France Five.

 I've just come across TV France 5,  which appears to be their Tubi equivalent - free, no customer email address required, sharp transfers of often unfamiliar items and the option of good English subtitles. There are enough feature films there to keep me going for a month.

I homed in on director Raymond Bernard's 1947 Adieu... Chèrie. Back home after the Hollywood stint, Danielle Darrieux shows the authority missing from her thirties films. It is a peak in her long and uneven output.

The misleading opening presents her in the kind of film that Hollywood served up for Paulette Goddard, at this stage. An overflowing bathtub has fellow tenants in her Montmartre block of flats hammering on her door. Count Louis Salou (unrecognisable from Les Enfants de Paradis)and concierge Palmyre Levasseur get the door open to find her still in her bed. Turns out that he is using her to honey trap rich visiting foreigners on night club tours where she gets a kick back from the proprietors, as well as the commission Salou pays her cf. The Devil’s Holiday, among others.

     Adieu Cherie -Darrieux, Salou & oil

A police raid on the Casino, which converts to a restaurant too slowly (Danielle’s mark turns out to be an undercover cop)brings her into contact with fellow arrestee Jacques Berthier, heir to a Provincial Olive Oil fortune and plagued by his family’s efforts to marry him rich. The pair concoct a fake marriage scheme which will save him from glasses-wearing Rolande Forest, the latest heiress the family has found - with Danielle to be paid off for both the wedding and her rapid subsequent divorce.

She and Salou do an inspection, which gets Danielle roped into the Olive Mill Tour, with Louis whipping up a meal from the souvenir bottle. Similar jokey routines with Forest, in a silly feather hat, confirm the impression that we are watching a (kind of dull) sitcom unworthy of its star, with a subtext about the contemptible rural bourgeoisie.

Robt.Seller, Dorziat, Larquey, Gernaine Stainval

Danielle meets the family dominated by Chatelaine Gabrielle Dorziat, in possibly her best role, and we get the deliberate shift of tone which makes the film notable. The scenes between the two women are impressive but, as her sibling and Berthier’s dad, Pierre Larquey still manages to draw attention. Another brother is supposed to be hunting lions in Africa, when the family disgrace is that he actually married beneath himself and runs a Toulon bar in ignominy. Offering Danielle the necklace passed down for generations precipitates decisions aimed at maintaining the status quo for the final scenes. It comes as a shock when the end title appears. Principal writer Jacques Companéez also did Compagnes de la nuit and La reine Margot. His skill in providing disturbing material seems to have been grossly under-estimated.

This is a film of its day, with plot developments that recall the best French films of the dismissed pre Nouvelle Vague era - the domineering matriarchs of Douce and Diable au corps. The provincial false respectability of Pasionelle, La vie de plaisir or Le courbeau. Craftsmanship is studio superior, though the barn dance in the sound stage, where a car can drive in, does provide a disruption to conviction. Poor Berthier, early in his long career, looks the part but is outclassed, particularly when subjected to the film’s few screen-filling, portrait-lit close-ups.

Charles Aznavour figures briefly in a nightclub act.

Adieu ... Chèrie is a peak in Darrieux' long and uneven output. Finding a film that is so substantial leaves us wondering about director Raymond Bernard’s other unknown work or, for that matter, the lengthy filmographies of many of the other participants. 

By contrast, you really have to make allowances for Abel  Gance, particularly in his thirties weepies. I was prepared to go along with Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre/Diary of a Poor Young Man for about the first hour. This is just one for the money, stuck in a Nineteenth-Century sensibility and offering Marie Bell and Pierre Fresnay, thirties French Boulevard attraction heart throbs. 

Even if his young man is visibly middle-aged and is still wearing black lipstick, they do make Fresnay up plausibly dashing for the Mexican flashback. However as a “sportif” hero, rescuing heiress Bell’s charmless dog from the weir currents, leaping from a tower window to avoid compromising her and still adoring when she keeps on humiliating him as a fortune hunter, Pierre is really too much.

The film opens with the auction of the possessions of the de Champcey family, with young Marquis Pierre watching his inheritance vanish into their debts. The new owner wants to move into the family manor immediately but they’ve let Pierre be shifted into the valet’s chamber. Devoted, aged housekeeper Madame Désir has to wheedle him into eating the tray meal she has prepared. There is only one answer. He has to find a job! A “No Work” signs montage includes the Renault factory but the family solicitor has a solution, getting Pierre the spot of steward on the Laroque  manor in picturesque Brittany, our hero's major quality being that, unlike the previous steward, he is honest. However he soon shows his worth, riding their killer horse and mastering owner Marcelle Praince’s accounts.

Roman... Carton & Fresnay

Family members have their own problems. Heavily made up, model ship building grandfather Delaître is particularly disturbed when Pierre shows. Poor relatives Pauline Carton and Marthe Mellot voice their unfulfilled dreams - a fortune to build a Spanish cathedral to house Mellot’s remains, for which Pierre designs a stained glass window featuring distrustful daughter Marie Bell’s likeness. Pierre has the hots for her, though slim Suzanne Laydeker, his sister’s pauper schoolmate,  seems a more suitable match. They all plot to discredit Pierre with Marie. She thinks being locked in the tower together by singing shepherd André Baugé is a plan to compromise her and our hero has to leap from an impossible height to fetch help.

Comic Saturin Fabre has a better innings, ridiculous in a Druid outfit for the estate musical play and cheerily avoiding a duel with our hero. I still don’t get that bit. 

Finally, gramps’ conscience gets the better of him and he reveals that, as the old Marquis de Champcey’s steward, he stole the estate and still has the will revealing that the property really belongs to Pierre - the circumstances outlined to make Marie approachable - him becoming rich while Marie becomes poor. Rather than humiliate the girl, Pierre burns the will, the fire causing further distrust among the family, but, conveniently, there is a second copy, and all ends happily, complete with a vision of Merlot’s Cathedral for the wedding.

Gance has his feet off the pedals, making no attempt to disguise the old pot boiler’s implausibilities. (there were already two silent versions, though a 1995 Ettore Scola film only uses the work's name).  Gance plays the sequence of the ride to the tower completely soundless, without any artistic justification. Plot developments are hard to follow and probably always were. Roger Hubert on camera and designer Robert Guys work hard, though the real locations are clearly not connected to the studio interiors as they purport to be. We’ve seen these master craftsmen and the cast do better.

The copy is, like Adieu... Chérie, early generation but, where the contrasty grading was correct for a forties production, using it here probably misrepresents the mid tones that were more common before WW2, when this film was shot and are still visible in surviving original prints of other thirties films.

The 1933 Gardez le sourire/ Keep Smiling is the French language version of the Austrian film Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sunshine, filmed simultaneously at Vienna’s Sacher Atelier, with the same leads,  Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier) and Gustav Fröhlich ( Gustave Froehlich).

The surprising, black comedy of the opening and the similar depression era working class struggle background raise hopes that this will equal director Paul Fejos’ remarkable Lonesome. Froehlich (tallest of the grubby applicants on the street outside the office) fails to get the one job the labor exchange offers and goes home to find his indignant landlady has locked him out of his room for being nine weeks behind on the rent. He wanders the streets alone, reaching the bank of the Danube at night.  Writing his farewell note, Gustav prepares to hurl himself into the suitably oily dark waters. Fejos’ U.S. silent The Last Moment also deals with a drowning. However on the bridge above him, Annabella appears, equally desperate.  She jumps and he leaps in to rescue her. Compare It’s a Wonderful Life, among others.

Dragging her back onto the riverbank, he spots the sign that promises a reward for rescuing would-be suicides and pushes her back in (!), seeing the beat policeman who takes them to the station where the desk sergeant duly produces Gustav’s fifty-crown note and tells Annabella that she has committed a crime and should be thrown into the cells. This however is too much trouble and he turns the pair loose with the reward money to carry them over. Their first purchase is a comb to dress her disheveled hair.

At a nearby fun park, they get a spot selling balloons on commission and he is recruited to be a black face target in a side show but a mean stripe-shirt customer loads a rock into a ball cover and Gustave is injured,  his replacement blacking up before he has even been cared for.

At this point, the texture abruptly changes. The leads, now scrubbed up, are engulfed in a crowd going to a wedding and in the shadows of the cathedral they repeat the responses of the bridal couple, removing the censurable shadow on the relationship. Rene Siti, a working French director, who did a couple of Michel Simon films, is remembered for the French version of Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. He is credited here as artistic contributor and, without documentation, it is legitimate to guess that the grim quality of Fejos’ work intimidated the company into passing the direction into his hands to provide a more up-beat tone.

Gardez le sourire - Annabella & Frolich.

We learn of Froelich’s dream of buying a taxi and, finding a deliveryman’s bag, he puts on the Stadtbank Cap and completes the run, getting himself hired. With the salaried position,  he can move into a housing project and make the first payment on his dream Taxi. However, the shadow of the original hovers over the new shooting and Gustav, while protecting a little boy flattening coins on a trolley track, is hit by a  Nudorf tram and has to be rushed to hospital, leaving Annabella unable to meet the payment due and facing losing the cab and their hope of a safe and happy life.

 However Siti rises to the occasion and presents the up-beat ending where the residents of the flats crowd onto the railings and shower Annabella with coins and bank notes, which their children gather up to placate the debt collector. It’s not a good fit with the sombre opening but it’s a nice sequence in itself and leaves us with a still presentable production. It’s also an early view of the Viennese public housing which to this day is presented as a model of responsible accommodation.

Curiously, the German version used a range of actors for the supporting roles, while here Robert Ozanne keeps on coming back in a variety of character make-ups.

Ignored even in its original market, Gardez le souvenir is not the major film that combining the stars of Metrololis and Le Million under the director of Lonsesome promissed but, for anyone with an interest in film history, this provides intriguing viewing. It’s not without its qualities. 

TV 5 offers more vintage film - René Clement's 1945 La Battaille du rail, Jacqueline Audrey's 1950 Olivia, Georges Lacomble's 1941 Mosieur La Souris, Marcel Carné's splendid 1937 Drole de Drame, along with more recent material and a Briggite Bardot stream. It's like having La Cinémathèque Française in the front room.

*https://www.tv5mondeplus.com/en/films/comedie-dramatique/le-roman-d-un-jeune-homme pauvre/play.   https://www.tv5mondeplus.com/en/films/comedie-dramatique/gardez-le-sourire.