The Bicycle Thief-First Impression

I just finished watching “The Bicycle Thief” and it was a very good movie. I can see why this movie was number one in British film magazine Sight and Sound. If Roger Ebert didn’t tell me that these actors were more less casted right off the street and were not professional actors, I would have thought the actors in “The Bicycle Thief” were professional actors. I believe by not using professional actors and using regular people off the street helped give this movie a better sense of realism. I think this because maybe people right off the street will be able to show better the struggles the man goes through than a professional. I also think that there will always be an interest in the material world because using material objects is one of the easiest ways to compare two people. We can see this during the scene in the pizzeria. We see Bruno who is very happy to get a mozzarella cheese sandwich, but we see Bruno keep looking over his shoulder at a rich boy who is getting platefuls of spaghetti. The rich boy gives Bruno a look to say that he is better than him just because he his eating spaghetti and Bruno isn’t eating spaghetti. I find it weird that when Ricci got his bike stolen the first time no one really tried to help him stop the thief, but when Ricci steals a bike the whole neighborhood tries and stops him.