Three thugs commandeer a couple of cars on a moving train and spread terror among the passengers.
Riccardo, belonging to an upper-middle class family from Puglia, studies religion in a Swiss boarding school. He has an incomplete relationship with his half-sister Stefania, who one day announces his engagement and the next marriage. Riccardo, wearing his cassock below, desperately tries to conquer the now reluctant half-sister.
Father Pacifico is a genuine friar with a brisk manner, for this reason he is nicknamed Father Manisco. The religious finds himself grappling with a thorny case, as Don Liborio, a Neapolitan lord, dominates all local events, including the love choices of his young daughter. Father Pacifico manages to restore harmony and order despite a thousand difficulties.
A lawyer heads out on the road in an attempt to find his daughter who has been missing for quite some time. To help him navigate the secret world his daughter lived within that he knows nothing about, he recruits the help of Irene a close friend of his daughter's. But Irene has plans of her own.
Stefano and Maria have a marriage by proxy while he is working abroad in Canada. When she is mistakenly accused of abandoning her own child and sent to jail, Stefano finds out and decides to annul their marriage.
In a village, the pharmacist and the innkeeper have an intense rivalry fuelled by the fact that they were once romantically involved many years before. To spite her rival, the innkeeper arranges to have her nephew set up a second pharmacy to take business away him. Unbeknownst to them a romance is developing between the younger generation of the families.
The tragic love story between Guido, the owner of a marble quarry and Luisa, the humble daughter of one of his employees, ends up in her giving birth to their baby boy. Giulio's mother is against them: first she sends her son abroad and then has the baby kidnapped, making Luisa think the boy died in a fire.
In his first collaboration with renowned screenwriter and longtime partner Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child. Heralding the pair’s subsequent work on some of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism, The Children Are Watching Us is a vivid, deeply humane portrait of a family’s disintegration.