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:INFO.half
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
De Sica turned down Cary Grant's money and cast a real factory worker and a boy off the street instead.

:STATS
[icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 90 minutes
[icon:STAR] Director | Vittorio De Sica
[icon:CHART] Budget | $133,000
[icon:FIRE] Cinematography | Carlo Montuori

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Antonio Ricci · Bicycle Thieves · 1948]
You live and you suffer.

:INFO
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.

:JOURNEY
Watching Bicycle Thieves
2 Hopeful
3 Redeemed
4 Taken
3 Refused
4 Compared
5 Reversed

:NOTE.half
David O. Selznick offered to finance the film if Cary Grant played the lead. De Sica declined and used a Breda factory worker who had never acted.

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It received an honorary Academy Award in 1950, before the foreign language category existed, and topped the first Sight and Sound critics poll in 1952.

:LINK
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/
Bicycle Thieves on IMDb: full cast and crew