“The Bicycle Thief” transcends time, ideology

It is the mark of a classic work, a Shakespeare play or an unforgettable movie, that it transcends its time. It speaks as truly when seen the first time as the fiftieth.

I first saw “The Bicycle Thief” in 1949, the year the Italian film premiered, and now, 60 years later and in a fresh print, not only do the emotions hold true but even the historical circumstances have come back full cycle.

As in American cities today, millions of unemployed men were leading lives of quiet desperation as they searched for work in the wake of Italy’s defeat in World War II.

One is Antonio Ricci, a family man whose luck seems to have finally turned. He lands a job with the Rome municipality, pasting huge advertising posters on walls. However, he must furnish his own bicycle, which is in a repair shop, and to pay the bill his wife hocks the family’s bed sheets.

On the first day of work, the bicycle is stolen, the police shrug their shoulders, and during the following days Antonio scours Rome’s streets and thieves markets , constantly trailed by his small son Bruno.

In a city of hundreds of thousands of bicycle riders, the search becomes ever more desperate and hopeless, brightened only intermittently by the bond between father and son.

“Bicycle Thief,” which is generally ranked among the half dozen greatest films of all time, is the work of Vottorio De Sica, a pioneer of the Italian school of neorealism, with his sparse documentary style and casting of non-professional actors.

Two such non-actors are Lamberto Maggiorani as Antonio and Enzo Staiola as his son Bruno, whose performances must be the envy of glittering Hollywood stars.

Besides a prolific career as an actor, De Sica directed 34 feature films, but by the late 1960s, he seemed to have lost his touch.

Then, in 1970, the critics rediscovered him with “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” produced by Arthur Cohn, which chronicled the fate of an upper class Jewish family under the Mussolini regime.

The international acclaim for “Bicycle Thief” and the preceding “Shoeshine” persuaded the Academy to establish an Oscar category for best foreign-language film, which De Sica topped again with “Finzi-Continis.”

“The Bicycle Thief” opens Jan. 8 at Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills. It is a film that transcends time, ideology or nationality to stand as a tribute to the human spirit.

As Arthur Miller, who knew something about portraying the ordinary man, put it, the film is “Everyman’s search for dignity – it is as though the soul of man had been filmed.”