Italian Neorealismo Cinema Classics

The Bicycle Thieves

Watch it here: Full length, English Voice Over

Review of The Bicycle Thieves By Stephen Brophy

This is a review that I thought was well written, so i include it here and give credit to the author and his link. If you ever go to Cartago, Costa Rica you will feel like you are in a neorealismo flick, and if you are unlucky as I was the other day, you may even get your friend;s weedwacker stolen which supposedly cost 800 bucks which I do not have. Anyhow, thanks to the Bicycle Thief movie I can feel the romance in it.
Here goes the review by Stephen Brody
The Bicycle Thieves (Ladridi Biciclette)
Directed by Vittorio de Sica. Written by Cesare Zavattini. Starring Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola.

Have you ever watched people on the street and tried to decipher them from the clues your eyes gather, to make up life stories for them? At the beginning of The Bicycle Thieves a man emerges from a crowd of unemployed workers, and after we have contemplated his working-class tragedy, he blends back with the masses as the movie comes to its end.

Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) is one man among thousands trying to find a way to survive with his young family in the chaos of post-war Rome. He is offered a job hanging posters as the movie begins, but to keep the job he will have to get his bicycle out of hock. To do this, his wife Maria - a fiercely protective proletarian madonna - offers to pawn some bed linens that comprise her dowry.

Their happiness and security don't last long. One day while Antonio is struggling to smooth out a poster of an impossibly nubile Rita Hayworth on a rough stone wall, a shifty-eyed passerby jumps on his bike and rides it away. Antonio and his young son Bruno (Enzio Staiola) begin a desperate odyssey through the neighborhoods of Rome to find the bike, without which he will lose his job.

While his father is the protagonist of this story, Bruno serves as its moral center. At first he seems prone to be one of those insufferably perky little monsters who populated so many Hollywood movies of the 1930s and '40s. But Bruno endures a lot through the course of this film, and when Antonio has completed his descent into hell, it is Bruno who takes him by the hand and leads him back out.

The Bicycle Thieves is one of the crown jewels of neorealism, the post-war Italian philosophy of filmmaking that permanently reinvigorated our world of cinema. Rejecting the illusory glamour and set-bound artificiality of conventional filmmaking, neorealism took its stories from the struggles of the working class, went out into the streets to record them, and used non-professional actors to tell them. This style borne of scarcity is also typified by a grainy, almost documentary cinematography, and frequent use of hand-held camera.

Cesare Zavattini, the script writer for Bicycle Thieves, was the most important theoretician of neorealism. He wrote his screenplay in just four days after watching an attempted theft while sitting at an outdoor Roman cafe. "My fixed idea is to deromanticize the cinema," he said. "I want to teach people to see daily life with the same passion they experience in reading a book." A committed Marxist, he spread his ideas in polemical essays and critiques as well as in many screenplays and collaborations with Vittorio de Sica and other directors.

Vittorio de Sica, director of The Bicycle Thieves, was also an accomplished actor. The courtly graciousness and romantic tenderness of his characters in the films of other artists like Rossellini or Ophuls reveal both the strengths and the weaknesses of his style of filmmaking. At its best his work is suffused with a tender love for his characters, which overrides the melodrama to which he is a little too prone. He has also made too many films full of empty stylishness and very little else. The Bicycle Thieves holds a secure place among his finest accomplishments.

This movie was released in Italy with the title Ladri di Biciclette, which is a plural construction. For American release it was given the simplified singular title, The Bicycle Thief, which is the way most people in this country now know it. Recently there has been a movement among serious writers about film to use the more correct plural, a movement in which I am a participant.

La Strada

Review for La Strada by Ronald Bowers at filmreference.com

La strada , one of the true masterpieces of modern cinema, is the film which brought international acclaim to director Federico Fellini. It is also an important transitional work in Italian cinema because its poetic and lyrical qualities set it apart from the literalness of the neorealism school which had dominated post-World War II Italy.

Fellini is an exponent of neo-realism, having apprenticed with Roberto Rossellini as a writer and assistant director on Open City and Paisan . However, when he began directing on his own, preceding La strada with The White Sheik and I vitelloni , he opted for a subjectivity which, while evidencing the influences of neo-realism, resulted in an interior and personalized cinema second only to Buñuel.

One of the recurring motifs in Fellini's films is the circus. As a youth, Fellini had spent a number of years with an itinerant circus troup and came to admire their simplicity and their affinity with nature. Other motifs center on his Franciscan-like religious beliefs of which he stated: "If one is to understand Christianity as an attitude of love towards another human being, then all my films revolve around it. I show a world without love inhabited by people who exploit other people, but there is always among them some significant person who wants to give love and to live for the sake of love." Both elements can be found in La strada , where a simple story involving the theme of redemption is set among itinerant circus folk.

Fellini wrote La strada (with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano) for his actress-wife Giulietta Masina. When he presented the project to producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, they rejected it as uncommercial, then suggested filming it with Silvano Mangano (Mrs. De Laurentiis) and Burt Lancaster as the stars. Fellini insisted that only his wife would play Gelsomina, and was finally able to convince Anthony Quinn, then in Italy making Attila, the Hun , to accept the role of Zampano. His producers acquiesced and the project was underway.

La strada is a serio-comic tragedy in which Fellini presents many levels of emotion and contrasting images. Its abiding message is that everyone has a purpose in life, a philosophy manifested through the lives of the three leading characters. Gelsomina is the self-sacrificing, doe-eyed simpleton (love) who becomes the chattel of Zampano, the animalistic circus strong-man (brutality). The catalyst in their fatal relationship is Il Matto, the Fool, whose prescience helps the ignorant Gelsomina to see her own value as a human being (imagination). On one level the story is a fable, a variation on Beauty and the Beast, with Gelsomina, whose beauty is within, loving the beast. On another level it is a religious allegory in which the Fool, says Fellini, represents Christ. It is also an unprepossessing story of life's rejects, for whom Fellini has always shown compassion, struggling with their own solitude. This juxtaposition of realism, fantasy and spirituality makes Fellini's La strada unique.

As defined by the title, La strada , or The Road , is an episodic journey in the lives of these three outcasts. Zampano travels from village to village with his motorcycle and three-wheeled trailer performing a strongman's feat of breaking an iron chain by expanding his muscular chest. His act requires a helpmate so he purchases Gelsomina from her destitute mother for 10,000 lire. (Zampano's former helpmate had been Gelsomina's sister who had died on the road.) Gelsomina becomes Zampano's slave. With much difficulty she learns to beat a drum, announce his act-"Zam-pan-o is here"-, play the trumpet, and fulfill his sexual needs. Zampano lives in a world of physical appetites, while Gelsomina communicates with the sea, the birds, the flowers. For a while they join a travelling circus where Il Matto, the equilibrist, taunts the brutish Zampano, and counsels Gelsomina in the spiritual.

After leaving the circus, their paths once again cross with that of Il Matto. This time when the Fool derides the strongman, Zampano accidently kills him. The Fool's death sends Gelsomina into a state of depression and Zampano selfishly deserts her. Five years later he learns that she has died and only then, through her loss, is he able to recognize his remorse and the magnitude of his own solitude. Fellini closes his film with a chilling scene by the sea where Gelsomina had always felt at home.

The impact of the film is the result of Fellini's poetic imagery and not any cinematic tricks. The most apparent cinematic device is the moving camera and beautiful photography of Otello Martelli. Nino Rota's enchanting musical score has since become an international classic. Most important to the effectiveness of the film is the acting. Quinn's performance as Zampano is superb and brought him long overdue acclaim as an actor of stature, and Basehart is a commendable and mischievous Il Matto. Most outstanding of all is the wonderful face and pantomime of Giulietta Masina whose comedic abilities were compared to those of Chaplin and Harry Langdon.

The majority of reviews were overwhelmingly positive, with the Catholic press describing it as a "parable of charity, love, grace, and salvation." There were, however, dissenting votes. The Italian leftists felt Fellini had betrayed neorealism, and some government factions protested the film's exportation to other countries, claiming it presented a sordid and immoral view of ordinary Italians.

The film is the first of what is often described as Fellini's trilogy of solitude- Il bidone and The Nights of Cabiria completing the trilogy. La strada won over 50 international awards, including the Grand Prize at the Venice Festival, The New York Film Critics Award, and the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film.

-Ronald Bowers

8 1/2

Federico Fellini

Felini 8 1/2

Felini 8 1/2

Umberto D

Vittorio De Sica

Umberto D

Umberto D

Cinema Paradiso

Giuseppe Tornatore

Its a Wonderful Life B&W

Its A Wonderful Life