Review of Une vie sans joie

A silent melodrama about an orphan girl, Catherine (Catherine Hessling) who can't seem to find good luck anywhere. She's removed from the home of kindly M. Mallet (Louis Gauthier) because his mean wife catches him being nice to her, and then she's thrown out of his sister's house when the melancholy son (Dieudonné) dies in some sort of unusual circumstances. After an interlude in a very scenic hotel, full of Montmartre-style low life, and thoughts of suicide, Catherine is rescued by Mallet, whose secretary she becomes. A scandal ensues, Mme. Mallet leaves the house ostensibly outraged, but actually pursuing an affair with an annoying young man with a seal face and a monocle. He's one of the men who urge Mallet to quiet the scandal by putting Catherine out of the house, and Mallet discovers an acrostic love poem to Mme. Mallet fallen out of his pocket. Catherine overhears part of the conference and determines not to ruin her only friend. She runs out into the rain and seeks refuge in a tram car; in the morning two vagabonds push the tram down the hill toward a vast viaduct and an open switch—but in the last seconds Mallet and some railroad workers save her, and they are united. Hessling has a wide, haunted face, and Gauthier a sympathetic one. The film features many great shots of faces, ordinary faces and mean faces and snobbish faces and funny faces, and it also features wonderful shots of the landscape, a country lane in the rain, a hilltop cemetery and a distant town on another hill, the narrow streets at night. The movie seems to have a gentle moral—people shouldn't be snobs and gossips. Meanness is stupid and cruel. Kindness is better.