Import

The Bicycle Thief (De Sica; Mayer-Burstyn), an Italian-made film by Vittorio De Sica (Shoeshine) arrives in the U.S. heavy with prizes and praise collected in Europe. Rene Clair has called it "the best film for 30 years." It is a fine, sentimental tragedy, filled with bitter social comment and presented in the realistic style which the modern Italian moviemakers have made their trademark.

The story concerns a typical Italian unheroic hero: a vacillating, tortured, sour-faced working man (Lamberto Maggiorani) whose only talent is to attract misery. He and his small son (Enzo Staiola) spend a grey Sunday scouring Rome for the stolen bicycle that is necessary to the father's bill-posting job. Their thief-chasing Odyssey takes them through various institutions (soup kitchen, church, bordello, political meeting, fortuneteller's), supposed to inspire or comfort the miserable. After being treated as a bumbling nuisance at each of these havens, the hero tries unsuccessfully to steal a bicycle, and then tearfully walks home to a hopeless existence.

This sort of journey-through-society script might have led to a movie that really moved with the erratic spontaneity of street life. But The Bicycle Thief is oddly static. Events move predictably and almost mechanically. Each small experience of the distraught hero is meticulously rounded and forced in sentiment, character coloring and social comment.Even the minor movements of the actors--the boy's tumble on a rainy street, the mother's fingering of her cheek--appear overrehearsed.

Since he has often been classed with such cinematic originators as Griffith, Eisenstein and Chaplin, Director De Sica is a moviemaker to be taken seriously. Actually, some of his scenes do suggest Chaplin's mixture of airy charm and down-to-earth bluntness. But thus far, he seems to be merely a clever craftsman with a great facility for squirting clear drops of sentiment into every shadow, gesture and cobblestone. The Bicycle Thief pictures the seamy side of life with no more reality than the average Hollywood movie shows the shiny side.

The picture scores a clear victory as a depressing document on the Roman terrain, particularly the remains of Mussolini's passion for majestic expanses of concrete. And De Sica's directing of his child star--Staiola's meanderings and scramblings, his thousand & one childish mannerisms, from unbuttoning his pants to his perplexed concentration on the chattering face of an Austrian priest--is worth several admission prices.

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