The Stolen Bicycle

The laurel-heaped Italian movie, The Bicycle Thief (TIME, Dec. 12), tells a simple, heartbreaking story that might have come right off the streets of postwar Rome. An unemployed workman gets a job which requires a bicycle. He pawns the family bedsheets to get his out of hock, loses it to a thief, and fails in a forlorn chase to get it back. For the central role, Director Vittorio (Shoeshine) De Sica hired a real workman: gaunt, sad-eyed Lamberto Maggiorani, 39, whose performance won international praise.

Last week, while. Manhattan moviegoers waited in line to see the picture, Maggiorani was in an unheated flat near Rome, playing the role of the buffeted worker all over again. But this time it was more realistic than even realist De Sica could make it.

Quick Riches. Maggiorani's own story began in the spring of 1948, when his plump, eternally optimistic wife Giuseppina pushed him into the movie. With a snapshot of their ten-year-old son Enrico, she had answered a call at De Sica's office for a small boy. Maggiorani was in the snapshot too, and the movie people liked his looks for the role of Antonio. He balked. He had worked for 16 years as a machinist in the Breda steel works, and the job was good enough to support his wife and three children. "A steady job," he protested, "is better than all the quick riches in the world."

But Giuseppina pleaded, so he put on his only good suit, joined 20 other applicants at the studio and got the role. For three months a black limousine picked him up every day at his tenement and took him to work. For his labors in De Sica's classic he got $1,000. With it he bought the new dining-room furniture that Giuseppina had always wanted, new clothes for themselves and the children, a family holiday in Florence. After that, he went back to his old job, and the-factory proudly gave him a medal.

Then the plot took a twist that De Sica could appreciate. The factory laid off 350 employees, and the manager called in Maggiorani. "Your companions are grumbling," he said. "They claim you made millions from the movie. It's not fair to fire them and keep you." So Maggiorani was fired. "Never mind," said Giuseppina cheerfully. "Since your role in The Bicycle Thief you have actually become Antonio. You feel downtrodden, and now your bicycle has been stolen. We will .merely tell De Sica you want to make another picture."

Hard Times. Last summer Maggiorani managed to get 17 days' work in a minor movie role. Then the family lived thinly on what little was left of Maggiorani's "millions." Last month the landlord posted an eviction notice on their three-room flat just as Maggiorani was starting a temporary job as a bricklayer at $2 a day.

Last week, when the New York Herald Tribune's Barrett McGurn cabled the sad story, Maggiorani needed work.

Would Director De Sica help? Well, he would give Maggiorani a job as a prop man in his next movie. "I don't think he has any future as an actor," De Sica said, "except occasionally in workmen's roles . . . I think he should go on with his regular job."

At week's end Maggiorani got some help from the U.S., where movie fans prefer a happy ending. Manhattan's Italian-language radio station WOV cabled its Rome studio to hire him as an apprentice recording technician, and perhaps give him work as an actor. While Giuseppina held out for a real acting job, Maggiorani gratefully considered the offer.

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