Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Of all the film polls conducted, there is generally no argument that the most respected poll is Sight & Sound magazine's once-in-a-decade survey of critics' top ten films. The first of these polls was published in 1952, and of the seven polls that have been conducted, only three films have come on top. Since 1962, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane has reigned supreme, untouchable until 2012 when Hitchcock's Vertigo finally dethroned it. However, in that very first poll it was a film that was still only four years old that came out above all others. The film was made in Italy by Vittorio De Sica - Bicycle Thieves.
By 1962, the film had dropped to 7th in the top 10, before falling out out completely by the 70s, and has never returned since (though as recently as 2012 in the magazine's parallel 'Director's Poll' Bicycle Thieves slipped in at number 10, suggesting a resurgence, at least among directors.).
It's easy to over-analyse these polls, but it still begs the question: why did Bicycle Thieves fall from grace so quickly? After all, the film that dislodged it from the top was made 7 years before it. But first, the film itself.

Proud Ricci and his son with their newly-purchased bicycle

Vittorio De Sica was by 1948 the most notable Italian director working in cinema.  He had won an honourary Academy Award for his 1946 film Shoeshine, which had bought him to international attention. Shoeshine was among the very first films of a new movement in cinema - neorealism. Neorealism was a product of the pain of World War II that had devastated fascist Italy. Characterised by the use of non-professional actors and telling simple, true-to-life stories, of the daily trials all Italians at the time were facing, such honest films quickly gained popularity all over the world.
The film, true to neorealism, was set on the streets of Rome, and one of the many strengths of the film is that it uses the city so well that it is almost a character itself, with the busy streets full of cars and people (and bicycles). In his only notable film credit, Lamberto Maggiorani plays Antonio Ricci, one of thousands of unemployed men in the city with a family to support. Ricci is offered a job placing advertising posters on the streets, but he is told he cannot take the job unless he has a bicycle. He returns to his wife, and in their desperation they pawn their valuable bedsheets - the only items of worth the family still possess. Ricci then begins learning his new job, but to his dismay as soon as he begins work on his own, a young man steals his bike. He tries to pursue him through the streets of Rome but is thrown off the trail by accomplices of the thief and is forced to walk to meet his son, Bruno.

The moment Ricci sees the thief escaping - with his bike

Distraught, Ricci reports the theft to the police, but is told that there is nothing they can do. He turns to friends for assistance, and one guarantees Ricci that he can find his bike at the Piazza Vittorio market. Despite finding a bicycle that Ricci is convinced may be his, after summoning a police officer he realises that the serial numbers do not match. As Ricci tries harder and harder to find his stolen bicycle his efforts become more and more desperate, and it's easy to sympathise with his ultimately futile search. By now completely despondent, he ultimately contemplates the unthinkable - to steal somebody else's bicycle.

I'll confess right now - I absolutely love this film. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a decent film, but was expecting more from it. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to watch it again. From the second watch, I was hooked. It's absolutely full of minor details which are easily to miss on a first viewing, but add so much to the film. An example is in the earlier scene when Ricci's wife pawns their bedsheets you notice that there are many, many stacks of bedsheets, and queues of other impoverished people doing exactly the same. Another easily-missed moment is the missions offering free meals and haircuts in return for attending church. It's these tiny little touches which really add to the feeling that this is a film being played out in a real world, with real people going about their real lives. All the best films offer something new with each fresh viewing, and Bicycle Thieves is one of the very best in this regard. Another high point is the relationship between Ricci and Bruno - it's surely the most believable adult / child relationship since Chaplin's The Kid.

Ricci and Bruno search in vain for the stolen bicycle

But why did Bicycle Thieves fall from favour so rapidly after 1952? Personally I'd say with wounds from the war still slowly healing, people didn't want to be reminded of all the worst aspects of it - including the poverty and destitution that followed. Similarly, Jean Renoir's fantastic war film La Grande Illusion, released in 1937, was a runner-up in the 1952 poll, and never troubled the charts again. It's worth remembering as well that it wasn't just the Axis powers that were badly effected; countries like France, who had been invaded, and Britain, who had virtually bankrupted themselves also wanted to move on from the 1940s.
So it seems that Bicycle Thieves fell out of fashion as the world tried to move on from the horrors of World War II, and its neorealism style suddenly seemed quaint and irrelevant. I'd argue that it's only as new generations have been able to experience films like this unburdened by their own contemporary experience (though recent scenes in Greece, especially, demonstrate that themes that Bicycle Thieves examines persist, no matter how much we'd like to think we have progressed) that we have been able to reevaluate them and see the universal themes that the film is based around. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see this back on the Sight & Sound poll one day- even if it does take a few decades.