Word: thief
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bicycle Thief, Mather House dining hall. 8, 10, March...
...World War II decade in a battered, guiltridden Italy, he was in the vanguard of the New Realism, and thereby a prominent figure under attack by his country's outraged government, clergy and film critics. In critical circles outside Italy, his cinematic results were considered brilliant (Shoeshine, 1946; Bicycle Thief, 1948; Umberto D, 1950); the ensuing wrath he incurred because of these disturbing documents of the hopelessness of Italy's human environment was equally as strong...
ODDLY LINKED to his Bicycle Thief, because most of Italy seems to move at the slow, wobbly pace produced by riding on two wheels, it is clear, as a sporty group of young people comes swooping by in the opening shot, that De Sica is dealing here with the upper-classes, not the population of Rome's slums. Upon the invitation of the Jewish-aristocrat Finzi-Continis, they are on their way to play tennis on the courts in the family's garden. As they pedal through the gates they leave the real world behind. True to the De Sica...
...results were at best fluff (Marriage-Italian Style), more frequently flubs (Woman Times Seven, The Condemned of Altond). Now, after more than a decade of indifferent and impersonal work, De Sica has returned to form. If The Garden of the Finzi-Continis does not fully rival The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D., it is good enough to stand comparison with them...
Still, it remains to be seen if the moral appeal implicit in this book will evoke a response from "the land of the thief and the home of the slave," as DuBois called it; partly because, as an Indian woman who had been on Alcatraz told me recently, "People are brought up with the idea that all these things the white people have done to the Indians was done a long time ago. A lot of people don't realize that it's still going...