas­sic, Bicycle Thieves:

In the open­ing scenes of De Sica’s 1948 clas­sic Bicycle Thieves a young moth­er goes to the factory-sized pawn­shop in her neigh­bour­hood to turn in the fam­ily bed sheets. “They’re used,” says the attend­ant. “Two are new,” she replies. Can you ima­gine the state your fam­ily must be in to resort to that level of des­per­a­tion? In fact, it’s only the beginning.

Maria (Llanella Carell) pawns the sheets because the fam­ily needs money to get her husband’s bicycle out of hock. He’s been offered a rare and pre­cious job put­ting up posters around the city but only if he has a bike to get around, a bike that is cur­rently sit­ting along­side hun­dreds of oth­ers that are being used as a piti­ful secur­ity for the loans that are keep­ing Roman fam­il­ies fed in the lean years fol­low­ing the end of World War II.

Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) is giddy with hap­pi­ness at finally being able to sup­port his fam­ily and slowly get them out of grind­ing poverty but on his first day on the job – while he is put­ting up a poster of Rita Hayworth – the bicycle is stolen and, des­pite giv­ing chase through the streets of Rome, the trail goes cold.

He knows that without the bicycle, the job is gone and without the job his dreams are dashed. The next day he enlists the help of some garbage col­lect­or friends to scour the city for the bike, or the thief, and his young son Bruno (who makes his own con­tri­bu­tion to the fam­ily fin­ances by work­ing at a gas sta­tion rather than going to school) joins them on the search.

Every moment of hope is dashed and the situ­ation becomes more and more des­per­ate until Antonio makes a fate­ful decision which will break your heart.

I’d love you to read the whole art­icle. I’ve been think­ing about this film a lot over the last six months.

Where to watch Bicycle Thieves

Aotearoa: Streaming on Brollie or digit­al rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on Prime Video or Brollie

Canada: Streaming on Criterion Channel

Ireland: Streaming on Prime Video

USA: Streaming on Max or Criterion Channel

UK: Streaming on BFI Player