The films The Bicycle Thieves and On the Waterfront deal with the economic and social difficulties that the protagonists in these films face and are easily viewed as Marxist works. Walter Benjamin pointed out in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, “the growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process” and are also the cause of the problems for Antonio Ricci and Terry Malloy.In The Bicycle Thieves crowds of workers, who are desperate for jobs, are met with disappointment day after day with their inability to obtain one. The man who hands out the jobs is smoking a cigar also stands higher up on the stairs, keeping his distance from the common men. This particular man informs the proletarian workers that he doesn’t have any jobs for “you people” indicating that he considers them to be of a separate lower class. The man handing out the jobs looks for Antonio Ricci in particular to do the job of hanging up posters even though other men are capable of doing the job. A bricklayer in the crowd protests and is told that he cannot have the job because he is of a “different category.” Ricci is told that he should have a bicycle to work but he does not have because he sold his to feed his family. There are men in the crowd who do own bicycles, but Ricci is able to keep this because of the slightly higher status that he holds over the other men.The movie On the Waterfront, took place maybe right before the Great Depression. I say this because the roles of robber barons and captains of industry are still in play. What is similar to the last movie is there is still the presence of a group of people, waiting for work. These men are longshoremen and instead of being protected by their powerful Union, they are threatened by it. As Walter Benjamin said , “one could expect it…to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity.” The workers are expected “to keep their mouths shut” and to work without complaint. They were expected to know their place and stay there. The Union bosses could be seen as the aristocracy, who suppress the workers or the proletariat. I agree with the idea , that the Marxist Idea of proletarians are not distinctive because of their manual labor but because of the way society categorizes them and their relationships with society. These two movies On the Waterfront and The Bicycle Thieves are meant to highlight the inequality of social classes.