A film that's a step on the way toward greatness: De Sica's The Children Are Watching Us

The seldom-seen Vittorio de Sica 1944 film The Children Are Watching Us doesn't rise the heights of his greatest works - Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine, Umberto D (and he worked w/ the same writer, Cesare Zavattini, had to look that up, on all of these) - but you can see it clearly as what one of the commentators called "proto-neorealism": he's just beginning to experiment with using natural settings and with unconventional narrative, and his sympathy for young children (boys) is apparent throughout - but he hasn't quite found his style yet as the movie, though unconventional in many ways, is much more a domestic drama, even a melodrama, than his later works about social conditions, poverty, class struggle, and loneliness. The Childre, somewhat like What Maisie Knew (a possible influence?) is told almost entirely from a young child's viewpoint so, like him, we piece things together by inference and observation, and there are gaps in what he knows and therefore in what we know. The 5-year-old boy witnesses his mother leaving the family to run off w/ her lover, then coming back for a time, but still drawn to flashiness and romance and not to the rather staid and boringly loyal father. Ultimately, she complete neglects the young child as she goes off with her lover; the father takes the child back, puts him into a strict Catholic boarding school, where the boy's fear and loneliness is palpable - and at the end the father commits suicide - we never see this, we learn of it from reaction shots - and, when the boy is told, his mother is cold as ice and he walks away from her, a tiny little thing in vast room in the school. It's a shockingly honest movie for its time, a very sad movie about a neglectful and selfish mother, and told w/ great economy and beauty and w/ no sympathy whatsoever for the mother: the boy is the victim, as is the faithful husband. Among the great scenes are the boy's feverish vision on the train ride home from his evil grandmother's place, the punch & judy show in the park in Rome, the seaside capers as the family tries fecklessly to reunite, the nightclub scene with the strange magician/illusionist and with the insipid society folk flirting w/ the young mother, and of course the little boy running away, walking along train tracks, nearly getting killed, tumbling down an embankment, running along the sand in the shadow of two policemen. Not a great film but fine for its era and a step along the way to greatness. BTW film was made and seemingly set in the early 1940s but not a hint or whiff of fascism and the war under way - it's not even referenced by its absence. For all intents, film could have been from 1930 - how can this be? Some kind of censorship or code in Italian cinema of the era?