The Bicycle Thief [DVD] [1948]

Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1949) comes to DVD in a respectable if not dazzling DVD, in a decent-looking edition that suffers from all of the usual problems associated with post-World War II European films. There was a lot of poor film stock floating around Europe at the time, and as a result, many of the movies shot in Italy, France, Germany, etc. during the years immediately following the war have never looked pristine; it's in the negative itself, and all of the restoration work in the world won't completely cure it (as those who have looked at the various upgrades of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and other late '40s films can attest). There are occasional scratches in the source print for this disc, as well as missing frames and edits that don't seem terribly smooth, but the contrast is fairly rich, and there's a decent amount of detail, despite a slight softness in the transfer. The producers of this disc did their best, and even offer the movie in Italian (with and without subtitles) and dubbed into English. It's especially enlightening to compare the two soundtracks; some of the sequences in the original Italian that have music are done without music on the English-dubbed track, and some music from the original is shifted around between scenes on the English-dubbed track. The audio on the Italian-language track is a little compressed, but not so badly as to mar the viewing experience. The voice actors in the dubbed version try hard to do their parts and tell the story dramatically, but they're a pale shadow of the original, and not all of the dubbing is terribly accurate either. There's also a good essay about the movie by playwright Arthur Miller and an English-narrated trailer dating from 1972 that looks a bit better than the actual film. The movie and the trailer alike are presented in full-frame (1.33:1) transfers. The disc opens automatically to the movie, and the special features must be accessed manually.