Bicycle Thieves Film Still

Bicycle Thieves

Vittorio De Sica

 
Bicycle Thieves Criterion DVD

DVD

2 Discs

SRP: $39.95

Criterion Store price:$31.96

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  • Italy
  • 1948
  • 93 minutes
  • Black and White
  • 1.33:1
  • Italian

SYNOPSIS: Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) defined an era in cinema. In postwar, poverty-stricken Rome, a man, hoping to support his desperate family with a new job, loses his bicycle, his main means of transportation for work. With his wide-eyed young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in Italy: emotional clarity, social righteousness, and brutal honesty.

Cast & CreditsOpen

Cast

Antonio Ricci Lamberto Maggiorani
Bruno Ricci Enzo Staiola
Maria Ricci Lianella Carell
Baiocco Gino Saltamerenda
The thiefVittorio Antonucci
The beggarGiulio Chiari

Credits

DirectorVittorio De Sica
ScreenplayVittorio De Sica, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Gerardo Guerrieri and Cesare Zavattini
CinematographyCarlo Montuori
ProducerGiuseppe Amato and Vittorio De Sica
StoryCesare Zavattini
Based on a novel byLuigi Bartolini
SoundGino Fiorelli
EditingEraldo Da Roma
MusicAlessandro Cicognini

Disc Features

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET:

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer
  • Working with De Sica, a collection of new interviews with screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico, actor Enzo Staiola, and film scholar Callisto Cosulich
  • Life as It Is, a new program on the history of Italian neorealism, featuring scholar Mark Shiel
  • A 2003 documentary on screenwriter and longtime Vittorio De Sica collaborator Cesare Zavattini, directed by Carlo Lizzani
  • Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A book featuring new essays by critic Godfrey Cheshire and filmmaker Charles Burnett, remembrances by De Sica and his collaborators, and classic writings by Zavattini and critic André Bazin

From the CurrentView the Current »

Film Essays

Bicycle Thieves:
A Passionate Commitment to the Real

By Godfrey CheshireFebruary 12, 2007

Viewed in retrospect, much of modern cinema can seem to flow from twin fountainheads: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Vittorio De Sica’s Read more »

Bicycle Thieves:
Ode to the Common Man

By Charles BurnettFebruary 12, 2007

Bicycle Thieves is truly one of my favorite films. I could watch it over and over again, and in truth, I have. It’s a complicated and eloquent story in Read more »