“One of the most perfect films I’ve ever seen”: the 1948 movie Leonardo DiCaprio would watch forever
We’ve all been in a situation where you’ll watch a movie for the first time and realise then and there that you’ll never get tired of watching it again and again and again, and Leonardo DiCaprio is more different.
He might be exorbitantly wealthy, eminently successful, and one of the greatest actors of his generation, but he’s still a cinephile at the end of the day, and when you spend that much time with Martin Scorsese, your horizons will inevitably be continually broadening as the maestro offers his recommendations.
That’s not to suggest that DiCaprio was watching Weekend at Bernie’s and Mac and Me on repeat before he headlined Gangs of New York in his first collaboration with the legendary director, especially when his artistically inclined parents ensured he was exposed to all forms of media from a young and impressionable age.
As you can obviously infer from his name, DiCaprio has Italian heritage, with his father, George, the grandson of Italian immigrants to New York City. The Academy Award-winning actor and producer also has a lifelong love of Italian cinema, with one masterpiece standing above the rest as one of the finest features he’s ever laid eyes on.
“I can’t talk about Italian cinema without mentioning Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, 8½, and La Strada, and, in particular, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves,” he shared. “No one captured the post-war realities in Europe with such poetry as De Sica, Fellini, and Visconti. Bicycle Thieves has to be one of the most perfect films I’ve ever seen.”
Evidently, DiCaprio is a big fan of the neorealism movement, when a new wave of Italian auteurs emerged to tell grounded, raw, and evocative stories that reflected the mood of a nation. The period is responsible for several ironclad classics, but as far as he’s concerned, Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 drama is the absolute pinnacle of the era.
“It’s a day in the life of one man trying to find his bicycle, but it somehow seems to capture a lifetime of experiences and emotions,” he proffered. “I’d never had a two-day discussion about one film with anyone, and this film provoked that.” You know a movie has had a profound impact when he didn’t just want to talk about it afterward; he wanted to talk about it afterward for 48 hours.
How do we know he would watch it forever? Because when DiCaprio was asked which films he could watch in perpetuity for the rest of his life without ever getting bored, Bicycle Thieves made the cut, alongside Taxi Driver, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Big Lebowski, Tokyo Story, Goodfellas, and Vertigo.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to call it the single most important picture of the Italian neorealism period, and even if it isn’t, it’s among the most influential films of its day, having awed and inspired everyone from DiCaprio and Scorsese to Satyajit Ray and Ken Loach, and countless others in between.
