![Bicycle Thieves: A Factory Worker Cast As The Lead](https://cdn.slatesource.com/6/6/d/66d727e7-fd8c-4833-abe5-837a5cd1ceef.webp)

# Bicycle Thieves: A Factory Worker Cast As The Lead

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/bicycle-thieves-a-factory-worker-cast-as-the-lead)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/6/6/d/66d727e7-fd8c-4833-abe5-837a5cd1ceef.webp)

## Bicycle Thieves (1948)

De Sica turned down Cary Grant's money and cast a real factory worker and a boy off the street instead.

Runtime

90 minutes

Director

Vittorio De Sica

Budget

$133,000

Cinematography

Carlo Montuori

> You live and you suffer.

## 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·6 Entrys

# Watching Bicycle Thieves

Unease

/

Entry

The Posting

Hopeful

"A name is called at the labour exchange and a job comes with one condition that the family cannot quite meet."

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.

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.

[Bicycle Thieves on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/?utm_source=slatesource)