| Overview: | THE BICYCLE THIEF is Everyman's search for dignity - it is as though the soul of a man had been filmed.
THE BICYCLE THIEF is about a man, a worker, who must have a bike in order to work at his job. He is desperate, pawns everything to regain his machine, goes to work, has the thing stolen form him while his back is turned, and then goes on a search through Rome to find it. That is about all there is to it. But is happens to be very close to a lyrical masterpiece.
And this is not because we see Rome as it is, or poor people, or rags. It is because these actual details are organized by a humane view of life. The film is unafraid to examine openly, straightforwardly, the terrible distorted, destructive world which Man has made for himself.
It has a point of view. It is genuinely angry, in fact, ferocious. And this anger is not cloaked (angled), got at by indirection and ladies' magazine plot masquerades, but is expressed by means of a head-on collision with the facts of life as they exist.
For many years, while writing my plays, I had tried to find means for expressing my ideas about life. It is the central process of every writer's development. I came, painfully, to the area where there was nothing left, no plots, no cagey angles, but only the possibility of saying openly and clearly and simply what I had in mind to say, uncloaked, naively. THE BICYCLE THIEF is especially dear to me - as it will be to many others - because it is so sweetly naive.
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