A commercial failure on its release, La finestra sul Luna Park is one of the hidden masterpieces of 1950s Italian cinema and the most personal of the films Comencini made during that decade. Aldo, a workman who has emigrated, returns home following the death of his wife and attempts to rebuild a relationship with his son, Mario. During his absence, Mario has found a substitute father-figure in the very different Righetto, a weak and mild-mannered member of the underclass (a character who recalls Il Matto in Fellini’s La strada, another fool who sends a brutish male into crisis – a parallel reinforced by the fact that both characters are dubbed by the same voice actor, Stefano Sibaldi). Righetto lives day-to-day but is able to offer the child the kind of affection he cannot find elsewhere (“The little I earn is enough for me,” he says, “Why should I work more if it would deprive me of time I can spend with Mario?”) It is the vision of this different kind of emotional relationship which opens the eyes of Aldo who brings to mind the protagonist of another film made the same year, Antonioni’s Il grido, played by one of the non-professional actors from Visconti’s Bellissima, Gastone Renzelli.
The film is structured as a low key, everyday (or realistic) male weepie. Aldo wanders through the new districts of Rome, often holding his son’s hand like the protagonist of Bicycle Thieves (the locations are the popular districts of Ostiense and Centocelle), in an attempt to reclaim spaces that have been dramatically transformed while he was away. The end result is a coming of age story focusing not on a child, but an adult who learns to let go of his identity as a working class man with bourgeois aspirations when confronted by a son drawn to a member of an underclass who lacks his work ethic and displays a “feminine” model of paternity. As the economic miracle beckoned, Comencini presents us with a point of entry into affluence which does not sacrifice the warmth of ordinary people and of a child.

Bambini in città is Comencini’s first official film, following a single amateur short in 16mm, La donzelletta, which was lost during the war. On the surface, this documentary provides a timely dose of neorealism: children amongst the ruins, as in the films of De Sica and Rossellini. Shoeshine and Paisan were produced during the same months; Bicycle Thieves and Germany Year Zero were still to come.
The narrator’s voice adopts a tone curiously lacking in rhetoric, while the beginning and ending reveal the gaze of an architect and town planner. Ruins are also a place of freedom. Amongst fairs, little theatres, amusement fairs, meadows and clearings, the Lampwicks and Pinocchios of the post-war years go in search of a world between the city and the countryside that the director would never forsake.