Reviews

Two sisters live in a lonely mansion by the sea. One of them (Marina Vlady) is confined to a wheelchair. One of them, unknown to the other, goes out at night to entertain random strangers in the front seat of their convertible. But which one?

The question acquires a fresh urgency when the latest "victim" (Robert Hossein) shows up on their doorstep. The sisters look so similar he can't decide which one he encountered the previous night. Neither seems the type. The sisters invite him to stay and an awkward ménage à trois develops - awkward because the unanswered question remains: which of the two is lying about her nocturnal excursions?

This is the premise, and it's a thin one, but Hossein (who also directs) does a great job with the material, keeping the suspense going till the final scene. The direction is sleek and stylish, Vlady (Hossein's wife at the time) is jaw droppingly gorgeous, and there's a nifty jazz score by André Hossein. Put your disbelief on hold and enjoy.

Another B movie, another mad scientist tampering in God's domain. This one gets hold of the recently executed body of a vicious killer named Butcher Benton (Lon Chaney Jr) and brings him back from the dead. The resurrection process also makes Benton indestructible - but I guess you have to expect that kind of thing when you're tampering in God's domain.

Benton has a score to settle with the thugs who helped put him on Death Row, so he sets off to get revenge and to collect a cache of stolen loot hidden in the LA sewers. Meanwhile a detective is closing in, helped by Benton's former girlfriend.

Aside from some dull romantic interludes between the cop and the girlfriend, the film moves along at a decent pace, helped by some good location work around LA and an effective, even sympathetic, performance from Chaney. As in his best known role as The Wolf Man, you get a real sense of the pain that his transformation has caused him.

Oddly, the film could probably have worked as well or even better without the sci-fi elements. If Benton had simply escaped from prison - without being resurrected, without being made indestructible - the core plot of a desperate man hunting down the rats who double-crossed him would still be there, and would locate the movie firmly in film noir country.

Christmas 1887. In a Parisian mansion, Douce, the bored daughter of an aristocratic family, nurtures a secret passion for Fabien, who manages the estate. But Fabien is the lover of Irène, Douce's governess, and plans to elope with her using money stolen from the family. Meanwhile, Douce's father, a widower, has also fallen in love with Irène, and his proposal of marriage sets in motion a train of events with tragic consequences...

The opening tracking shot of "Douce", across a miniature of Paris with an Eiffel Tower in construction, establishes a fin de siècle world in which new ideas are imposing themselves upon the old landscape. In the social order, too, there is evidence of change: Douce's father (Jean Debucourt) sees only good in his planned marriage to Irène (Madeleine Robinson) and in her elevation to his own social level. This elevation is depicted literally when he takes her for a ride in his newly installed lift, a symbol of his modernity in the stuffy gaslit townhouse. For him, love transcends class.

But the father's manner is too mild ("douce"). He has been wounded physically and psychologically, plagued by a sense of failure, hobbling on a wooden leg. The household is dominated by his mother the countess (Marguerite Moreno), a harridan whose starched black dresses represent her inflexible adherence to the old order and the sense of sin associated with transgression of social boundaries. As well as blocking her son's happiness, she is infusing her granddaughter Douce (Odette Joyeux) with her outdated orthodoxies, not realising that the thrill derived from breaking a taboo may become in itself a potent attraction for a modern, rebellious adolescent. The intransigence and cynicism of the crowlike old woman are the poison that saturates this house from the top down.

There's an angry polemic burning at the heart of the film, but on the surface, as in the title, all is soft and calm. "Douce" is one of the most elegant films ever made, each scene gliding smoothly into another as the characters move from room to room within the mansion. The screenplay is polished and literary, the performances intelligent and refined, the music perfectly integrated into the drama, the direction exquisitely choreographed with sumptuous camera movements to rival Ophüls. It's a drama of biting satire and of deep emotions deeply suppressed, registering only as a narrowing eyelid or a pursed lip.

And at the centre of the drama is the 17-year-old Douce herself, brilliantly played by Odette Joyeux - who was almost 30 at the time, and older than Madeleine Robinson who plays her governess. Douce is depicted on contemporary posters as a bird in a gilded cage, but her nature is more feline: playful, impulsive and by turns tender and cruel. She is experiencing love for the first time, and this makes her a vulnerable and ultimately a tragic character. As she sets out in the snow for her midnight assignation with Fabien (Roger Pigaut), her hooded cape reminds us of Little Red Riding-Hood about to meet the wolf.

"Douce" is not an anti-bourgeois film, as some have suggested. Truffaut famously remarked (in condemning films such as Autant-Lara's): "What is the value of an anti-bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the bourgeois?" The countess is ridiculous and contemptible, but the servant classes, as depicted here, are little better: Irène is an opportunist, Fabien is a thief, and his haughty attitude suggests a kinship of temperament with the countess. Only the rare few such as Douce and her father, who are willing to throw aside social convention and follow their hearts, are portrayed with sympathy in this film. And that's the message of Autant-Lara the artist, not the politician.

Someone is murdering the owners of a string of nightclubs, one of which, The Plantation, is unexpectedly bequeathed to a student (Odette Joyeux) on condition that she manages the club in person for a month. In order to give herself some authority, she poses as the wife of a wealthy Englishman, Steve Richardson. But then the mysterious Mr Richardson (Paul Meurisse) shows up in person...

"Scandale" is a comedy thriller that doesn't really get going until the arrival of Paul Meurisse over halfway through the picture. From that point on, though, it's pure gold, with the ditzy Joyeux and the dapper Meurisse forming a wonderful pair of romantic sparring partners. There's an obvious Hollywood influence in this comedy relationship, and it's all to the good.

In one scene Meurisse shoots his way into Joyeux's bedroom, twirls his gun, pours himself a drink, then removes her shoes and tickles her toes to revive her from a pretended faint. And all without a flicker across his face. Though best known internationally as the evil headmaster in "Les Dialobiques", Meurisse really excelled at these deadpan comedy roles, importing a British style of dry black humour into French film.

Sadly, the first half of the picture, in which Joyeux's comic partner is a talking parrot, is not nearly so good.

Frédéric Truche, a respectable businessman, is on his way home one evening when he spots an unattended parcel on a luggage rack in the Métro. These days, the correct response would be to throw your hands in the air and run screaming in the opposite direction. But this is 1947 and there are food shortages, and M Truche, suspecting it to be a ham or a parcel of butter, slips it under his arm and takes it home to his wife. They unwrap it eagerly, only to find... something very nasty inside.

This might be the opening of a Fritz Lang noir; and the ensuing drama, in which M Truche finds himself sucked into a criminal process where no-one believes his innocence, could be the plot of a Hitchcock thriller. (In fact, it was - "The Wrong Man".) But "Tête blonde" is a comedy, and a fairly good one at that. The film's greatest asset is Jules Berry, an actor who excelled at playing screen villains but who could turn his hand to comedy with equal success. There's a lot of pleasure to be had here, watching the energetic Berry, in one of his last roles, trying to squirm and babble his way out of the Kafkaesque nightmare that seems to be leading inexorably to the guillotine.

Maurice Cam's direction of the comedy is unfortunately a little too heavy-handed, with a tendency to underline every quirky moment with jaunty music and wide-eyed close-ups. In the hands of a better director, this might have been something quite wonderful, rather than what it is: a pleasant black comedy and a showcase for Berry's comic skills.

Watch out for a strange cameo by Jean Tissier, a character actor who was exceptionally prolific around this time. Here, he plays a psychiatric patient giving Berry's character a lesson in faking insanity. It's hard to detect any real justification for this scene, other than the simple fun of seeing two great eccentric actors chewing the scenery together.

The Spanish occupation of Flanders had already been the setting for Jacques Feyder's wonderful comedy "La Kermesse héroïque" of 1935. A decade later, there was not much comedy to be found in the subject of enemy occupation, and Louis Daquin's "Patrie", about a resistance movement to expel the invaders, has an altogether more serious and darker tone. It deals with persecution, summary execution, betrayal and collaboration, heroism in the face of death, and above all the hope of liberation and the sense of menace that might crush it at any moment. No Frenchman in 1946 could have had any doubt that he was watching a film about recent events in his country.

The correspondence between Pierre Blanchar's band of patriots and the French Résistance is so emphatic that one wonders why Daquin even felt the need to step back in time four centuries to tell this story. There was no longer an interdiction on films dealing directly with wartime events; nor does the historical setting throw any greater light on those events (as Arthur Miller's allegory of McCarthyism in "The Crucible" does, for example). Perhaps Daquin's point is simply that "There is nothing new under the sun".

Allegory aside, "Patrie" is a gripping drama that builds to a grim but stirring conclusion. Pierre Blanchar, tight-lipped and fierce-eyed, is the embodiment of suppressed fervour. Jean Desailly and Maria Mauban, as the lovers whose relationship threatens to undermine Blanchar's resistance movement, give intelligent and subtle performances. There is an excellent supporting cast (notably Louis Seigner as a wily prelate) and Daquin's unhurried, attentive direction shows them to advantage.

The use of music is interesting in "Patrie". The opening credits roll to a melody on church bells which, we soon discover, is a symbol of the resistance and the signal for the army of liberation to attack. The melody is taken up in various forms throughout the film until its dramatic use in the final scene.

Before she became the vampish femme fatale luring Jean Gabin to his downfall in "Pépé le Moko" and "Gueule d'amour", Mireille Balin spent several years playing the standard love interest in a handful of lightweight comedies such as this one by Léo Joannon.

"On a trouvé une femme nue" finds her in a role that couldn't be further from her later, immaculately styled persona. Here, she's the tweedy daughter of a down-at-heels aristocrat (Saturnin Fabre) who decides that a marriage of convenience is the only way to save the family from ruin. As her last night of freedom, she attends a toga party being thrown by medical students, unaware of one important rule: any woman not dressed as a Roman will be stripped naked. Balin escapes into the Parisian night but not before being relieved of all her clothes except for a mask and a pair of high heels.

It's not unusual to catch a glimpse of bare flesh in a mainstream French film of this period, but rarer for one of the stars to get naked (though not unprecedented - Arletty has a topless bathing scene in the previous year's "Un soir de réveillon"). Balin was offered a body double but declined. However, she wears an eye mask throughout the scene and is only shown naked from behind.

Aside from the promise of mild titillation, and the always reliable Saturnin Fabre, there's little to recommend this film. Much of the comedy seems to be based on the theory that watching people getting drunk and having a good time is equivalent to having a good time yourself - a theory which this movie sufficiently disproves. The most effective scene is when Balin, covered up in an overcoat and top hat, spends an evening with her prospective husband, played with boyish charm by Paul Bernard (this was before Jean Grémillon added a darker shade to Bernard's charm in "Lumière d'été" and "Pattes blanches"). It's a sweetly romantic interlude that almost redeems the film. Almost, but not quite, as Joannon repeatedly interrupts it with shots of Jean Gobet playing the most irritating screen drunk I've seen in a long time.

Joannon was capable of much better work than this - in particular, 1942's "Caprices" with Danielle Darrieux and Albert Préjean, a screwball entertainment in the American style, and one of the best comedies of the war years.

An interesting aspect of this film is the way the cast appear on screen at the start to introduce themselves. It's an idea that predates Sacha Guitry's regular practice of using spoken credits.

An escaped convict seeks refuge with his former lover, Flora, who works as a lion tamer in a travelling circus. She agrees to hide him from the police and finds work for him in the company; but his past catches up, putting Flora in mortal danger. Meanwhile, Flora's son, who doesn't know the convict is his father, is planning to elope with the circus owner's daughter.

It's a corny plot but never mind: the pleasure is in the details -- the characters and the sketches of circus life -- and in the skill with which Feyder weaves these into a grand spectacle and a coherent drama. At the heart of the picture is the tough but kindly Madame Flora, played by Feyder's wife Françoise Rosay. It's a tour-de-force performance, and a brave one, too, with Rosay getting up close and personal with some ferocious looking tigers. Feyder rewards her with long scenes and lingering takes.

"Les Gens du voyage" was the last film in which Feyder's genius from "Le Grand Jeu" and "La Kermesse héroïque" is still apparent (though it ranks below either of those masterpieces). As was the occasional practice of the time, he filmed a simultaneous German version, "Fahrendes Volk", with a mostly German cast. Françoise Rosay retained her role; indeed, it would be hard to imagine the film without her.

In her first film, little Louise Carletti gives a striking and mature performance as the spiteful younger daughter of the circus owner. She would become a familiar face in French cinema during the Nazi Occupation. And if you don't blink, you can catch a glimpse of future stars Micheline Francey and Madeleine Sologne, playing a couple of ballet students.

Antoine, a lift attendant in a fashion store, learns that he has inherited a small fortune. By the time the tax man and the solicitors have had their share, the fortune is so small it fits into his back pocket, but he decides to use what's left to live like a king, or at least a count, for a few days. His girlfriend picks the name Obligado for his new identity because that's the name of her Métro stop on the way to work.

"Comte Obligado" is a film driven entirely by the energy of its star, Georges Milton, a music hall song-and-dance man who made several ventures into movies in the 1930s. His English equivalent would perhaps be Tommy Trinder or Arthur Askey; in Hollywood, maybe Wheeler and Woolsey. One of Milton's best known songs was "La Fille du Bédouin", a performance of which is shoehorned, none too smoothly, into this picture, along with a surprisingly acrobatic dance number.

In common with many French popular comedies of the period, the film has an anti-establishment theme. Antoine's superiors are greedy, conniving, arrogant and effete - ripe, in fact, for a downfall at the hands of the happy-go-lucky, working class hero and his hard-working, under-appreciated girlfriend (delightful Paulette Dubost, who also sings in the film). Along the way, there are numerous potshots at the foolishness and pretensions of French high society.

In one curious scene, Antoine attends the drawing of the national lottery numbers. Unless the producers hired a theatre packed with thousands of extras, this appears to have been shot during the real event, candid camera style, with Milton in character. This, along with a few street scenes, give a sense of time and place to what is largely a studio-based picture.

Good, simple fun, with catchy songs and an infectious joie de vivre.

A wealthy young banker, bored with his lifestyle, visits a café in the Latin Quarter of Paris to mingle with the students from the Sorbonne. He meets a girl and pretends to be a struggling artist so that he can move into a room in the same boarding house.

"Quartier Latin" is a drab romantic comedy, poorly written, lazily directed and badly acted by almost all involved. Bernard Lancret is a particularly charmless romantic lead. Even Jean Tissier, a prolific and generally reliable character actor, is at a loss here (though he appears to be enjoying himself in the scene in which he massages Lancret's naked back). I might have found something more positive to say about this film if it had actually been shot on location in the Latin Quarter instead of on obvious studio sets which capture nothing of the flavour of that district, nor of student life.

A forgotten French film of the late 1930s which reminds us that not everything that came out of that Golden Age was a masterpiece.

Vautier, a rich surgeon, seduces the daughter of a fairground worker, using his money to silence the protests of her mother, then to eliminate any rivals for her affections. When her former lover shows up, Vautier forces her to choose between his money and her love for the younger man.

"Cette vieille canaille" is not a great film, but it contains a great central performance by Harry Baur. It's another of the "civilised ogre" roles that he played so often and so well, breathing humanity into what might have ended up, in the hands of a lesser actor, as a caricature.

As played by Baur, we can't help feeling a certain pity for Vautier. Like the financier in Maurice Tourneur's "Samson" (also played by Baur), this is a man who expects no love, or even fidelity, from the girl he has bought, but who knows the power of money and its hold on people. When Vautier perversely arranges a rendez-vous between his mistress and her former lover, it becomes more than a test of his power over her: it's a crucible of his whole cynical view of human nature.

Pierre Blanchar plays the younger man in this triangle with his usual nervous intensity. His scenes with Harry Baur are a highlight of the film and give us a taste of the more elaborate cat-and-mouse games played by the two actors in the 1935 adaptation of "Crime and Punishment".

A medical student meets a young woman on a sleeper train. They meet up again in Paris, but there are complications: the woman has a jealous boyfriend and the young man is expecting a visit from an interfering uncle with marriage plans for his nephew. Since the uncle believes that the student has already passed his exams, the boy poses as a practising doctor; the naked woman in his bathtub being, of course, a patient undergoing hydrotherapy...

"La Petite Dame du wagon-lit" was adapted from a stage farce and it shows. Aside from the short prologue on the train, and the final scene in a nightclub, we rarely stray from the main set of the student's apartment, through which passes a crowd of half-dressed women, blustering relatives, angry suitors, and confused would-be patients. Over the course of 90 minutes, there's no end of slamming doors, keyhole peeping and comic misunderstandings.

It's very silly but also very enjoyable. Roger Tréville, who appeared in many such comedies in the 30s, plays the leading role with enthusiasm and charm. As his best friend, tubby actor Pauley is the "butt" of much of the physical humour. And Colette Darfeuil, whose naked breasts get their own cameo in the opening credits, is good fun as the "petite dame".

Many French comedies of this period would pause for a song or two, but this one runs straight through without a break. Perhaps they'd been edited out of the print I saw (which did have some harsh cuts); or perhaps director Maurice Cammage simply understood the importance of pace and momentum in a film of this sort. The zip and fizz of this movie could be a lesson to many modern directors working in comedy.

One of the best films of 1934 was Jacques Feyder's "Le Grand Jeu", in which Pierre Richard-Willm leaves his high maintenance girlfriend Marie Bell, only to encounter her low-rent doppelganger in a faraway whorehouse.

It's an amusing coincidence that the film itself has a low-budget doppelganger in this picture by Louis Valray, which premiered two months earlier. In "La Belle de nuit", a playwright (Aimé Clariond) finds that his actress lover is cheating on him with his old war buddy. He ditches her and goes on a long journey to forget her, only to find... her lookalike in a Toulon whorehouse. Instead of sleeping with her, as Richard-Willm does in "Le Grand Jeu", Clariond weaves a plan in which he will use her to exact revenge on his former friend.

In the dual role, the statuesque Véra Korène is coolly elegant as the actress Maryse and coldly severe as the world-weary, man-hating prostitute Maïthé. It was her second feature film, but Korène was already an established stage actress and her performance here, while less alluring than that of the eroticised Marie Bell in Feyder's picture, is intense, striking and complex. Korène's promising film career was cut short by the Nazi Occupation after only a dozen features. As a Jew, she was forbidden from acting and fled to Canada.

Louis Valray was also a relative newcomer to film. He made just three films as director, of which this is the second. His handling of the melodrama, and of the actors' performances, is perhaps a little stiff and theatrical for modern tastes. However, there is evidence of a creative intelligence at work. He uses camera movements and dissolves to good effect, often linking scenes by dissolving between shots that are visually or audibly related: a dog yapping at Maryse's expulsion dissolves into a train whistle announcing the departure of his master. In a later shot, the camera pans from a metal mask on a wall to the steely face of Maïthé as she prepares the deception that will seduce her victim.

The final scenes, on a rocky seashore and fleeing through woodland, have a surreal, almost dreamlike quality, lifting the film out of the "merely melodrama". "Le Grand Jeu" is the greater film, and the work of a true master, but this is an interesting companion piece.

In 1942 Jean Stelli had a huge success with the weepie "Le Voile bleu". It starred Gaby Morlay as a nanny who, having lost her own child, devotes her life to the children of others. Even today, the final scene can induce moisture in uncynical eyes.

In 1943 Robert Péguy tried to repeat that success with "Les Ailes blanches". It stars Gaby Morlay as a nun who, having lost her only love, devotes her life to helping other desperate women. We learn of Sister Claire's story in a flashback, while she's pondering the case of a pregnant girl who's been abandoned by her lover and rejected by her father (Saturnin Fabre).

The film did not achieve the success of "Le Voile bleu" and it's not hard to see why. The two plots - the frame story and the flashback - are hackneyed melodramas without even the compensation of a tearjerker ending. 50-year-old Gaby Morlay, who had been so moving as the selfless nanny in the earlier film, gives an arid performance as the elderly nun, and an unconvincing one as her teenage self, squeezed into party frocks and giant bows.

I found myself foraging for whatever morsels I could find in this unappetising pudding. One such morsel is Saturnin Fabre, a splendidly old-fashioned and over-the-top character actor who is continually swerving between broad comedy and high tragedy, and occasionally achieving both at the same time. Whenever my interest started to flag, they would wheel on Saturnin Fabre for another scene and all would be well.

Another tasty morsel, but at the opposite end of the dramatic register from Saturnin Fabre, is Jacqueline Bouvier. She gives such a fresh, lively, modern performance in this (her second) film, it's as if she's tumbled backwards out of a swinging fifties movie. I particularly enjoyed the part where she appears bare-legged in a showgirl costume. Those scenes had great technical merit, I thought.

Mademoiselle Bouvier later became Madame Marcel Pagnol. She starred in several of her husband's films, all of which are better than this.

An Indochinese orphan (played by the lovely Foun-Sen) comes to Paris in search of the man she believes to be her father. All she knows about him is that his name is Paul Ménard, so she goes through the phone book with the intention of visiting the whole "collection" of Paul Ménards in Paris.

And an odd collection they are, too. It feels like every French character actor of the period was drafted in to do a comic turn in this film. So here we have Lucien Baroux as an eccentric museum curator, Marguerite Moreno as an eccentric author, Pierre Larquey as a mad doctor, Robert Le Vigan as a crazy old man, Jean Tissier, Suzy Prim...

Episodic stories like this can work very well with a decent script and believable performances. See, for example Duvivier's Un carnet de bal. But here, each character seems to have stepped straight out of a lunatic asylum, or a French stage farce. Only Foun-Sen brings a sense of realism and genuine emotion to the piece. Unfortunately, too many of her scenes find her paired with the exasperating Lucien Baroux, a deservedly forgotten comic actor of the time. Only completists of French Occupation cinema should add this one to their collection.

These days movies tend to be based on comic books or computer games. In 1936 it was a hit song for Ray Ventura and his band that gave rise to Henry Wulschleger's film of the same name. The link between the song and the film is tenuous at best, but Wulschleger milks it for all he's worth: we get Ventura performing the song on camera during the opening credits, followed by the cast singing it while they briefly act out the comic anecdote that it tells: how the lady of the manor is informed of the total conflagration of her ancestral home by her servants, who break the news to her by slow degrees, to soften the blow. The song is repeatedly referenced throughout the movie and is reprised at the end by the main character, and then by the band again as the credits roll.

In spite of all that, the film has little to do with the song. The marquise (a cameo by Marguerite Moreno) appears only briefly, and the story is really about one Yonnik Le Ploumanech (Noël-Noël), a gormless but good-natured Breton yokel who was the servant chiefly responsible for the fire in the first scene. Now out of work and in need of money to marry his fiancée, he earns some coins from tourists by busking in a traditional Brittany costume. He can only play one tune on his bagpipes, but a producer from a Paris theatre is passing by and hires him on the spot for a show about regional music. Le Ploumanech is whisked off to the big city to find fame and fortune. Or so he thinks...

The only other review of this film I could find describes it as a "nanar" (turkey). I think that's a bit unfair. OK, the plot is silly and contrived, and the direction is nothing special. But Le Ploumanech, as played by Noël-Noël in a putty nose, is a rather splendid comic creation, sweet but over-eager and accident-prone, a little reminiscent of the silent star Harry Langdon. And then there's that song, which really is extremely catchy. "Tout va très bien, madame la marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien..."

The premise of this sublime comedy is that two third-rate actors, desperate for publicity, devise a harebrained scheme in which one of them pretends to kill the other. The "victim" will then return from the dead at the eleventh hour, saving his friend from the guillotine and creating a national sensation that will turn them both into top-billed stars. Of course, it doesn't all go according to plan...

Michel Simon and Jules Berry make such a great double act it's a pity that the story requires them to split up for most of the movie. But the pace never flags, with Michel Simon's manic attempts to get himself arrested and then to clear himself of the murder charge; and Jules Berry trying to extricate himself from a wildly implausible but potentially fatal case of mistaken identity. The clever conceit of Carlo Rim's screenplay is that these hapless actors cannot even play themselves with conviction when their lives depend on it.

There are some lovely details in the minor characters, too: the music hall starlet whose first reaction on hearing that someone may have been murdered over her is to sort out photos of herself for distribution to the press; the concierge, niggled at the way Michel Simon barks at her cat; and Simon's ineffectual windbag lawyer (all too plausible, I fear).

Jules Berry was a notorious improviser of dialogue, and Michel Simon had difficulty keeping up at times. He even asked him to stick to the script at one point, though director André Berthomieu decided he liked it better when Berry was given free rein. A wise decision, as the spontaneous energy of their scenes together is one of the great delights of this movie.

The idea for Feu sacré came from its leading actress, Viviane Romance, and is a sort of fictionalised autobiography of her rise from music hall showgirl to can-can dancer to movie star, taking in the trials and sacrifices she endures along the way.

It's a film of no great originality, no real dramatic heights, and no suspense, either: we know that the starlet is going to make it to the top, despite the occasional setback, because the story is told in flashback as she emerges from the premiere of her latest triumph.

Nevertheless, Maurice Cloche's brisk direction and eye for detail, particularly in the vibrant backstabbing world of the Parisian music hall, make for pleasant enough entertainment. And, of course, there's the wonderfully alluring Viviane Romance, who really did have a spark of the "sacred fire", and who throws herself into this performance heart, body and soul.

Georges Flamant, who plays one of Romance's lovers in Feu sacré, was her partner in real life at the time. She left him for Franck Villard, who plays her other lover in the film. Inspired by this "autobiopic", Romance went on to write her own script for La Boîte aux rêves.

Playwright André Luguet returns home one evening to find a beautiful stranger on his doorstep. She faints at his feet, and when she comes to on his sofa a few minutes later she claims to know nothing of who she is, how she got there, or why there's a recently fired gun in her purse. To add to his troubles, Luguet's fiancée is due home any moment.

This is a style of stage comedy transferred, with no great inventiveness, to the cinema. It's very reminiscent of 1942's Boléro, which also has André Luguet as a dapper, befuddled and slightly preposterous leading man, struggling to preserve his dignity while his world crumbles and reforms around him. In my review of Boléro, I said that the main interest of that film was Arletty. Here, it's Madeleine Sologne, a familiar and distinctive face of French Occupation cinema, whose odd, angular beauty and sense of other-worldliness (enhanced by her role in the recent L'Eternel Retour) add a welcome air of intrigue to this otherwise routine comedy.

Femme fatale Madeleine Robinson is married to Raymond Aimos, a coal miner with a face like a pickled walnut and a libido to match. She wants some action, and what she can't get from her impotent husband, she looks for elsewhere, first with his best friend Pierre Brasseur, then with his boss Lucien Gallas, who is also dating Brasseur's kid sister Odette Joyeux.

Throw in the mandatory pit disaster to remind everyone of the true meaning of comradeship, and it adds up to a routine melodrama, ably directed but unremarkable, particularly for a year which produced such timeless classics as Hôtel du Nord, La Bête humaine and Quai des brumes. The main interest for me was the sense of an authentic mining community rather than a studio facsimile; and the pleasure of seeing favourite actors Brasseur, Robinson, Joyeux and Bernard Blier (a minor role as Joyeux's second choice boyfriend) while still young in their careers.

The European Space Programme suffers its first setback when Julien Carette opens the window of his capsule to smoke a cigarette and blasts himself and fellow astronaut Madeleine Sologne 25 years into the future. When they return to Earth it's 1967 and everyone's dressed in sparkly suits like game show hosts. An organisation, Croisières Sidérales (Star Cruises), is set up to exploit the commercial possibilities of time and space travel, and a new rocket is sent up with a cargo of passengers destined for the year 2000. Unfortunately, the accident-prone Carette is once again on board...

Fantasy and escapism were popular themes in French cinema during the German Occupation, but this was the only film that took audiences to other worlds and future times. When the movie was released, it was accompanied by a short film explaining the Theory of Relativity on which the story is (very loosely) based. This caused some problems for the director André Zwoboda, who was summoned by the Nazi authorities and asked to explain why he was promulgating the ideas of Albert Einstein, a Jew.

The set designs (by Henri Mahé, who worked with Gance) evoke the fantasies of Méliès, though the film lacks the charm and innocence of those early silents. There's some broad comedy with Carette and the other eccentric passengers clowning around in zero gravity, an underdeveloped romantic plot involving Sologne and her husband (who make an extraordinary sacrifice to level their age difference), and even a Busby Berkeley style dance number that must have eaten up half the budget.

Sadly, there's little attempt on the part of the screenwriters to engage either seriously or satirically with the ambitious ideas of the premise. When the travellers return to Earth (via a visit to some smug Venusians) the only lesson they seem to have learnt is to stop messing about with science and be happy with what they've got.

The screenplay of Lucrèce was inspired by a real incident in Edwige Feuillère's life. A Parisian schoolboy, infatuated with the actress, announced to his classmates that he was her son. When the rumour reached the actress, the boy was reprimanded by his headmistress and the matter ended. In the film version, things go further, with the actress Lucrèce (played by Feuillère) taking pity on the boy and inviting him for a working holiday on her farm, where an unlikely relationship develops...

Around this time, Henri Decoin was directing his young wife Danielle Darrieux in a series of comedies which often cast her as the schoolgirl love interest of an older man. Here, director Léo Joannon reverses the proposition, with Jean Mercanton awkwardly cast as a sort of male Darrieux to Feuillère's older woman.

Feuillère was fresh from the success of L'Honorable Catherine, a fizzing screwball comedy directed by Marcel L'Herbier. Lucrèce was expected to be another hit, but it flopped, weighed down by an overly melodramatic script, and by an imbalanced cast which leaves young Mercanton struggling in love scenes with the more mature and talented Feuillère.

In supporting roles, watch out for Pierre Jourdan (brother of the more famous Louis) as the rival for Lucrèce's affections, and Jean Tissier, one of the best character actors of the period, as Mercanton's batty headmaster.

Evelyne (Edwige Feuillère) works as a dancer in a sleazy nightclub, trying to scrape a living for herself and her young son. When a man she loved years earlier suddenly reappears she decides to pretend, for a few days at least, that her life has been more successful. But it won't be that easy...

Evelyne is a woman imprisoned in her situation (the thick netting hanging from the walls in the nightclub remind us of this). She is trapped by poverty and by the demands of the men in her life, including her son. Her sudden impulse to escape comes like a long-suppressed scream, but succeeds only in confirming the futility of the attempt and reminding her of the happiness she has lost forever. "I can live a lie for three days," she says, "but a lifetime... no."

This is Ophüls in Poetic Realism mode. Though the story is slight (Pabst's "Drame de Shanghai" and Valentin's "L'Entraineuse" are more interesting variations on the same theme), Ophüls' elegant compositions and camera movements, and the exquisite, delicate performance of Edwige Feuillère, lift this to the level of great art.

When small-time crook Ralph Schwarz (Charles Boyer) is released from prison early for good behaviour, he heads straight back to his girlfriend Ania, unaware that she's having an affair with Gustave, a successful photographer. Knowing Ralph's violent temper, Ania's smart move would be to drop Gustave without delay. But she's unable to resist a good thing, any more than Ralph can resist the murderous rage that consumes him when he finds out.

Set almost entirely at night or in shadowy gloom that seems to press in upon the characters, Tumultes is a dark film both thematically and optically. It doesn't leave you with a good feeling about the human race. We are, in Siodmak's vision, wretched creatures, imprisoned and ultimately destroyed by our lowest impulses. Twice in the film Ralph gets free from captivity. But his freedom is illusory. His obsessive jealousy and pride, centred around the femme fatale Ania, make his downfall a grim inevitability.

Charles Boyer is magnificent as the unlikeable but fascinating Ralph. As in the best noirs, there is a tragic dignity about this doomed anti-hero, and Boyer captures this perfectly in the lull before the final storm, as Ralph sits quietly eating an apple with his knife while he waits for Ania's latest beau to arrive.

Siodmak's other great French noir, Pièges, is perhaps a more entertaining film, lightening the darkness with comedy and with a strong-willed central character who is in control of her fate. But Tumultes is the more concentrated, complex and psychologically penetrating of the two.