The film, a classic of popular cinema of the 20s, was originally released in three episodes, for something around 4 and a half hours of projection. Unfortunately, none of the prints that have been found keeps the original structure in three episodes. In facts, both prints found at the Cineteca Italiana di Milano are divided in two parts, dividing approximately in two halves the length of 3.400 meters, as the american release version (Nobody’s Children, found at the Academy Archive in Beverly Hills), which is much shorter of the original Italian version, having been cut, re-edited and having been cut more than 60% of intertitles. Unfortunately both Italian prints are seriously incomplete and partly decomposed; only in few cases it was possible to use the American version to reconstruct the missing parts. Wherever intertitles were added from the American version, they were produced using a different layout. This was meant in order to make these intertitles recognizable; in fact the American version – and particularly its intertitles – differs from the original version because it emphasizes the “revolutionary” and “socialist” content of the film, therefore the text of the American version cannot be considered as always and perfectly consistent to the Italian version.

I figli di nessuno was one of the great successes of Italian cinema in the 1920s. But it encountered problems with the censor because of its open-minded approach of certain themes. For example, it denounced child labour in the mines and expressed support for the workers in their class war. The censor imposed a series of conditions upon the first episode:

1) to reduce the length of the scene in which a worker becomes the victim of a mining accident, letting the film end at the point at which the body, which has been carried to the custodian’s cottage, is laid out on a mattress on the ground. 2) to change the scene in which we see the workers’ committee, headed by Don Demetrio, visiting Count Carani, in such a way that all of the workers are removed from the scene so that only the priest is seen visiting the Count, acting in their name. 3) to remove altogether the scene which shows the workers’ uprising.

Thirty years later, in 1951, Gustavo Lombardo and Ubaldo Maria Del Colle (the latter as adviser) produced a new version of the film, directed by Matarazzo, which became one of the all-time box offices successes in the history of Italian cinema. The film also appeared in France in six episodes, under the title Les enfants trouvés.

(Aldo Bernardini – Vittorio Martinelli, Leda Gys, attrice, Milan, Coliseum, 1987)