| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Movie Name | The Children Are Watching Us (Italian: I bambini ci guardano) (1944) |
| Director | Vittorio De Sica |
| Writers | Cesare Zavattini, Adolfo Franci, Gherardo Gherardi |
| Lead Cast | Luciano De Ambrosis, Isa Pola, Emilio Cigoli |
| Supporting Cast | Adriano Rimoldi, Giovanna Cigoli, Maria Mercader, Dina Perbellini |
| Genre | Drama |
| Release Date | November 27, 1944 (Italy) |
| Duration | ~84 minutes |
| Language | Italian |
| IMDb Rating | 7.7/10 |
The Children Are Watching Us is a modern movie filmed over 80 years ago, too realistic to be lumped together with earlier domestic dramas, but also too polished to be grouped with the Italian neo realism films that were soon to follow. It’s a vision of Rome as an upper middle class world remarkably similar to 1940s-film Manhattan, with elegant high rise apartments, doormen, housekeepers, cooks, and a massive city park where children play while grown-ups cluster and smoke.
One half-expects Nick and Nora to wander through a scene with Asta in tow, except the Thin Man characters were never built to tackle real life problems, and this film has plenty of that. Despite the familiar décor, The Children Are Watching Us is honest in a way we do not expect from American movies of the past or present.
At the center of the film is Pricò (Luciano De Ambrosis), the only child of a fashionable, well to do couple, and as the title suggests, he’s the one who provides the picture’s point of view. Low camera angles literally show us his perspective, and there are frequent cuts to Pricò for his silent reaction to adult situations and dialogue.
What he’s reacting to, almost from the very start of the film, is his mother’s involvement with a strange man, which Pricò first becomes aware of while happily riding his scooter in a park and spying his mother involved in an intimate conversation, half hidden behind a tree. “Say goodbye to Mr. Roberto,” she tells Pricò, downplaying the scene, but the child won’t speak, and his anxiety and anger flash in his eyes. Other grown ups in his life are also acting strangely, but before he can make sense of it, everything has changed. Pricò wakes up one day and his mother is gone.
Kramer vs. Kramer, made 36 years later, almost certainly copied settings and situations from The Children Are Watching Us, but the earlier film actually cuts deeper by showing how the littlest family members are effected by a marriage in collapse. Unlike Kramer, She’s So Lovely, or Terms of Endearment, which focus on the marquee name adult characters (Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, and Debra Winger, respectively), The Children Are Watching Us puts Pricò at the center of almost every scene, with the lives of his mother (Isa Pola), father (Emilio Cigoli), and other adults revolving around him. And it’s remarkable to consider that the wonderful, expressive actor who is carrying this film is four years old.
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