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List Price: $39.95Amazon.com's Price: $35.99 You Save: $3.96 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 0715515022224
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: February 13, 2007
Running Time: 89 minutes
Sales Rank: 9225
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: December 13, 1949
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.System Requirements:Run Time: 89 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 715515022224 Manufacturer No: CC1681DDVD
Amazon.com essential video:
Vittorio De Sica's remarkable 1947 drama of desperation and survival in Italy's devastating post-war depression earned a special Oscar for its affecting power. Shot in the streets and alleys of Rome, De Sica uses the real-life environment of contemporary life to frame his moving drama of a desperate father whose new job delivering cinema posters is threatened when a street thief steals his bicycle. Too poor to buy another, he and his son take to the streets in an impossible search for his bike. Cast with nonactors and filled with the real street life of Rome, this landmark film helped define the Italian neorealist approach with its mix of real life details, poetic imagery, and warm sentimentality. De Sica uses the wandering pair to witness the lives of everyday folks, but ultimately he paints a quiet, poignant portrait of father and son, played by nonprofessionals Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, whose understated performances carry the heart of the film. De Sica and scenarist Cesare Zavattini also collaborated on Shoeshine, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D, all classics in the neorealist vein, but none of which approach the simple poetry and quiet power achieved in The Bicycle Thief. --Sean Axmaker
On the DVD
The two-disc Criterion DVD of Bicycle Thieves is most significant for its fine digitally restored print quality, a marked improvement over previous video editions of the film. Now the beauties of this devastating masterpiece of Italian Neorealism shine through anew: the richness of the locations, the simple clarity of the performances, the heartbreaking details of the daily lives of the dispossessed. No commentary track, but a first-rate booklet gives a primer on the movie, with critical appreciations (including a classic take by Andre Bazin), a bell-ringing Neorealist manifesto by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, and a variety of memoirs on the making of the film, including one by director Vittorio De Sica. A second disc has three well-chosen extras. Life as It Is: The Neorealist Movement in Italy is a useful 40-minute intro to the general subject of postwar Italian cinema. Working with De Sica is a 22-minute doc with reminiscences from surviving members of the Bicycle Thieves cast and crew, including Enzo Staiola, the unforgettable little boy who was plucked out of a crowd to star in the film. A 55-minute documentary on the life of Zavattini, made for European TV, gives background on this feisty leading light of Neorealism; testimony is offered by Bernardo Bertolucci and Roberto Benigni, among others. By the way, for years the film was known in the U.S. as The Bicycle Thief, but if you re-visit it you'll be struck by how shatteringly appropriate the restoration of the original plural is. --Robert Horton
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Well deserving of its "classic" label
Despite this movie's strong placement in the annals of those deemed "classics", I was a bit hesitant to check it out because I'm not the biggest fan of neorealism, and, strangely enough, a lot of my friends with opinions I respect really didn't like it. I've got to say that I'm going to have to side with those who call it a classic this time around. More specifically, I've never before seen a neorealist film I would ever have called "gripping" and I've not seen any neorealist film as good since ... Read More
Rating: - Great
Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (Ladri Di Biciclette), made in 1948, in black and white, is one of the all time great films, and, in its Neo-realistic cinema verité simplicity, it shows how utterly creatively bankrupt most filmmaking these days is. And by that I mean worldwide, not just the obvious flaws of the Hollywood crap factory. Lean, spare, poetic- it tells one story, but tells it very well, and that story becomes universal, and is applicable to all people who have ever suffered, or been ... Read More
Rating:  - It Retains Its Power
"The Bicycle Thief," a dramatic, grainy black and white Italian film released in the United States in 1949, has long been considered one of the greats, for several reasons. The strongest must be that, along with Roberto Rossellini's 1946 "Open City," it gives us an unvarnished look at Rome, shortly after the end of World War II, which the Italians definitively lost. The city is devastated; its people are desperate for jobs, food, and shelter.
The movie was written by Cesare Zavattini, ... Read More
Rating: - Big fish, little fish, loser fish, thief fish
De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (plural, in the Italian) reminds us that hope takes many forms. In the case of Antonio Ricci and his family, hope is a bicycle. Ricci, one of the tens of thousands of unemployed workers in the Italian depression that followed WWII, finally gets a job in Rome as a sign-hanger. But the job requires that he have a bicycle. Ricci's bike is stolen his first day on the job, and he and his son Bruno embark on a fruitless search for it that occupies the bulk of the movie. They ... Read More
Rating: - Amazing! A neo-realist masterpiece...
What can I say? I've heard about this film for years, and I finally got to watch it the other day. It was one of the best cinematic experiences that I have ever had!
There isn't much in the way of a plot - a struggling father and husband buys a new bicycle in order to carry out the duties of his new job, the bike is taken away buy a passing thief, and the father and his son go out into the poverty stricken streets of Italy to find it.
However, it is a journey that they will ... Read More
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