Nous le Gosses was the first feature film of Louis Daquin, a leftist filmmaker who had his most creative period during the war years, when he was also active in the Resistance. Written before the war by members of the Ciné-Liberté group of the Popular Front and released during the second year of the Occupation, it recalls the spirit of such Thirties films as Vigo's Zero de Conduit and Christian-Jaque's Les Disparus de Saint-Agil in telling the tale of a group of mischievous schoolboys who band together to raise money to replace an enormous window which they have broken.
Georges Sadoul recalls, "This unpretentious, lively and entertaining film brought with it a breath of fresh air and hope...its production showed that films of poetic realism could still be made in France despite the Nazi and Vichy censors" (in "Dictionary of Films").
It's a spirited paean to the anarchic camaraderie of childhood...(that) also paints a sympathetic, idealized canvas of the Parisian working-class faubourg.... Yet this film's subterranean message-an expression of the need for optimism against all odds, and for a kind of proletarian solidarity at any cost-was its most touchingly dated element...one more of that host of wartime movies with an ostensibly contemporary setting, which were actually reveries of that now irretrievable region of the memory, the France of the 1930s." --Stephen Harvey, Museum of Modern Art