[The] credit line "Directed by Vittorio De Sica" has so far been reserved almost entirely for the pictures, like "Shoe-Shine," into which he has poured the enthusiasm and ingenuity of a fervent artist, in the belief that in them alone lies his chance for a distinguished place in the history of his craft. These films, so startlingly different from the ones that De Sica acts in for other producers, deal for the most part with serious subjects—notably, the subject of poverty, omnipresent in Italy—and they contrive to temper the uncompromising realism of documentaries with a compassionate humanity not often found in the output of the cinema industry. Probably not more than two of these films have been anything like financial successes, one reason being that most Italians, who willingly pay millions of lire to clap and bravo over the merest flick of De Sica the actor's...