The Bicycle Thief

What a stark, black and white reduction of humanity! Rome, circa World War II. Posters of the big bossom girl, Rita Hayworth, pasted on the walls of the city. The job requires a bicycle and no sooner does the out-of-work young father rescue his bicycle from the Roman equivalent of the pawn shop, than thieves conspire to steal it away from him while he works. The rest of the movie is about trying to find the thief and the way reality and justice fail to merge. In the end, the desperate father steals someone else's bicycle, gets himself caught, and mortifies his crying son. Only some sort of unelaborated upon compassion from the bicycle owner saves him from going to jail for theft. "Some fine example you set for your son," one of the men who catches him says. It is a bitter irony. Is this film about how not to parent your child? Is this about survival? Survival of the fittest? Is the movie about injustice? Is it cynical? Is it about how thin the separation between humans and animals may actually be? My guess is that Arthur Miller intended that every one of these questions be asked, if not answered. It may be that they are not answerable, but it is good to be aware of them from time to time. Of course in post war Europe, raw survival might well have been the best one could hope for anyway. Those years must have been more harsh and gritty than we could know, not having lived then.