ROME LETTER
623
torio Antonucci, the eighteen-year-old boy who played the villainous
bicycle thief, the only member of the cast who did not seem to have made
enough money to get a new suit, kept staring into space while people
milled around him, and yelled: "Look, the thief." Finally he shrugged
his shoulders and made for the bus.
The fact is that the whole ceremony was very much like a family
reunion, in which the movie itself had the function of the family
SCl'"P–
book. With the help of a thin anecdote about a poor worker whose bi–
cycle is stolen, and who roams through all the poorest, and the most
characteristic, sections of Rome, dragging around his little boy for a
whole Sunday in the attempt to catch up with the thief, De Sica has
succeeded in making the most charming and skillful of all the many
movies about Rome at which the directors of the so-called "neo-realistic"
school have tried their hand. Nine tenths of De Sica's talent consists in
knowing exactly what he can do, and doing it with great diligence and
patience. He directs a movie much the same way as Stanislawski directed
a play. A scenario is to him a series of notes indicating places and atmo–
spheres that he wants to use. Then come weeks and weeks of careful
work on the spot, which involves getting really to know every milieu
that is going to be represented, even in details that will never appear
on the screen. Since the war, fortune tellers have become a very im–
portant part of Italian life. The scenario of
Bicycle Thieves
required two
scenes in a fortune teller's room. De Sica's collaborators had discovered
a woman seer who, they thought, was inimitable, and tried to bribe her
into acting her own part, in her own apartment. The woman was incor–
ruptible. The only solution left was to go to her place day after day,
posing as her clients, and noting down every detail, from the awed
whispers of people waiting in the corridor to be received by the "holy
woman" to the hundreds of sacred images and fetishes hanging on the
walls of the sybil's temple. In due time, the mental photographing was
completed. The whole thing had to be reconstructed, and the right actors
found. It took a lot of time and trouble, since De Sica didn't want any
professional actors. But De Sica is ready to wait as long as necessary to
get the right touch. He knows Rome, loves the Roman way of life,
enjoys catching it on film, and, as people say of him, he could lure even
a sack of potatoes into acting. In his latest picture, he has put every bit
of his capacities to good use, and is being rewarded with a lot of ap–
plause, a moderate amount of cash, and a few attacks from certain
quarters, for having "defamed Italy and the Italian character"--an
accusation to which Italian movie directors are by now getting ac–
customed.
