Les enfants nous regardent...

The story relates the disintegrating marriage of a bourgeois couple, indicated through their modern, spacious apartment and the housekeeper they employ. This distinguishes the film from the better known Italian neo realist works which typically take place against a backdrop of poverty and deprivation. The story is seen through the eyes of their young son, Prico.

Far more obscure than de Sica's other work, this is still nonetheless a classic because it endures, the story could take place just as easily today, with a few minor adjustments of clothing and details.

I don t agree this film is sentimental, it manages to stay just the right side of mawkishness. However, it still tugs at your heart strings, the child is just superb. The sign of a genius director that De Sica was able to manage the logistics of the crew, the equipment and coax this sort of performance out of a four year old.

This film put me in mind of Brief Encounter and it would be interesting to watch the two alongside. Both deal with infidelity and both are fantastically moving films.

The Criterion DVD is an excellent transfer. There are a couple of interviews on the disc and the accompanying sleeve notes are really informative.

Highly recommended.

Once in a great while, a child actor and a director are perfectly matched so that the child delivers an indelible performance that etches itself firmly into film history, as Jean-Pierre Leaud did for Truffault in The 400 Blows, or Haley Joel Osment accomplished for Shamalyan in The Sixth Sense; The child Luciano De Ambrosis performs with an incredible sensitivity to the insensitive adults around him, a mother and father who search for their own bliss while forgetting their child's well-being. Because it was released during WWII in Italy, DeSica's early effort did not receive the kudos it deserved, but deserves to rank in the pantheon with Bicycle Thief and Umberto D; it's a simple story of learning bitter lessons, with a memorable, well-defined sense of time and atmosphere.

De Sica's first Neo-Realist film had been neglected over the years and, so, it was a surprise to see it being added to "The Criterion Collection". Ultimately, it's not up to his later more celebrated quartet - SHOESHINE (1946), THE BICYCLE THIEF (1948), MIRACLE IN MILAN (1951) and UMBERTO D (1952) - but, taken on its own modest merits, it's a reasonably effective work coming from an actor best-known for light fare!

As indicated by the title, the narrative is seen through the eyes of the sensitive young son of a working-class couple; the mother is having an affair and the boy is witness to - and the victim of - the inevitable disintegrating family ties, being bounced around from the household of one begrudging relative to another. The couple make a determined effort to stay together for the sake of the child (having to contend, besides, with the nosy and gossiping tenants of their condominium) - but the impetuous young man who has come between man and wife won't give her up so easily, and he finally manages to tear her from them for good. In desperation, the husband commits suicide…

The plot is pretty melodramatic and the film is infused with a good deal of sentimentality (there are plenty of close-ups of the boy weeping his heart out, for instance); clearly, De Sica's hand isn't confident as yet in juggling the various elements that comprise such slices-of-life - for one thing, he has used actors rather than the non-professionals who would come to serve him in good stead in his subsequent Neo-Realist classics. Even so, the three leading performances are undeniably excellent...while the film's real coup is to be found in its devastating - and truly uncompromising - conclusion.

A four-year old boy, Pricò, becomes the subject of emotional folly by his fluctuant parents and inattentive relatives.

Peter Brunette notes, "The Children Are Watching Us marks the first full blossoming of one of the most fruitful collaborations in world cinema history. The brilliant pairing of legendary Italian actor and hitherto commercial director Vittorio DeSica with Cesare Zavattini, the talented screenwriter who was to become the chief theorist of the neorealist movement that flourished in Italy right after World War II, created a synergy of magnificent proportions, which allowed each man to transcend his own individual limitations." So, Brunette might be a little flowery with his prose, but he is spot on. Regardless of whatever internal qualities this film has, good or bad, it is historically significant because of its place at the beginning of DeSica's career. This may be his least-known film, or at least one of the lesser known, but without it there would never have been "Bicycle Thieves", "Umberto D", or much of anything else. This really is the birth of the neo-realist movement that defined Italy for a generation.

An unbelievably great film made a year before Visconti's "Ossessione" which is often wrongly considered the first official neo-realist film. It's a bit melodramatic in parts but filled with scene after scene of immortal, poignant truths not only about the way a child sees adults but the way everyone sees everyone else in reality and in the 'real world' where purity of soul and honesty matters and is always heroic, where as Pascal wrote, man's greatness is so obvious it can even be deduced from his wretchedness. This extremely fleeting 'real world' is never fixed but nevertheless always there in some essence or another waiting to be discovered and 'captured' underneath a thousand and one veils. Neo-realism provided techniques for snaring those elusive essences better. And these techniques have endured to this day, where the sons of the sons of neo-realist films from all around the world are instantly recognized as valuable and given acclaim (most recently a slew of impressive films from Iranian directors). Even if De Sica hadn't gone on to make "Shoeshine," "Bicycle Thief," and "Umberto D" he already had enough in this one little film to earn respect as one of the supreme artists of the 20th century.