In “Our Films, Their Films,” Satyajit Ray writes of seeing The Bicycle Thief as the turning point in his career: “I was to work for six months in London in my (advertising) agency's head office. Doubtless the management hoped that I would come back...wholly dedicated to the pursuit of selling tea and biscuits. What the trip did in fact was to set the seal of doom on my advertising career. Within three days of arriving in London I saw The Bicycle Thief. I knew immediately that if I ever made Pather Panchali - and the idea had been at the back of my mind for some time - I would make it in the same way, using natural locations and unknown actors....”
The Bicycle Thief is “the most important film of the immediate postwar period,” according to film historian Georges Sadoul. Scripted by the great poet and theoretician of Neo-Realism Cesare Zavattini, who wrote several of De Sica's masterpieces, it relates the story of a poor man and his son. In order to get a job as a bill poster the man must acquire a bicycle; he does, but it is stolen. The remainder of the film consists of their ironic and despondent search for survival. An American company wanted Cary Grant to play the lead, but De Sica and Zavattini instead chose a factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani. Bosley Crowther wrote that The Bicycle Thief “ranks for all-around greatness with any picture made.”