Film review: Bicycle Thieves (1948)

This film is, supposedly, "much-loved."  It is also a "classic" and "a masterpiece of neo-realism."  Well, I'll grant the second two, but I'm not going to say I loved it.  Mainly because I'm a softy and (spoiler alert) the ending is an all-time downer.  Okay, so nobody dies, but unless something changes, they well might.  The basic plot is that the father of a family (two kids, one of whom is a baby and the other of whom is the most adorable little boy in any movie ever) miraculously gets a job in war-ravaged Rome, where the throngs of the unemployed are everywhere.  Unfortunately, the job, which is pasting up posters around the city, requires a bicycle, which the father has only just pawned.  His wife gathers up all their bedsheets and they raise enough to get the bike back.  But then, on his first day on the job, the bike is stolen by a gang in front of his eyes.  And the rest of the film is him trying (and, spoiler alert, failing) to get the bike back.  Apparently a Hollywood producer wanted to make the film in the US and have Cary Grant as the lead.  This would not have worked.  For one thing, Rome itself is a major player in the film (apparently that's part of the "realism" of neo-realism - actually filming on location, rather than on a set), for another, the actual main actor is perfect - and looks suitably cadaverous for someone on the verge of starvation, and for a third, no producer would have allowed the realistic plot, where nobody is really a villain, even the thieves (they find the one who pedaled off on it, but he lives with his mother and sister in a tiny apartment, and he has seizures, or is a very good faker), because everybody's just trying to survive, and things just don't turn out fine in the end.
The film starts relatively slowly, but at some point in the film you become completely gripped (at several points it really looks like they're going to get the bike back!), and, despite its apparent picaresque plotlessness, on looking back you realize you were exposed to a very realistic vision of the injustice of poverty.  Don't get me wrong: it's very far from being unrelenting misery - there are funny moments, and definitely hearwarming moments between the father and his pint-sized companion, but that just makes the final wretchedness, when the father resorts to trying to steal somebody else's bicycle and almost gets dragged off to jail, all the more wrenching.  The ending is a punch in the gut.  Again I ask, why are there so few great films that make you feel better?