Summary
Accompanied by stirring music, Antonio triumphantly rides through the workers' suburbs of Rome to work, with Bruno on the handlebars. Antonio drops his son off at the filling station, where the child works. Antonio arrives at the headquarters of his job, and him and several other employees then go on their separate routes via bicycle, with tall ladders in hand.
One of Antonio’s coworkers demonstrates how to paste up posters, emphasizing the importance of adding a second coat of glue on top of the posters to flatten out the lumps and wrinkles. The particular poster they hang up is one of Rita Hayworth, the famous 40s American sex symbol and movie star. While his coworker is explaining the requirements of the job, two impoverished children—likely younger than Bruno—wander around Antonio, his coworker, and pedestrians, begging them for money. The men either ignore the children or tell them to beat it.
Antonio then begins his route independently. He stands on his ladder and plasters more posters of Rita Hayworth, with the bike kept at a notable distance from him. A young man talks to an older man while eyeing Antonio’s bike, and then he quickly jumps on it and rides off. Antonio yells out “Thief!” and begins chasing the young man on foot. Someone graciously allows Antonio to latch onto his car during his chase, but they lose the thief in the tunnels. Antonio briefly gazes the street for his bike before returning to his work post, where he finishes the 2nd coat of glue. Devastated, Antonio sinks to the bottom of his ladder with an uncertain, anguished, nearly teary-eyed expression on his face.
At a police station, Antonio reports the theft to the police. He files a complaint and gives the bike’s serial number and description. The unsympathetic officer encourages Antonio to look for the bike himself; he asserts that there is not much the police can do in the meantime, to which Antonio replies, “Then why even file a complaint?” Before abandoning Antonio to help quell a political riot, the officer gets angry at a helpless Antonio’s insistence that the police should make a real effort to find the bike. As Antonio leaves the station, he notices piles of thousands of unsolved cases hanging across the wall.
After cutting into lines of waiting people, Antonio has an arduous ride on an overcrowded bus and finally picks up Bruno, who asks his father, “Where’s the bike?” Too ashamed to reveal the truth, Antonio tells Bruno the bicycle broke down and continues walking alongside him in silence. They finally arrive home, and Antonio tells Bruno to go inside without him. While searching for his friend, Baiocco, Antonio stumbles upon a Communist party meeting. The group discusses worker’s rights, and Antonio is almost immediately hushed out of the room. Antonio then finds Baiocco, who’s working on a rehearsal of an amateur stage play. Antonio asks Baiocco to help him find his bicycle, and Baiocco agrees and adds that they should search for it at Piazza Vittorio, Rome’s largest square, as soon as possible.
Clearly distraught, Maria then approaches Antonio and Baiocco. Antonio callously tells her to not whine, saying, “I purposely didn’t go home to avoid that [Maria's whining].” Maria begins to cry, and Baiocco reassures her that they will be able to find the bike tomorrow—“They’ll swap some parts, but it’ll be on the market tomorrow...You might not sleep so well tonight, but we’ll find it. Don’t worry.” Baiocco’s confident words settle Antonio and Maria down, though they still look uneasy for what tomorrow will bring them.
Analysis
In addition to themes like the calamitous impacts of poverty, the delicacy of father-son relationships, and the complex moral issues affecting marginalized sections of society, Bicycle Thieves also crucially centers on the conflict between the individual and the group conflict. In Part 1 of the film, Antonio’s luck and success arise solely when he finds authority figures who view him as an individual with real, unique dilemmas. Antonio receives the job offer once he becomes miraculously singled out by the employment officer; he gets his official job assignment when he faces his employer one-on-one; and he and Maria collect some extra money for their sheets once the pawnbroker humanely empathizes with their hardships.
In short, Antonio's poverty is alleviated when his individual predicaments are noticed and validated by a singular authority figure—an employment officer, his boss, a pawnbroker. Because he confronts these authorities face-to-face and isn’t outnumbered, he is finally treated like a human being, but his joy and luck soon dissipates in Part 2. The theft of his bike marks the first in a series of defeats for Antonio, and these defeats emerge when he is overwhelmed by the force of a group, who view him less as an individual and more as an insignificant part of the anonymous, unemployed mass in post war Italy. Notably, two men participate in the theft of his bike, with the young man riding off with the bike and the other older man delaying Antonio’s pursuit. Also, a roomful of policemen dismiss his report of theft, the speeches given at the Communist party meeting are insubstantial, and when Antonio asks a member about the whereabouts of Baiocco, the group—quite ironically—hushes Antonio, a suffering member of the proletariat, out of the room. In other words, these perceived allies of the downtrodden—the police, the Communist party—are indifferent to Antonio’s problems when his individuality becomes outnumbered and subservient to these larger, more powerful groups in society. Even when Antonio eventually locates Baiocco at the rehearsal, the singer repeats the word “gente” (“people” in Italian), emphasizing the theme of the one against the many.
Likewise, through the depicted inadequacy of the police and public infrastructure in these scenes, we begin to see De Sica and Zavattini’s criticism of the institutions who suppress and neglect the adversities of the poor rather than actively work to improve their destitute circumstances. When Antonio’s bike is reported, the apathetic officer encourages him to search for the bike himself, asserting that there isn’t much the police can do, as they wouldn’t even recognize the bike if they saw it. This dismissive attitude culminates when a co-worker asks the officer if he’s dealing with a serious crime, to which the officer replies, “Just a bicycle.” Not only are the police unable to control crime, but they unabashedly show their indifference and callousness to the crimes affecting thousands of powerless individuals across Rome.
The losses Antonio suffers when he’s outnumbered within institutions and collectives reflects the overarching politics of the film. A man cannot successfully combat the larger forces of society, who will either turn him into a thief or starve him. This section of the film foreshadows Antonio’s descent into criminality when he cuts into the long line of people waiting at the bus stop, demonstrating a disregard for equity and his fellow man. As the acclaimed French film theorist, Andre Bazin, remarked in his analysis of Bicycle Thieves, “in the world in which this workman [Antonio] lives, the poor must steal from each other in order to survive.” Bicycle Thieves portrays an inefficient capitalist world—complete with long bus lines, lack of running water, apathetic government functionaries, and high unemployment rates—that denies necessities to the lower classes. This system produces an impoverished state where desperation dehumanizes poor individuals, turning them into petty criminals.
One of Bicycle Thieves’ most iconic images is the poster of a sultry Rita Hayworth, which Antonio glues up on his 1st day of work. This imagery ironically contrasts the glamorous lifestyle of the Hollywood elite with the bleak poverty ubiquitous in postwar Europe. Hollywood and its stars are a fantasy disconnected from “real” people like Antonio, which becomes apparent when Antonio's coworker tells him to flatten out creases in the poster. Rita Hayworth’s face must remain a glossy illusion of aesthetic perfection, unlike members of the Italian proletariat, who don’t have resources like Hollywood lighting and makeup to hinder their gaunt, flawed appearances. Antonio will never ascend to Hollywood grandeur, and his face, consisting of sharp cheekbones and wrinkles, will always signify the sacrifices he’s made to survive in the near post-apocalyptic world of post-WWII Italy. The imagery of the Rita Hayworth poster also juxtaposes the grandiose, over-the-top studio artifice of Hollywood with the gritty, quotidian social concerns expressed in neorealism, with its on-location shooting, nonprofessional actors, stark photography, and natural lighting. This juxtaposition illustrates how filmmakers like De Sica were not only accurately depicting dour social and economic conditions, injustices, and oppression, but they were also critiquing the superficial American film industry.
