The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Vittorio De Sica · a film · 1948 · about ninety minutes · written with Cesare Zavattini and four others, from the novel by Luigi Bartolini · in Italian
Mode
A search across a city, played by people who are not actors on its own streets; social drama, quest and story of a father and son in one
Mythos
The quest for the lost thing; the oracle consulted, the descent through the places of the poor, the hunter become what he hunted; the son who sees and covers his father’s shame
Phase
A few days and one Sunday in postwar Rome, from an employment office on a housing estate to the crowd outside a stadium
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about ninety minutes, in Italian with the sound post-synchronised; Carlo Montuori’s photography, Alessandro Cicognini’s score; leads who are not actors, shot on the streets of Rome
Register
From a fortune teller’s queue and a variety rehearsal to a cry from the river; the camera kept at walking distance
Scale
A father and a son, one bicycle, and every institution of a city
Governing Proposition
A man in postwar Rome is given work pasting posters on condition that he has a bicycle, and on his first morning it is stolen. With his small son he searches the city for it, among the police, the Party, the Church, the market and a fortune teller, until he steals a bicycle himself and is caught in front of the boy. The wager of the film is that a story with no event beyond a theft, played by people who are not actors on streets that do not stop for it, can show that a poor man’s honesty depends on owning the tools of honest work, and that the bond between a father and his son can survive the loss of the father’s authority.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on a housing estate at the edge of Rome, where men wait outside an employment office. Antonio Ricci is offered work pasting posters, if he has a bicycle. He has one, but it is at the pawnshop. At home his wife, Maria, strips the beds, and the sheets go to the pawnshop to redeem it. The clerk takes them over the counter and climbs a wall of shelves stacked to the ceiling with other families’ linen. The bicycle is bought back with the beds. Before anything has been stolen the film has shown its economy once, in one image, and it will not need to explain it again.
Vittorio De Sica directed it and produced it, raising the money himself. The screenplay is by Cesare Zavattini, with Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Oreste Biancoli, Adolfo Franci, Gerardo Guerrieri and De Sica, from a novel by Luigi Bartolini published in 1946. Carlo Montuori photographed it, Eraldo Da Roma cut it, and Alessandro Cicognini wrote the score. Antonio is played by Lamberto Maggiorani, a factory worker, not an actor; his son Bruno by Enzo Staiola, a child found in the street; Maria by Lianella Carell. It was shot in black and white on the streets of Rome, with the sound post-synchronised, as was usual in Italian production of the time, and it runs about ninety minutes. It opened in Italy in November 1948. Behind it stood Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Paisà, and De Sica’s own Shoeshine.
Maria visits the Santona, a fortune teller with a queue of clients and a fee, and Antonio scorns the visit. The film plays it as comedy and keeps her for later. Then the first morning. Bruno goes to his job at a filling station, and Antonio rides out with his ladder, his paste and his posters. The means are few and plain: a man, a bicycle, a job, and a boy who walks two steps to his father’s one. From here the camera keeps the distance of someone walking beside them.
Movement II
On a ladder in the street Antonio pastes up a poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Hollywood’s glamour going up on a Roman wall. While he works, a young man takes the bicycle and rides off. Antonio runs after him and loses him. The theft takes a moment, and the city around it does not stop: the crowds who fail to help him are not hostile, they merely continue. It is the only event the story has, and the rest of the film is its consequence.
He goes to the police, who take his statement. He goes to a hall where his friend Baiocco can be found, and the hall is two rooms: in one a Party meeting is promising help, on Monday; in the other a variety company is rehearsing. No one is free to help today. Each institution Antonio turns to answers him in its own terms, and the film lights none of them as wicked. The police have a procedure, the Party a programme, and the rehearsal its own work, and none of them has a bicycle.
There is no villain anywhere in the film, and no actor at its centre. Maggiorani is large and slow, and his face goes from pride to panic to shame without a performer’s signs; Staiola trots beside him, watching. The viewer does not wait for a star to win, because there is none. What is happening could be happening to anyone, on these streets, now, and the form says so with every face it chooses.
Movement III
At dawn on Sunday Antonio and Bruno go out with the dustmen to the market at Piazza Vittorio and search the bicycle parts on sale for any they could recognise. The market is the pawnshop’s counterpart, the city’s other trade in what the poor have lost, and it is as indifferent as the first. Nothing is found.
At Porta Portese it rains, and they shelter under an arcade beside a group of seminarians talking in German. The comedy is light and the waiting is long. Then Antonio glimpses the thief talking to an old man, and loses him again, and follows the old man instead. The search, which began as an inquiry, becomes a pursuit, and the man pursuing has nothing on his side but his certainty.
The old man goes into a mission church where the poor are shaved and fed for attending Mass. Antonio follows him in, and the old man escapes. The charity of the church is real: it feeds and shaves the poor, and it lets the one man Antonio needs walk away. Like the police and the Party it gives help, in its own currency, and the currency is not his.
Movement IV
Outside, Antonio slaps Bruno, and the boy walks off. Then there is a cry that a boy is drowning at the river. Antonio runs along the embankment of the Tiber, and the film holds him running before he sees that the boy carried out of the water is not his son. It is the dread at the centre of the film, set where no one expects it, and it changes nothing in the search and everything between the two of them.
He takes Bruno to a trattoria and orders as if they were rich, fried mozzarella among it. At the next table a prosperous family eats, and Bruno watches their boy. The scene is tenderness under shame, a father trying to give his son one meal as a man of means, and the son seeing exactly what it costs.
Then Antonio goes to the Santona himself. The man who scorned her pays her, and her answer is that he will find the bicycle at once or not at all. The film plays it, again, as comedy, and the comedy has turned: the oracle the hero laughed at is the authority he has left. The fall can be measured by the distance between the first visit and the second.
Movement V
He finds the thief in his own street. The young man has an epileptic fit; his mother is there; the street closes round Antonio and turns on him. A carabiniere is brought, and there is no witness, and nothing can be done. Antonio sees in the man who robbed him his own poverty: the thief is as poor as he is, with a mother and an illness, and the crowd that shields him is a crowd of people like Antonio.
Outside a stadium, rows and rows of bicycles stand waiting for their owners, and in an empty street nearby one leans alone. The decision is made in the cutting, between the bicycle and the man. Antonio takes it, and is caught; hands are on him, his hat is knocked into the dust, and Bruno picks it up and gives it back. He is let go because of the boy. The release is worse than arrest. Father and son walk off into the crowd from the stadium, the father weeping, and Bruno takes his hand.
An honorary Academy Award followed, presented in 1950. In 1952 the film stood first in the first Sight and Sound critics’ poll, and André Bazin made it the test case for a cinema that reveals the real. Satyajit Ray saw it in London in 1950, and by his own account it decided him to make Pather Panchali with non-professionals on location; and in 2001 Wang Xiaoshuai built Beijing Bicycle on its premise. Its place in the polls has fallen since. The thing it shows has not passed: a man whose honesty depended on a tool, a city whose every help came at a price, and a boy who saw his father’s disgrace and stayed.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test scene by scene and almost nothing comes out without loss. The pawnshop is the economy of the film in one image: the family’s sheets go onto a wall of other families’ sheets, so the bicycle is bought back with the beds. The Santona is set up early so that the return to her measures how far Antonio has fallen from his own scorn. The Party hall, the mission church and the thief’s street each give a help that cannot help him, or his own face in another man’s poverty. What gives: the seminarians in the rain and the long rehearsal are colour past their work, and the score says twice what the images have said once.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds. A poor man’s honesty depends on owning the tools of honest work. When the tool is taken, every institution he turns to, the police, the Party, the Church, the market and the fortune teller, answers in its own terms and none answers him, and the order that made him a victim makes him a thief within days. Under it lies a second truth: the son sees the father’s disgrace and stays at his side, so the authority is lost and the bond survives. It is articulated through faces, streets and objects more than words. Held a step from the top because the mechanism is shown rather than opened: the film shows that the order fails him, not how it is built.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The elevation is low to the ground, and it comes more often than the method seems to allow. The pawnshop shelves rise like a cliff of linen over the clerk who climbs them. The rows of bicycles at the stadium, and the one leaning alone, are temptation made spatial. The cry from the Tiber, with Antonio running along the embankment before he sees that the boy carried out is not his son, is dread at full height. The last minute is the summit, a release worse than arrest. Frequency holds the axis down. For long stretches the film is level by design, streets and errands, and the score lifts where the images had not asked to be lifted.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is built, not alluded to. The quest for the lost thing carries the structure: a man crosses a city to recover what was taken, consults the authorities, goes down into the market and the church, consults an oracle, finds the thief and cannot take the thing back, and at the end becomes what he hunted. Under it lies an older pattern, the son who sees his father’s shame, and here the son covers it, handing back the fallen hat. The descent through the places of the poor has the shape of a journey through the underworld, and the particular stays particular: a Fides bicycle, a poster of Rita Hayworth. Held below the top because it is one pattern at street level.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is double: the Italian studio cinema of the Fascist years, against which the movement turned, and neorealism itself, already proven by Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946) and by De Sica’s own Shoeshine (1946). Against narrative cinema at large the departure is deep: leads who are not actors, no event beyond a theft, no villain, no remedy. The stake was real: De Sica raised the money himself, and an ending without remedy was still a wager in a commercial industry in 1948. Held at the bar because the turn was made before this film. The swerve is of purity, not of direction: the most stripped statement of a method others had opened.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that this is happening to anyone, on these streets, now, and that no story will rescue it. Faces that belong to no actor give Antonio no star’s immunity. Real streets put the theft inside a city that does not stop for it, so indifference is shown by crowds who merely continue. A few days and one Sunday make the stake exactly a job. The camera stays at walking distance, often a step behind father and son, so the viewer walks with them rather than above them. Made a studio melodrama, the knowledge would become pathos. The cost is the score, a container for feeling rather than an instrument of it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Seventy-eight years of return are evidence. André Bazin’s essay made the film the test case for a theory of cinema as the revelation of the real; Zavattini’s writing made it the model of following a man through his day; later critics answered that it is a closely built melodrama with a Christian shape and a sentimental score. The readings conflict. Return yields Bruno as the film’s eye and its judge, the comedy of the Santona and the hall, Antonio’s harshness to his son, the thief’s street as a mirror. Held below the top because, once father and son are seen, the meaning lies open on the surface: return deepens it more than it overturns it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 1948, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The force: with Rome, Open City it is the defining work of the movement that showed what narrative film could do without, actors, sets, plot and resolution; Rossellini’s share is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: first in the first Sight and Sound critics’ poll (1952); Satyajit Ray’s account that seeing it in 1950 decided him to make Pather Panchali with non-professionals on location; the Indian parallel cinema, the Iranian cinema of Kiarostami, Panahi and Majidi, Cinema Novo, Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers; Beijing Bicycle (2001), built on its premise. Few films of its decade moved more of world cinema.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole, and no later cut has displaced it. Presence has been continuous for seventy-eight years, in exhibition, in the histories of cinema and in teaching; its fall in the critics’ polls, from first in 1952 to well down the list in recent decades, tempers the presence without breaking it. Postwar Rome, the housing estate and the poster of Gilda are 1948, and the film is about what 1948 did to a family, so they age as history, not as fashion; the condition it treats has not passed. A period print is the smallest charge. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The direction of people who are not actors bears weight throughout: Maggiorani’s large, slow body and his face going from pride to panic to shame, and Staiola’s walk, two steps to his father’s one, are the film’s two instruments, played exactly. Montuori holds the streets in clear depth without picturesqueness; the crowds are staged with great control; at the stadium the decision to steal is made in the cut. The costs: Cicognini’s score is conventional and sentimental where the images are not, a reaction or two of Staiola’s is coached, and the trattoria underlines.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comic Santona, with her queue of clients and her fee, and the last walk into the crowd. One law governs both. Everything in this city has a price and every help comes in its own currency: the pawnshop takes sheets, the church attendance at Mass, the Party Monday’s meeting, the fortune teller a coin, the police a statement. No one is lit as a villain; the thief is as poor as the man he robbed. The comedy of the hall and the seminarians obeys the same indifferent physics as the despair, a wide range for so plain a film. The strain is the score, which takes the side the camera refuses to take.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders are held in one structure: labour, in a job that needs a bicycle and the boy’s work at a filling station; the family; the state, in the employment office, the police and the carabiniere; the Church, in the mission and the seminarians; the Party, in the hall; the market; folk belief, in the Santona; class, in the trattoria; crime and its community, in the thief’s street; consciousness, in the father’s shame and the boy’s judgment. Each is reached through one search, and none is listed. What holds it lowest: history is present only as the condition of 1948, the sacred as an institution rather than a belief, nature barely appears, and one search holds two inner lives, no more.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, then The Living Form, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.9, then The Imperishable at 8.8. A disclosure that a poor man’s honesty depends on owning the tools of honest work, and that a bond can outlive the loss of authority; the model of its movement abroad, from Ray’s India to Iran and Beijing; a form in which faces that belong to no actor and streets that do not stop are the knowledge; a direction of two untrained performers that carries the film; one law of price governing its comedy and its despair; and seventy-eight years of continuous presence.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2: labour, the family, the state, the Church, the Party, the market, folk belief, class and crime are each entered by a scene the search requires, but history is present only as the condition of 1948, the sacred as an institution, nature barely at all, and the form holds two inner lives. Above it, The Sublime and The Swerve at 8.5: elevations of real height at the pawnshop, the river and the stadium between long stretches level by design, and a turn of purity rather than direction, made after the movement had opened its path.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.5, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ladri di biciclette as released in Italy in November 1948, in Italian, black and white, about ninety minutes, from the employment office on the housing estate to the walk into the crowd outside the stadium: directed and produced by Vittorio De Sica from a screenplay by Cesare Zavattini, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Oreste Biancoli, Adolfo Franci, Gerardo Guerrieri and De Sica, after the novel by Luigi Bartolini, photographed by Carlo Montuori, edited by Eraldo Da Roma, with music by Alessandro Cicognini. It was released in the United States as The Bicycle Thief and in Britain as Bicycle Thieves. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Italian film; the English-dubbed version is not judged, and nothing here is charged to it. No Italian line is held to the word with certainty, so the dialogue is described and never quoted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the production company, the day of the Rome opening, the exact running time, the weekdays of the story, how much of Bartolini’s novel survives in the film, the circumstances of the financing beyond De Sica’s own money, and any restoration, are not given.