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IN 1942, four years before he made ''Shoeshine,'' his first neo-realist success, Vittorio De Sica directed ''The Children Are Watching Us'' (''I Bambini Ci Guardano''), based on a novel by Cesare Giulio Viola, who was also to contribute to ''Shoeshine.''

''The Children Are Watching Us'' now looks very tame and conventional. However, considering the circumstances under which it was produced and the work it preceded (including ''The Bicycle Thief'' and ''Miracle in Milan''), ''The Children Are Watching Us'' is an important footnote to the De Sica career. The film opens today at the Thalia SoHo Theater on a bill with De Sica's not-great ''Brief Vacation'' (1973).

The most interesting thing about ''The Children Are Watching Us'' is that it seems to be a sincerely serious film that was purposely disguised to look as rootless and classless as a soap opera. Though Italy was at war when it was made, there are no references to attach the film to its own period. It appears to take place in some idealized bourgeois society, where, because there are jobs for everyone and food for all, the citizens (including the film makers) have nothing to do but fret about personal problems.

In ''Children,'' these problems are both real and devastating as experienced by its solemn adolescent hero, Prico, but they're unconnected to anything that's happening in the world at large. Prico's pretty, bored, middle-class mother abandons him on two different occasions to run off with the same man. The boy comes to put all his trust in his decent but unexciting father, only to be abandoned in turn by him.

The story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the boy, who makes no judgments on what he sees. This might be expected to make the film more complex than one in which the social-political system takes all the blame. In fact, however, it puts more of a burden on De Sica, the actors and the screenplay than they can carry. Fate all by itself, without help from any particular system, has stacked the cards against poor little Prico.

As played by Luciano De Ambrosis, a nonprofessional actor, Prico is not an immensely appealing child. De Sica was never at his best in his direction of children - they tend to come out looking a bit phony, even when they are amateurs. They appear to have been designed to conform to a contemporary ideal. In this film, Prico, whose hair is always combed, could well be the child on a box of breakfast cereal.

This makes the bleak heart of ''The Children Are Watching Us'' all the more astonishing. Here's a very dark movie that initially looks no more disturbing than a tear-jerker like ''The Champ,'' but that was to lead directly to De Sica's greatest, angriest films - ''Shoeshine'' and ''The Bicycle Thief.''

montgomery wrote:I sort of dreaded watching it, because there seems to be a tradition in Italian cinema of using kids to ellicit sympathy and other cheap emotions.

montgomery wrote:It's certainly universal, but in my film-going experiences, it seems most prevelant in Italian films...though I certainly admit that this may be a generalization.

montgomery wrote:I sort of dreaded watching it, because there seems to be a tradition in Italian cinema of using kids to ellicit sympathy and other cheap emotions.

kinjitsu wrote:That seems universal and hardly exclusive of Italians.

Scharphedin2 wrote:Maybe, since De Sica is telling the story through the eyes of the boy, the ommision of the war is natural in face of the much greater and more immediate apocalypse that the boy is facing with his family breaking up.

Cash Flagg wrote:According to Michael's Movie Mayhem, this has been discontinued.

Tom Hagen wrote:Undoubtedly the DVD to own if, you know, you live in Italy.

domino harvey wrote:This is a forum devoted to an American DVD label

TMDaines wrote:I didn't realise that I had stumbled across Criterion's Facebook page.