S4E28: Bicycle Thieves

Kill James Bond!

November, Abigail, and Devon

Tv & Film, Film Reviews, Tv & Film:film Reviews

4.7 • 615 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 98 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's our final heist movie of the year, and it's time to flip the script a little. A union man in immediate postwar Italy is assigned a job putting up posters. The pay is enough to finally give his family some stability, but it requires a bicycle. When his bike is stolen on his first day, he and his remarkable young son search through the markets and back alleys of Rome to find it. ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestinehttps://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotillahttps://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla alsohttps://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patcheshttps://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly.
0:21.6	I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorn and Devon.
0:25.4	Bonjourno.
0:26.5	Bonjourno.
0:27.5	How we doing?
0:28.0	We were trying to cook up an Italian cold open for this, and then we realized that none of us speak Italian.
0:35.2	No, not even a little bit.
0:36.1	That's never been a problem for these cold opens before. That's true, but I think the thing is, it's very important for us to convey a sense of, like, verisimilitude and social context, because what you're seeing isn't just regular kill James Bond. What you're seeing is Italian neo-realist kill James Bond. Oh shit.
1:21.1	Because I've sort of, I've hijacked the podcast a bit. I'm sorry for all the downer films. You're a podcast. You can do that. You're the showrunner. It's true. I have the controls. Me as a pilot. Yeah. I've hijacked this plane and will be flying it safely to its destination. No, the destination on this one is the 1948 film Bicycle Thieves, Ladri di Biclete, which is a turn for robbery season, but it's one I've had in mind for a long time.
1:24.1	New oldest film we've ever done.
1:25.0	It's true. I wanted to do a film about how maybe robbery isn't always cool.
1:31.3	What?
1:32.3	What?
1:33.3	Or sexy.
1:34.3	I wanted us to do this film because it's a film about, partially about how robbery sucks,
1:39.3	and also about where it comes from, because neorealism as a sort of cinematic movement is meant to be something
1:46.8	ethnographic, right?
1:48.4	It's a portrait of a society.
1:50.1	It's meant to be as kind of documentarian as possible.
1:54.4	So it's like castration movie?
1:56.4	Yeah, absolutely.
1:57.4	Yeah.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from November, Abigail, and Devon, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of November, Abigail, and Devon and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.