“The Bicycle Thief.”

“People should see it — and they should care.” Those are the concluding words to one of the more passionate raves in the annals of New York Times film criticism: Bosley Crowther’s 1949 review of the Italian movie introduced to American audiences as “The Bicycle Thief.”

The English title has since been adjusted to reflect the original. It’s “Bicycle Thieves” (“Ladri di Biciclette” in Italian) not only because more than one bike is stolen, but also because the cruelty of modern life threatens to make robbers of us all. More than 70 years after Crowther’s enthusiastic notice — during which time Vittorio De Sica’s fable of desperation has been imitated, satirized, analyzed and taught in schools—I’m tempted to let my predecessor have the last word.

But why should you see it, or see it again? Why should you (still) care? These are fair questions to ask of any consensus masterpiece — skepticism is what keeps art alive, reverence embalms it — and especially apt in the case of “Bicycle Thieves.” The movie is about seeing and caring, about the danger of being distracted from what matters. The tragedy it depicts arises partly from poverty, injustice and the aftereffect of dictatorship, but more profoundly from a deficit of empathy.

Based on a book by Luigi Bartolini, with a script by Cesare Zavattini —written, as Crowther noted, “with the camera exclusively in mind” 

—“Bicycle Thieves is a political parable and a spiritual fable, at once a hard look at the conditions of the Roman working class after World War II and an inquiry into the state of an individual soul. The soul in question belongs to Antonio Ricci, a lean, handsome, diffident man who lives with his wife, Maria, and their two young children in a recently built apartment that lacks running water.