... our daily bread." It is not always this automatic, especially when there is a depression. Whether to "take what comes" or fight for more, whether to accept fate or try and make one's own fate, are important problems for starving men. These philosophical puzzles are also rather complicated but "Give Us This Day" plunges in and comes up with acceptable, if not completely satisfying, answers.

Sam Wanamaker is an Italian-American laborer, Loa Padovani his wife and bearer of his four children, and poverty a regular tenant in their tenement apartment, in this adaptation of Pietro di Donata's "Christ In Concrete." Miss Padovani portrays calm acceptance and dogged belief almost perfectly and Kathleen Ryan, as Wanamaker's mistress, symbolizes the world in which right and wrong give way to strong and weak. Mr. Wanamaker lets himself be torn in two between the philosophies admirably; his final decision brings the film's conflicts out with clarity and force.

The technical production is adequate, if uninspiring. The photography is occasionally artistic, but it is mainly content with reporting, not commenting.

The laborer's dramatic death and a bit of irony concerning the value of his life may seem a trite and incredible ending. But taking the picture as a symbolic struggle, the climax is both appropriate and inevitable.