Bertrand Tavernier interviewed by Barrie Pattison, first published in Film (UK) Magazine, August 1974.

There have been a lot of good Simenon film adaptations - Renoir's La Nuit de Carefour, Duvivier's  La tête d'un homme, the Albert Préjean and Gabin Maigrets. or the current batch like Granierre Deferre's La Veuve Coudec and Le Chat. What is the appeal of this story?

The thing which immediately attracts me is the line said by the cop to the clockmaker, "Your son has killed a man." It is so simple that when you read it, you never say I never thought of that. The concept at the beginning and the end are always very good. I mean they are very simple, and Simenon does one thing that helps the screenwriter. The dramatisation is not overdone. Sometimes you advance only a few steps between the beginning & the end of the story. Let's say that in most stories the people go from A to Z, but in Simenon you go from A to B, a very small way and in the genius of Simenon is how he makes that alive but at the same time very simple and rooted on the social context, which in most of his stories is very true and that is one of the reasons they have been so popular, I mean much more than the so called atmosphere - I mean fog, rain.

Decaying buildings.

Yes, that kind of stuff. I think it's first very literary and then it belongs very much to a kind of philosophy which is very much post-war, I mean 1945-6. It's the children of Camus, Gide. Gide I've always admired. To explain why I have always wanted to adapt his stories, it's Simenon's simplicity, much more than his pessimistic atmosphere.

When was this story, "L'Horloger d'Everton," written?

In 54, I think. 

It wasn't about the confrontation of the left & the right?

Sylvain Rougerie & Noiret in court.

No, there was nothing political in the book. In a way, it belongs to Simenon's American period. For instance, the boy and the girl go into the farm, and they really provoke the police, a bit like some of the gangsters of the thirties. It's not said but you have to guess about how the murder was committed. We only know that they took a gun and they shot someone to steal his car. I wrote to Simenon. I had a long correspondence, and I told him that in America, if you take a gun to a car it's that you really want to kill, because it's very easy to steal a car without a gun, I mean and Simenon says yes, you are right. It was really a gesture which was planned and it was planned as a gesture of revolt and rooted in a certain American context, so I had to change it. make it more French, also the context had changed between '54 and 70 and Simenon too was influenced by Gide, by "Caves du Vatican", that kind of "Meurtre gratuit" you know.

How was your collaboration with the Aurenche and Bost writing team (Pastoral  Symphony)? 

Very good - I mean we worked together for four months. It was the same kind of relationship in the film, I mean we discovered each other. I needed someone older than me to write a few points of a man of 45, which maybe I wouldn't make as convincing. They found a few things- I think sometimes personal, because we all put personal things in the film. I put a few things.  The house with the old woman is the house where I was born. I found them very young. I mean they are people of seventy and they are some of the youngest men I ever met in my whole life.

A lot of films now look like a compromise between an imitation of a TV serial and publicity films - just a succession of fast shots and I felt that I needed scenes.

Protracted confrontations between the characters.

I wanted to respect the characters - I mean to respect the pace, to respect their rhythm of life. 

I'm interested that, when mentioning their work, you singled out Le diable au corps because your film seems to resemble it in the way situations are brought back and shown differently.

Le diable au corps - Philippe & Presle

Maybe, because Le Diable au corps was an important film - I mean to be made in that period - and I think too that that's what I like in Aureche & Bost. It's a thing too that I like in (Jacques) Prévert  - why I dedicated my film to Prévert - to have a quiet mood and a quiet pace and inside that to be aggressive and violent. I think that's more interesting than to have blood. The thing I liked about Le diable au corps is that it was a very aggressive picture, in a way against France and in France it provoked incredible reaction with the front page headline of Le Figaro saying it was an insult to France. I mean the French Ambassador left the middle of the premiere openly, with all his family. That film shocked incredibly. I wanted that slowly and slowly the audience gets involved with (Philippe) Noiret.  For me the character of Noiret is a great hero. I mean, he is without any slogan, without anything superficial in what he does. A few journalists in France have been shocked by that and we received some letters and some very violent phone calls, very violent phone calls from unknown people.

Some of the Delannoy films have this quality - Dieu a besoin des hommes.

Yes - and in (René) Clement - Gervaise and Forbidden Games but mostly it was Autant-Lara. For Instance Traversée de Paris is an incredibly aggressive picture. It's a superb film and before Chagrin et la pitié, the only true picture made about the occupation.

One thing I noticed is that you've been careful to locate the film exactly, not in Paris either but in Lyons which is somewhere most people will not know.

Yes, and except for one or two things, which I cheated a little bit and that nobody, even the old-time Lyonaise, ever remarked, everything is true. I mean, when they walk from point to point, from street to street it's the exact  ... 

Geography! The only other film where I've noticed that is the Joseph Losey Time Without Pity. All your film was shot in real settings. How much did you set dress the rooms? 

Yes, everything was shot in real locations.  I kept a few things from the rooms in which we shot. For instance, the skull was in the room. I brought the quotation from Celine, that I'm against war because war, it takes place in the country and the country bores me to death.

The burning car under the titles contributes an effective motif. That's worth comment.

I wanted that, because in France - I don't know if it's true in England but it's so important in France. There was a line written about the riots of '68 saying that the students lost sympathy when they began to burn cars. I think it's true. I have no car, and I wanted to make an anti-car film. Yes, not anti-car  Anti... 

This infatuation with the car!

I mean the line that says you have the right to kill someone but not the right to burn his car. I think it's been said on TV ... and you cut away to the left-wing friend saying what great TV the French have.

Yes, TV and cars are the things I don't like. I don't like the "religion' around TV and cars and it is used to put people to sleep. I think the left wing on that point is very late. I mean the Communist Party, the Socialists don't take TV seriously as they should. When I see a good review of  Jeux sans fontières (It's a knockout), the kind of games quiz in (left-wing paper) Humanité, that makes me sick because these games are designed to avoid confrontation with reality,

People make film a religion, too.

Yes - but I never see people fighting over a TV serial. I've seen people fighting over films. People love films and will study film. Sometimes it's a way to wake them up. I think film is still powerful and energetic. It's contrary to what people say. It doesn't do - what do you say? 

Anaesthetise them ... Tell me a little about the crew. A few years ago every French film seemed to have a score by Michel Legrand. Now they have music by Philippe Sarde.

He's very conscious of that. He's refusing a lot of films. Last year, he did at least ten films. We had a lot of discussion about the music which was done in London, at Wembley, with very good English musicians.

Pierre William Glenn? 

He's great, Glenn. He's not only a very good lighting cameraman but he's a great operator. He did all the hand-held himself and that was done on direct sound. The sound is nearly all direct sound. I dubbed a few lines in the open market, not because it was not possible to listen but because there was so much noise that the actors spoke too loud and it became a bit emphatic. Glenn's going to do the next Costa Gavras. He did State of Siege. He did two films by Jose Giovanni, one called Aller Simple, which was quite good. He did Une belle fille comme moi. I mean he's got two Louis Delluc prizes, two Caesars - State Of Siege and mine and one film which is a candidate for the Oscar, which is not bad for a cameraman of thirty.

Jean Rochefort is not known here.

In the theatre, he's quite a star. He was, with Delphine Seyrig, one of the people who brought Pinter to France.

In film, he did Feux de la chandeleur.

The Clockmaker - Noiret & Rochfort

He played in Le grand blonde avec le chasure noir, a film by Yves Robert, and he was very good in one of his first films, which was by Jacques Deray, called Symphony pour un massacre. He's very friendly with Noiret. They lived in the same neighbourhood and they played a few films together, one being La porteuse de pain by Mauice Cloche which is an interesting film photographed by Henri Decae, in which they were two villains. They used to say there's no such fun as playing in those films. There were no problems once we began to rehearse. Everybody was laughing. I think most of the handling takes place outside the set. It's more when I went to a certain restaurant with Noiret and we began to discuss about food.

Food was very much featured.

Yes, because for me it's very important, especially in France, a lot of things take place when you eat. In many films I can see that the director knows nothing about food - not Claude Chabrol, because he is a man who knows how to eat... The only thing I shot with two cameras is the meal at the beginning. I didn't want people to re-eat things, so I made a dish which would be very easy to warm up. It was rabbit civet - rabbit in casserole with red wine sauce, onions and bacon too. - very good. They finished it all. I mean, it is very easy for a man like Noiret to play while he is eating because he knows how to eat. I think food was a kind of ritual for the film. 

The directors we've been talking about that your work reminds me of - Autant Lara, (Jacques) Becker, Clement - are not the usual popular choice.

Some people of my generation are interested in them. Pascal Thomas is interested in Becker and Lara. They are French, which is for me one very important thing. I love so much the American film that I try to make French film because I see so many people loving the American cinema and...

making imitation American films.

Yes, imitations.

Melville in many cases.

Yes, and I think that is one of the worst loves you can have in France, one of the proofs that you don't understand that cinema, because what is really great in some of the best American cinema is that it is really rooted into something that is specific, very national. I mean it's impossible to study American idealism without understanding Capra. Of course Capra is not true - millionaires changing their minds and suddenly and killing themselves and bad people becoming good. That's not true. That's a fairy tale, but I believe that is a very good reflection of a certain American attitude. It fascinates me. People like Becker admired the American Cinema too. The best way to prove my love of it was to adapt that kind of quality to a French film and to make it French. That's why I admire Becker. I think Casque d'Or was one of the great masterpieces of the French cinema.

Tavernier's In the Electric Mist - Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel & director.

Barie Pattison 2026

Cinema Reborn

 

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Cinema Reborn 2026 Launches Today at the Randwick Ritz Screenings on Friday and Saturday Cinema Reborn May 1   READ IN APP   CINEMA REBORN 2026 LAUNCHES TODAY AT THE RANDWICK RITZ SCREENINGS ON FRIDAY AND SATURDAY DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST (Satyajit Ray, India, 1970) Friday 1 May at 7.00 pm, introduced by James Vaughan “Anything signed by Satyajit Ray must be cherished and preserved; but the nearly-forgotten Days and Nights in the Forest is a special/particular gem,” Wes Anderson Session Times and Bookings THE WATCHMAKER OF SAINT-PAUL (Bertrand Tavernier, France, 1974) Saturday 2 May at 11.40 am, introduced by Barrie Pattison “An extraordinary film” Roger Ebert Session Times and Bookings THE HEIRESS (William Wyler, USA, 1949) Saturday 2 May at 2.00 pm, introduced by John McDonald “One of the finest films ever made about 19th Century America” – Martin Scorsese Session Times and Bookings KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, USA, 1978) Saturday 2 May at 4.30 pm, introduced by Robert Hughes “One of the saddest, happiest movies imaginable.” Nelson Kim Session Time and Bookings THIEF (Michael Mann, USA, 1981) Saturday 2 May at 6.45 pm, introduced by Blake Howard “Echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville…profound human characters” Olivier Assayas Session Times and Bookings MELBOURNE SEASON AT THE HAWTHORN LIDO All of the films mentioned above will be screening as part of Cinema Reborn 2026 at the Hawthorn Lido commencing on Friday 8 May. For details of all films, extensive program notes by some of Australia’s best film critics and scholars, links to session times and bookings head for the CINEMA REBORN WEBSITE

The Sun Never Sets.

 The Sun Never Sets.

Pre-WW2 English film tends to be a surprising black hole in our cinema knowledge. We hear about the protectionist Quota Films Act, which made it viable to sell shoddy productions by the foot to meet the required Theatre Time of home -grown product. However, getting to see these is another matter. They were never re-issued and rarely printed up in the small film gages, which were the home video of the day. The British Film Institute tended to consider early production beneath their dignity. Though I lived a bus ride away from the London NFT, it wasn't till the Paris Cinémathèque did an English season that I saw titles like Pastor Hall, the Victor McLaglen Tower of London and the Maurice Elvey-Leslie Howard The Gentle Sex.  When British TV arrived, it showed minimal interest, though it would find space for even more tacky fifties efforts. Without prompting, a new generation of critics never enquired. 

It was assumed that the bulk of this material, quota quickies and more substantial efforts alike, had vanished. However market forces, in the succeeding forms of domestic video and streaming came riding up the hill. Titles unseen for more than half a century became available. Rank's Gaumont British product surfaced here when the ABC bought their library, presumably eyeing the Dirk Bogarde vehicles, and more recently Canal Plus has made a deal with the English Network label to make available another substantial set of titles, including Ealing and ABPC efforts that had made their way into their hands.

Hopes of finding lost masterpieces have largely proved unjustified but these films do have another value as a record of a lost pre-war world of Empire Rule, top-hatted toffs showing cloth-capped menials their proper place, Ivor Novello and Jessie Matthews, Music Hall, the British Broadcasting Corporation and threepenny comics. It may be less involving than the one populated by white hat cowboys, Broadway chorines and lantern-jawed G-Men but it is useful to know that this is a picture that a previous generation accepted and often considered a more suitable role model. It has its own fascination.

These generally arrive as sharp well-graded multi-title box sets. I now feel an obligation towards those, to which, curiously, YouTube has now added the imagined forever-lost 1932 Illegal, made for Warner British at their Teddington operation and directed by William McGann with minimal ambition and surviving in a good and apparently complete copy. After their home market showing, it had been common practice to hack a couple of reels out of the edited negatives and ship them to the 'States to provide first halves - never to be seen again. 

   Elsom

In Illegal, the then Mrs. Maurice Elvey, Isobel Elsom stars as the wife of rotter D.A. Clarke-Smith (from the thirties Man Who Knew Too Much), who she has to rescue from cheated bookie Wally Patch, so we move into the plot of Michael Curtiz’ silent The Maddona of Ave. A, shortly later again recycled for Marcel Carné’s debut, Jenny. Isabel uses unexpected winnings on the ponies to open the Scarecrow Club, a sly grog dive with a roulette wheel concealed in a birthday cake. This funds the education of her two daughters at Margaret Damer’s boarding school for better-class young women, on the condition that the other parents must never know about Isabel’s shady profession. 

She of course has a heart of gold, returning his losses to the nineteen-year-old punter and baring him from the wheel. I thought he might show up again. The  peelers take a dim view and, profiting from the club’s lax membership policy, gain admission. Elsom’s loyal associate Ivor Barnard recognises them too late to stop a raid, after which Isabel is thrown in the slammer. Seeing her photo in the paper,  the daughters, now grown (shot of stocking-ed feet touching - dissolve to larger size) to be judgemental blonde Margot Grahame (later in the U.S for The Informer and a Three Musketeers’ Milady) and more sensitive Moira Lynd  leave their posh school and resolve to use their well to do connections to attract customers to a legitimate use of the venue, with the big draw card being Grahame, in grotesque Louis Brooks' glamour outfits, singing then standard “Can’t We Talk It Over?”  

Elsom & Barnard - Scarecrow Club

Dad Clarke-Smith shows up again and Grahame moves off into her own flat, where he gropes her, precipitating a car smash.  Nice sister Lind has a (colorless middle-aged) Nob boy friend who pairs with her despite the scandal and Elsom, getting a fortnight time-off for good behaviour, comes back to the club and uses the obviously planted benzine that Barnard is cleaning the drapes with to burn the place down - as if that made any sense.

The US-imported department heads give the piece a mechanical smoothness (dissolving from the roulette wheel spinning to locomotive valve gears pumping) lacking in many of the minor British films of the day, an interesting comparison with parallel Michael Powell efforts, but they never catch the setting in any involving way. Brief, evocative location inserts, like the newspaper seller's street poster, the first exterior of a neighborhood pub in fog or a London cab parked outside Wandsworth Women’s prison may be the work of  British second cameraman  Cyril J. Knowles. Vintage vehicle enthusiasts will have a good innings. 

This one has the off-putting, squalid quality which persists in later English film - Gainsborough costume melo, Blue Lamp, Room at the Top, Movie Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. Elsom was much livelier as a Spanish Courtesan in Elvey's silent The Wandering Jew. After their divorce, she would settle into doing haughty matrons in Hollywood, films like Ladies in Retirement.

In the Studio Canal collection, director Graeme Cutts' altogether more substantial Over She Goes, of 1937, is a determinedly British musical, which seems to have escaped from Shaftesbury Avenue. A plot about stealing an incriminating letter involves disguising star Stanley Lupino as a missing uncle, back from South America. Think “Charley’s Aunt” and there’s a bit of Mabel’s Room and the common veranda outside the women’s bedrooms from the Willy Forst Alotria.

Large, glossy family estate set and a Fox-Hunting opening after which heir John Wood, a juvenile not outclassed by Lupino & (the most effective) Laddie Cliff  - veterans who have honed their talent on the ‘Halls - all carry in their respective love interests Clare Luce, Sally Gray & Gina Malo, after falling off their horses to get the boys to propose (!) Complications when Wood’s one-time squeeze Judy Kelly threatens a breach of promise action, though she had been the one to throw him over when he was just part of the struggling vaudeville trio. Cliff, the brainy one’s solution is to have a disguised Lupino pass himself off as his lost-believed-dead uncle, whose appearance would mean Wood would lose the inherited family fortune. Kelly’s vengeful American fiancé, heavyweight champion Max Bear, towers over everyone and is perfectly adequate for his part in the complications - about the time he played lead in Wellman’s superior The Prizefighter & the Lady.

Developments involve Police Inspector Syd Walker, who is stuck with Oxford-educated Sergeant Richard Murdock, and aunt Berthe Belmore, trying to unravel the disappearance of the revived uncle. The mechanically perfected dance routines in the gleaming white interiors are interchanceable and it comes as a relief when a carload of Walker’s singing Bobies takes us out of doors into the estate gardens. The pace is maintained, the numbers exactly drilled. There are a few OK bits of well-rehearsed comic business and the women are plausibly glamorous, suggesting they could have carried more of the load. Lab work is less polished with the shaky lighthouse matte and heavy grain on the opticals.

Things are undermined by the impression that the Brits are trying to demonstrate that they can keep up with overseas frivolity.

Less ambitious is Music Hath Charms of 1936, also included in Studio Canal's "British Musicals of the 1930s Volume 1 Box set" with Thomas Bentley credited as supervising director. This one is a shapeless musical with a spray of subplots related to BBC Dance Orchestra leader Henry Hall’s birthday, where his broadcast is picked up in a variety of locations. After the band celebrates it by serenading under the window of his suburban home, he takes carloads of children on a countryside holiday where he is mistaken for an escaped loony.

   Music Hath Charms - Hall & kids.

The musical numbers are spaced by sub plots - a breach of promise action in mugging Judge Aubrey Mallalieu ’s court, restless natives advancing on the pair of British pith helmet types offering their native  boy “Plenty kicks backside” in the African wilds, ocean going busybody Edith Sharpe interfering with a philandering pair and causing a shipboard panic and the marriage-shy mountain climber couple united by a rope cutting accident before meeting rustic Herbert Lomas. These in turn interlock, as with gunfire in the jungle cut to target shooting on board.

Nobody shines and it’s impossible to attribute the contributions of later-notable talents, Ronald Neame and Arthur Woods included. Equally feeble drama & jokes are erratically inserted between the cheery, now forgotten numbers but there is one nice sequence where the musicians trickle back from the countryside fiasco to their BBC live broadcast, which Hall has begun on solo piano. The film’s implausible account of thirties radio gives it some interest - more than the occasional bursts of production value (an enormous kids motorcade rolling through London or police and guardsmen marching to the sound of Hall’s broadcast.

He’s confident enough to compete with Kay Kyser and Harry James in the then-current band leader movie star cycle.

Like the recent surge in unfamiliar Hollywood early sound film on YouTube, these productions are a significantly underdocumented source and I enjoy investigating them. Watch this space!

Music Hath Charms - Carol Goodner

 

 

Barrie  Pattison - 2026

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.