Neorealism As Method

The plot is a single sentence: a man gets a job that requires a bicycle, the bicycle is stolen, and he looks for it with his son. De Sica shot it in the streets of postwar Rome with a cast of non professionals, chose Lamberto Maggiorani because of how he carried his shoulders, and found Enzo Staiola watching a street performer. The refusal of stars is the whole argument. Without a famous face to carry the audience, attention falls on queues, pawn shops, wet cobbles, a police station that cannot help and a church that will not, and the film becomes a documentary of a city where work exists and security does not. The famous final stretch turns the moral question inside out by putting the father in the position of the thief in front of the one person whose opinion he cannot survive.