Bicycle Thieves

To English-language audiences, it may be one of the most famous foreign-language films ever made: Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves," made in Italy in 1948, has come to represent a form of cinematic realism that influences filmmakers and artists to the present day. His story concerns people marked by the ordinary nature of their dramatic conflicts-the narrative considering the need to make money, the need to eat, and the need to have a place to sleep, all by a plot that turns on the wheel of the apparatus that allows us to work (in this case not just a body, but the eponymous bicycle.) Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) obtains a job at the moment he needs it most, when all he has left to sell are the bedsheets on his mattress. But the bike he needs to earn that living gets stolen on day one, sending him and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) scurrying throughout Rome in search of the man who took it. The word that's been tagged to the film eternally is "neorealist," but you might describe it more aptly as being "street-level."

The narrative isn't far from the realm of melodrama, but De Sica's production methods and visual rhythm develop a language of their own making. Using nonprofessional actors and shooting real locations as though this were a work of nonfiction, he captures the bustle of his setting-the way the people move, the way they yell over one another, the one everyone has a story turning behind that of our main character. De Sica would eventually work for an American studio and direct "Terminal Station," which makes a point of staying behind its main character at the end of every scene, and looking at the Italian locals who follow in her footsteps. But already in the background of "Bicycle Thieves," he's accomplishing the same thing: behind the emotion of his inexorable tragedy, there are the sounds of the street, uncaring and true.

Criterion's Blu-ray release of the film features numerous extra features that tell De Sica-focused memories-some are his own, and others belong to his collaborators. For the former, there's a booklet that accompanies the disc, and features writing by the director about his impressions and recollections of the classic film's production. Also included is an essay by Godfrey Cheshire, among other pieces of writing. Additional extras on the disc itself expand on the image of the man who made the movie: one, entitled "Working with De Sica," features three different interview subjects (screenwriter Suso Cecchi d'Amico, film scholar Callisto Cosulich, and actor Enzo Staiola) speaking in-depth about their relationship with the director (particularly Staiola, who shares his own childhood memories of working with the revered auteur.)

The other two extra features are focused on the neorealism aspect of the film's legacy. The first is an almost-hourlong documentary profile of screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (the piece is directed by Carlo Lizzani,) which aims to document the way that his sense for mixing regional texture with narrative structure helped to upend entire traditions of film history (the people here to comment include numerous contemporary filmmakers, all of them claiming the influence of De Sica's cinema.) The second extra says it plainly up front-"Life as it Is: The Neorealist Movement in Italy" is a short-form (40 minutes) documentary (led by film scholar Mark Shiel) that aims to further explain the sociocultural conditions and filmmaking methods that allowed the form to flourish as it once did. "Bicycle Thieves" may not represent its beginning, but it has certainly come to represent one of the apexes of the form-and it seems doubtful that it'll ever be served better on home video than it has been by this latest Criterion release.