GENRE, MYTH, AND CONVENTION

IN THE FRENCH CINEMA, 1929–1939

GENRE, MYTH,
AND
CONVENTION
IN THE
French
Cinema
1929–1939

COLIN CRISP
 This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA

http://iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders 800-842-6796

Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail [email protected]

© 2002 by Colin Crisp

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-
copying and recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. The Association of American University Presses'
Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this
prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crisp, C. G.
Genre, myth, and convention in the French cinema, 1929–1939 / Colin
Crisp.
p. cm.
A viewer's guide [to 200 or so films]: p.
Filmography, 1929–1939: p.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-253-34072-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21516-1 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Motion pictures—France—History. 2. Film genres—France. I.
Title.
PN1993.5.F7 C785 2002
791.43'0944—dc21
2002001184

1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03 02
For Jane (again)
 CONTENTS

 ⁄ ix

 ⁄ xi

Part One. Thirteen Hundred Films

1. Identity: Reflecting on the Self 

2. Nation and Race: French and Not-French—Sterotypes and Myths 

3. Class: Authority, Oppression, and the Dream of Escape 

4. Gender and the Family: The Formation and

Dissolution of the Couple 

5. Education, the Media, and the Law: The Training of a Citizen 

6. Art and Transcendence: Spirituality and Reflexivity 

Part Two. Genre, Star, Box Office

7. Cinematic Genres in France: “A grotesque mask”

or “the genius of the system”? 

8. The Stars in Their (Dis)courses: “Anemic dreams”

and “poetry for pallid people”? 

9. Box-Office Success in the Thirties: Films “debased by popular taste”? 

10. Conclusion 

 ’  ⁄ 

 ⁄ 

 ⁄ 

 ⁄ 

 ⁄ 

  ⁄ 

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Griffith University for the period of leave and the
initial funding which allowed me to undertake this disconcertingly large
project, and the Australian Research Council for the subsequent funding
which allowed me to complete it. An earlier version of chapter 8 was given
as a paper at the Film and History Conference in Canberra in 1995, while
some aspects of chapter 9 were covered at a conference, “Cinema of the
Occupation,” at Rutgers University in November 1996.
I am also grateful to the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and the BiFi in Paris
for the use of their resources, and most particularly to the IDHEC library
out of which the BiFi evolved: it had a card index system which, confronted
by computerized equivalents, I remember with nostalgic affection and not
a little longing.
 INTRODUCTION

Most books which deal with the classic French cinema avoid or minimize
the topic of genre and focus on individual films or on directors. There have
been study guides to Les Enfants du paradis, Le Jour se lève, nous la liberté,
and La Règle du jeu. Avant-Scène Cinéma has reprinted the scenarios of
dozens of films, from Pepe le Moko to Les Visiteurs du soir, Le Ciel est à vous,
Les Dernières Vacances, Toni, Le Corbeau, L’Opéra de quat’sous, Le Passage du
Rhin, Monsieur Ripois, La Grande Illusion, and Jeux interdits. But however
well these texts may be introduced, the focus on a single film precludes any
adequate explanation of the form and content of the work, let alone the
fact that it should have emerged from a production system which stifled so
many others at birth.
Likewise, the focus on directors such as Renoir, Carné, Grémillon, Clou-
zot, Duvivier, and Vigo, which has motivated the production of many other
books on the classic French cinema, can never aspire to any very convincing
explanatory power, since to regard the director (or, for that matter, such
scriptwriters as Prévert, Aurenche, Bost, Spaak, Sigurd, and Jeanson) as the
point of origin of such films is to ignore the vast cultural repertoire on
which they were drawing, and the often intense political and industrial con-
straints on their ability to draw freely on that repertoire, not to mention the
various types of formal or informal “training” that they had had, which led
them to draw on one rather than another sector of the available repertoire.
Finally, the ideological orientation of many researchers has led them to
focus on the dramatic conditions experienced by the French cinema during
the war years, analyzing the extent to which the films produced then were
or were not politically correct, and this in turn has led to a focus, within the
thirties, on those fascinating but largely anomalous films that can be more
or less directly related to the Popular Front. The idea that the period from
1930 to 1945 formed a block, and that the cinema of Vichy was already
present in the popular cinema of 1935, has been put forward by a number
of critics1 and is explicit in the title of Garçon’s book De Blum à Pétain.2 Yet
even if one extends this “pre-Vichy” cinema to include all the films gener-
ally categorized as “poetic realist,” as Geneviève Sellier has rightly pointed
out, one is talking about “an insignificant proportion of the production of
 xii | Introduction
the time, and hardly one representative of the tastes of the movie-going
public.”3
Most studies of the cinematic scene are happy to ignore these problems,
since they take as their point of departure a canonic and very limited range
of films and a mythic commitment to individual creativity, or at least they
are targeted at a readership which has learned to take these as its point of de-
parture. The present study focuses neither on “the great directors” nor on
“the great social and political movements.” Rather, it constitutes one stage of
an attempt to provide a more adequate explanatory model for the existence
and nature of a national cinema, based on the triple concepts of social sys-
tem, industrial system, and textual system. My previous book in the series,
The Classic French Cinema 1930–1960,4 looked at the industrial structure
and mode of production of the French cinema during those three decades in
the light of social, political, and economic conditions—looked, that is, at
the industrial system in the light of the socio-economic system. The present
volume, and its successor dealing with the period 1940–60, aims to outline
the textual system which the filmmakers of the time drew on and, in turn,
constructed in the course of their filmmaking activities. By “textual system,”
I mean simply the sum total of the three thousand or so films produced in
France and/or regarded by French audiences as French films between 1930
and 1960, considered as one single global text, with overlapping and recur-
rent narratives, recurrent yet evolving characters and settings, established yet
developing technical practices, and arising from all these a recognizably dis-
tinct array of thematic material.
In one very important respect, a detailed study of that textual system
will forever be impossible, since a large number of the films produced dur-
ing the thirty-year period have disappeared, and many of the rest are diffi-
cult or impossible to access. This problem is particularly acute in dealing
with the decade of the thirties, for which period Raymond Borde estimated
that some 70 percent of films had disappeared. My own research would
tend to suggest that no more than 10 percent are currently available from
the early thirties, but over 30 percent and perhaps as many as 40 percent
after 1934. There may be a significantly greater number hidden away in
various archives, since in a 1986 afterword Jeancolas mentions a survey
undertaken by the seven principal French archives which suggested that an
astonishing 76 percent of 1930s French feature films still existed, and per-
haps even 80 percent.5 Nevertheless, the great bulk of these are not avail-
able to researchers.
Despite this lack of primary material, which constitutes a major obsta-
cle, the films that are available provide a sufficient body of work for gener-
alizations concerning recurrent story lines, characters, technical effects,
motifs, and themes to have statistical validity, especially when supple-
mented by contemporary plot summaries and reviews of the missing films.
 Introduction | xiii
It is on this basis that the present study aims to analyze the textual web of
interrelated material constituted by the thirteen hundred films produced in
the thirties.
To describe the textual system of the classic French cinema as a “system”
is already to imply a significant level of conventionality within it. Indeed,
many elements within the films, at the level of plot, character, iconography,
and technical practices, were in some sense well known to the filmmakers
and spectators of the time, and whenever they appeared within a given film
they were felt to have a significance broader than their simple visual pres-
ence. Tramp figures appeared so frequently in plots in which bourgeois
households were disrupted that they came to stand for the subversion of es-
tablished social rules, for freedom, and even for anarchy. Orphans, or twins,
or street singers, or aviators could not be introduced into a plot without
arousing quite precise expectations, deriving from the numerous previous
occasions on which the audience half-remembered seeing analogous figures
in analogous situations. Such “agreed meanings” also clustered around set-
tings such as tall, isolated apartment buildings, casinos and nightclubs, re-
mote peasant communities, guinguettes (open-air restaurants) on the banks
of the Marne, and outposts of empire. At some level, viewers recognized
the significance of tilted frames, rapid editing, low-key lighting, and the
various forms of background music, and they recognized them because
those forms had been recurrently used with quite specific meanings in a
number of films.
It was inevitable that some degree of conventionality should exist with-
in the classic French cinema, if only because it borrowed so heavily, espe-
cially in the early days, from neighboring textual systems in which generic
conventions had a long and often elaborately articulated history—conven-
tions deriving from operetta, vaudeville, boulevard comedy, romantic and
historical novels, melodrama, and the popular song, for example. Where
these generic forms were borrowed wholesale, and particularly where the-
atrical and other texts were simply or largely transposed into film, the resul-
tant classic cinema could itself be said to have a solid generic base. Yet it is
widely recognized that at no time did the French cinema approach the level
of formulaic conventionality manifested by Hollywood or, for that matter,
other large-scale film industries. Although, on occasion, it transposed exist-
ing genres, it evolved relatively few of its own, and those few proved rela-
tively unstable and short-lived. It was not that the French cinema “escaped”
conventionality, but rather that such conventional elements as developed
within it seldom coalesced into the recurrent arrays of related conventions that
are necessary for a genre to begin to exist in the minds of filmmakers and
spectators.
The reasons for this state of affairs were outlined in The Classic French
Cinema 1930–1960.6 The principal cause was the fragmented production
 xiv | Introduction
system that characterized the industry of the time. Consisting of a multi-
tude of mostly transitory and under-funded production firms, few of which
owned their own means of production and none of which maintained a sta-
ble of stars or a corps of technical personnel on long-term contract, the clas-
sic cinema was ill adapted to replicate successes. By the time a film had
proved to be a hit with the public, the production company might no
longer exist, and even if it did it would inevitably have to begin almost from
zero in its attempt to replicate that success, with a new writer, new techni-
cians, and a new set of actors and actresses. Moreover, the production of
French films from conception to screening took a longer time than in the
U.S., so it was seldom less than a year before the producers could know
whether the project was to be successful, and thus whether it might be
worth replicating.
A closely related problem was the relative lack of a star system in
France. The high degree of industrial organization needed to fabricate and
sustain the mythic stereotypes essential to the very existence of such a sys-
tem simply did not exist in France. Lacking an institutionalized publicity
machine to feed the public the necessary “information” about a given actor,
lacking the established channels through which the public could then ex-
press its admiration, lacking a secretariat to respond to the resultant “fan
mail,” lacking the stable of accommodating scenarists who might be in-
structed to develop a series of convergent scenarios for a given actor, and,
indeed, unable to call on an actor at will, the production system had no way
of responding promptly to an audience’s enthusiasm for a given role or per-
formance. The French film industry was frozen in an artisanal mode of
production, whereas it is arguable that a full-fledged industrial capitalism
such as existed in Hollywood is necessary to support the merchandising of
actors central to a star system, and a fortiori to support the development of
a genre system.
Yet if the generic framework of French cinema was relatively undevel-
oped, it was nevertheless quite common for production companies to
appeal to generic labels in the marketing of their films, and even more
common for industry publications such as Cinéopse, La Cinématographie
Française, and Le Film Français to categorize the respective year’s produc-
tion according to those widely understood generic labels. Little study of
these labels has been undertaken; yet they are important as an indication of
the ways in which the industry conceptualized its product. Moreover, a
breakdown of the changing proportions of texts categorized under the var-
ious generic labels can provide a first indication of the way in which the
textual system was evolving over the decades in question.
Critics and commentators also referred to these generic categories when
writing about films, though very few of them manifested any respect for
films that could be seen to conform too readily to generic formulas. The
 Introduction | xv
chapter on genres (chapter 7) undertakes to survey all such books and arti-
cles written during the classic period, in order to identify the generic labels
which critics recognized as relevant to the French cinema of the day and to
summarize the views they expressed both about specific genres and about
the concept of genre as a critical tool. Aspects of this survey cover the entire
thirty-year period of the classic cinema, from 1930 to 1960, in order to bet-
ter recognize patterns and trends, but it focuses more specifically on the
thirties when discussing the genres that critics and commentators saw as
typical of that decade.
A second way to arrive at an understanding of the textual system from
outside the textual system itself is to look at the discourses surrounding the
actors and actresses of the day. How were the leading actors of the day dis-
cussed, described, and categorized in popular film magazines? As an initial
broad generalization, because the acting fraternity in the thirties moved
freely between the cinema and the theater, it usually brought to its cine-
matic activities a range of pre-established categories within which it felt at
home. These categories, or emplois—young lead, ingénue, servant, and so
on—were all the more readily accepted into the cinema as they corre-
sponded to the casting of the theatrical productions which for several years
dominated the talkies. Gradually, however, the influence of theatrical cate-
gories waned, the recurrent social roles which they served to characterize
began to dissolve, and ready-made categorizations fell into disrepute under
the influence of the myth of the psychological, self-determined individual.7
Nevertheless, it is demonstrably the case that mythic character types
continued to exist and to evolve throughout the thirties. The evidence lies
in the articles published in fan magazines, such as gossip columns, film re-
views, snippets of information about the stars’ activities, and occasional
more extended accounts of the life of a particular actor. Articles such as
these construct the actors and actresses in clearly differentiated ways over
the years, reflecting, for the most part in a totally unselfconscious way, the
larger preoccupations of the time and the related forms of fantasized iden-
tity that spectators wished to see attributed to their screen heroes and hero-
ines. These various discourses woven around actors provide, then, a further
indication of the forms of characterization that one might expect to find in
the textual system of the day, and the way those forms of characterization
might evolve. For the discourses, of course, are not stable. To take an ex-
treme instance, a radically different set of fantasies gets woven around the
emergent stars of the fifties from the more established emplois and tradi-
tional social roles that were regularly attributed to their equivalents in the
early thirties. The later set are more oriented toward the new audiences of
the fifties, and particularly toward a younger generation that is more finan-
cially independent and more inclined to define itself against its parents, en-
couraged by an emergent neo-capitalism toward a “revolutionary” morale
 xvi | Introduction
of sensual self-gratification that would constitute the young as appropriate
citizens of the coming consumer society. As a first step toward charting the
evolution of these discourses over the whole thirty-year period, chapter 8
looks at the principal discourses surrounding stars in the thirties.
A third way of charting the evolution of the textual system is to identify
the most popular films of each year, and thus to chart the evolution of pop-
ular taste as expressed through entries and box-office success. The crucial
questions are: “Which films were most popular, which textual elements re-
curred most frequently in them, and what satisfactions were those elements
providing for the audiences?” The first step in the process of identifying the
most popular films of the classic period has been taken for us by contem-
porary researchers in the Centre National de la Cinématographie, who
from 1948 on published data that were reproduced in industry journals
such as La Cinématographie Française and Le Film Français concerning en-
tries and earnings for first-release films in Paris and the provinces. Unfortu-
nately, no equivalent data exist for the years prior to 1948, because various
vested interests saw to it that they remained confidential, so the results ar-
rived at in the present volume relating specifically to the thirties are the
product of a relentless scanning of the weekly film programs of Paris, sup-
plemented by some less reliable indicators of box-office success which ap-
peared in more discursive and subjective form or in unsystematic local and
regional surveys. One might be justified in asking whether data based pri-
marily on Paris box-office figures are really the most reliable indicator of a
film’s national popularity, since (where they exist) data concerning the long-
term nationwide success of a given film often modify or radically contradict
any conclusions one might be tempted to draw on the basis of Parisian
data. These factors are discussed at the end of the chapter on box-office suc-
cess in the thirties (chapter 9).
All such ancillary institutional data external to the textual system which
help us to track the evolution of that system must be secondary to an analy-
sis of the system itself. The chapters dealing with external indicators are to
be found in the second part of the present book, while part 1 looks at the
textual system itself. Together, the two parts aim to provide an understand-
ing of the extent to which genre, stereotype, and convention were present,
and were recognized as being present, in the classic French cinema of the
thirties. They thus provide an indication of the communal repertoire of
characters, stories, and settings on which filmmakers were drawing at any
given moment. The reasons for undertaking such a study are many, but two
predominate. First, a knowledge of the repertoire on which films were
drawing can contribute to a demystification of production, by rendering a
little more translucent the process of “creativity” that went into the compo-
sition of each film. This process is commonly mythologized, within the
romantic approach to literature, music, painting, and, more recently, film-
 Introduction | xvii
making, as an essentially incomprehensible and even magical process, orig-
inating in a special talent of the “author” (composer, writer, painter, direc-
tor) that is commonly called genius. Often regarded as innate and intuitive,
this talent is seen as expressing itself spontaneously in the production of
works of art.
A more matter-of-fact approach to the process of textual composition
has recently seen the production of works of art in any medium as, at least
in part, the product of a perfectly rational and comprehensible process of
selection and assemblage, according to practices which allow for endless re-
combinations and modifications of given material. The “inventiveness” of
the creative artist, that is, can be seen as subordinate to, and even depen-
dent on, the conventional forms and practices of the day, in the use of
which the artist is formally or informally trained. Even the ways of breaking
the rules and conventions of the day are part of those conventions. In this
sense, an awareness of the overall repertoire of settings, characters, and sto-
ries available at the time can render less singular the appearance of any one
of them in a specific film. The aviator in La Règle du jeu thus becomes a tex-
tual commonplace, as do the fairground in Quai des brumes and the climac-
tic siege in Le Jour se lève. To contextualize thus the process of production is
not to reduce all films to a similar level of banality. There are always degrees
of “inventiveness” among filmmakers—that is, a greater or lesser degree of
skill in the manipulation of the material drawn from the filmic and other
repertoires. Simply, the source of the material itself, and the procedures for
manipulating it, can more readily be identified, as can the forms of “train-
ing” in these processes of selection and organization that the filmmakers
have experienced.
A second reason for examining the evolution of the textual system is to
achieve a better understanding not of production but of consumption.
That subset of the global textual system which consists of each year’s most
popular films and of those containing the most frequently recurring con-
ventions can stand in for the relatively weak genre system as a guide to the
mythic aspirations of audiences. The connection between myth and genre
has often been invoked. In the case of the Western, to take just one well-
known example, Will Wright’s book Sixguns and Society argues the case for
any genre providing its audience with satisfactions analogous to those that
the folktale provided in earlier days.8 But whereas the folktale, designed for
a relatively static feudal society, did not need to evolve noticeably over the
centuries, the Western (like other contemporary genres) was designed for a
society undergoing constant change. The needs of its citizens were them-
selves evolving, so the various fictional genres embodied in its cultural ar-
tifacts needed to evolve in order to accommodate those needs. Hence
Wright’s periodization of the Western according to the way it catered to the
needs of the thirties, the forties, or the fifties.
 xviii | Introduction
But Wright, like Propp9 in the case of the folktale, could readily isolate
the recurrent structural elements of the genre in question, or at least that of
the most popular Western films. When one works within a textual system
resistant to the development of genres, it is the most widespread conven-
tions and the most popular films, however diverse their apparent generic al-
legiance, that must constitute the primary evidence of mythic status. It is,
therefore, narratives, characters, and settings which recur and evolve across
the whole subsystem, and technical practices that become standardized and
gradually change over the years which will provide the most useful infor-
mation. Hence the decision to treat the textual system as a whole, and more
particularly the subset of the textual system constituted by its most popular
films, in the same way as other critics have approached more well-estab-
lished and widely recognized genres.
It is, then, with a number of significant reservations but an even stronger
belief in the worth of the task that I have set out to describe the repertoire
of the first decade of the French classic cinema, both in itself and as seen
from the vantage point of ancillary textual systems such as fan magazines,
industry journals, and critical commentary. My aim is to chronicle the evo-
lution of that repertoire, and thus to clarify aspects of the production and
consumption of the films of the day. It could well be argued that the textual
web thus described is arbitrarily limited to French films and commentary,
when in fact any web of the sort defined here extends seamlessly across ad-
jacent fictional media and adjacent national film systems. In particular, it
could be argued that in order to identify what was mythic for the audiences
of the day it would be desirable to analyze all the films that entered the
French market during the thirties, particularly American films, since French
audiences often rated them as highly as they did indigenous productions.
This is a perfectly valid observation, but to implement such a course of ac-
tion would have more than doubled the already onerous work required for
the present study. For the moment, French production alone will form the
object of analysis.
Despite this limitation, the approach can prove profitable. As an in-
stance of the sort of new light that it might shed on an apparently well-
known film, the following observations attempt to situate the opening
scene of La Règle du jeu within the textual web of the classic French cinema
by noting certain elements of the repertoire which it mobilizes. It should be
said, first of all, that the film is based on elements of a more extended tex-
tual web, as Renoir was happy to acknowledge, since he borrowed the un-
derlying narrative pattern from Alfred de Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne.
The elements common to the two texts can be listed quite readily. There is
a triangular relationship in which a dignitary’s wife is importuned, unsuc-
cessfully, by an ardent romantic lover. The lover’s friend (in both cases
named Octave) is willing to act as go-between, but his pleading on his
 Introduction | xix
friend’s behalf makes it only too apparent that he also is fascinated by the
dignitary’s wife. That wife’s commitment to her husband is undone by the
husband’s own inadvertence, with the result that she is willing to reconsider
the importunate lover, or Octave, or indeed anyone. Her capricious behav-
ior thus presents Octave with the possibility of a romantic liaison, but he
nobly renounces it, sending his friend to the rendezvous in his guise. The
friend is killed by the husband’s underling.
Although this general schema is borrowed from de Musset, there are
many other textual elements in the film which can be related to films or
genres of the decade. This is particularly apparent in the opening scene, in
which Jurieux, the aviator, is seen returning from a record-breaking flight
to the acclamation of the people, only to undermine the celebratory nature
of the occasion by allowing his personal disappointments to intrude on the
reception. There are six points that I would like to make relating to inter-
textual conventions operating at this moment.
1. At a very general level, we can say that many films of the period opened
or closed with such a scene, involving the dramatic contrast between
public celebration and private despair. Some instances are well known—
the ending of Hôtel du Nord (38.50) in which the character played by
Jouvet, recognizing that his hope of escape with Renée to a better life
“over there” is doomed, allows himself to be killed by a rival gangster—
as it happens, amidst the general conviviality of Bastille Day—or the
ending of Les Enfants du paradis (1943) in which Garance leaves Bap-
tiste forever, carried away by the rejoicing carnival throng against which
Baptiste struggles in vain. Similar incidents involving an ironic contrast
between public conviviality and private grief abound in films of the
day. In La Bête humaine (38.12), Lantier’s private tragedy is played out
against a background of suave orchestral music emanating from the
nearby ballroom. In Paradis perdu (39.69) the lovers part and die dur-
ing a grand gala. In La Duchesse de Langeais (1941) Rontriveau despair-
ingly searches for the duchess amidst the Mardi Gras celebrations. In
Au bonheur des dames (1943) the distraught Baudu is crushed beneath
the hooves of a delivery van’s horses while inside the department store
the employees are enjoying their annual ball. Similar ironic scenes
occur in La Petite Lise (30.66), La Chienne (31.31), Macadam (1946),
Lumière d’été (1942), Sortilèges (1944), and many others, both before
and after La Règle du jeu.
It would be futile to try to identify a single origin for such a com-
mon rhetorical figure of the time, which, aside from its general dra-
matic power, often (though not always) served to represent the people
as a source of vitality—the only true source—but at the same time as
individually doomed to a joyless destiny.
 xx | Introduction
2. More specifically, this scene mobilizes a particular form of celebra-
tory occasion—the arrival of the popular hero. This was another
common element of the popular mythology of the thirties and forties.
Standard codings of such an event include darkness, a chaos of half-
glimpsed shapes, a continuous din of excited acclamation, surging
throngs, news-hounds with flashbulbs, the desperate attempts of a
thin line of policemen to contain the exuberance of the people, emo-
tion outflanking law and order, and, quite commonly, a final act of vi-
olence that disrupts the occasion and undercuts the celebration.
In Le Ciel est à vous (1943), an aviatrix returns from setting a long-
distance record: night, a crowd seething across the air field, glimpses of
a shadowy plane, reporters surging forward, police unable to cope. . . .
Yet, largely because of wartime restrictions on the production of mor-
bid and debilitating films, Le Ciel est à vous seems bland alongside La
Règle du jeu, lacking the bitter counterpoise of a private tragedy. In Le
Bonheur (35.12), however, this too is present: Clara Stuart, the popular
film star, arrives at the St. Lazare station; it is night, clouds of smoke,
shafts of light, a surging throng of fans, the flashes of reporters’ cam-
eras; then, in the fictional version at the end, if not in the “real” events
earlier, the sudden glimpse of a gun, a shot, and the film star collapses.
In a slightly different register, the people’s hero in De Mayerling à
Sarajevo (39.21) is the archduke, represented here as someone who has
been able to out-maneuver the politicians and work for the good of
the people. He arrives by train, and the platform is crowded with sup-
porters: shouts, banners, a thin line of police, a shot, the archduke col-
lapses.
The representation of such moments, of course, is not limited to
the films of the day. The arrival of Maurice Chevalier from the U.S. is
reported in fan magazines of the day in similar terms. He is “the object
of indescribable emotion; the crowd massed behind the barricades jos-
tles the forces of order and rushes forward to greet their idol and ex-
press their joy. . . . Emerging finally from this popular delirium,
[Chevalier] is machine-gunned unremittingly by the flashbulbs of the
reporters and cameramen.”10
Louise Brooks’s arrival the previous year to star in Prix de beauté
(30.69) had been reported in similar terms in Ciné Miroir: “On the
platform, crowded with a mass of people, [were] journalists, photogra-
phers, women bearing masses of flowers; if there had been policemen
there, it would have seemed like the arrival of a monarch; feverishly the
army of journalists and photographers charges along the platform,
looking for her face [ . . . ]. Finally, there she is! Flowers rain down,
photographers crowd around, flashbulbs explode.”11 The same maga-
 Introduction | xxi
zine records an earlier visit by Chevalier, this time by ship: “Surging
forward, the reporters crowd onto the monster’s flanks, rush across the
salon and up the stairs, to cluster triumphantly around their prodigal
son: cries of joy, acclamations, unbridled emotion.”12
If I cite these magazines and “real life” popular heroes, it is not at all
with a view to validating La Règle du jeu as an authentic record of con-
temporary existence, but, on the contrary, because these fan magazines
themselves constitute a textual system, closely related to the cinema’s
own textual system, catering to the same audience and the same needs.
The elements of reality recounted time after time in them, such as the
arrival of the popular hero, are as mythic as the elements (often the
same elements) recurring in films of the day. It is self-evident that not
all realities are recounted this insistently in any textual system, but only
those elements in which readers can recognize aspects of their fantasy
life, elements which render their social situation comprehensible
and/or tolerable, and elements which can be used to construct or reaf-
firm their social identity.
3. More specifically still, what we have here is the aviator as popular
hero. At the time, this was something of a commonplace. World War I
had seen the flying ace come to prominence for his reputed courage,
gallantry, and daredevil aerial acrobatics. The extension of this tech-
nology to civil aviation in the twenties had led to a rage for setting
long-distance and speed records across oceans and across deserts. The
importance of aviation as the contemporary archetype of technologi-
cal progress ensured it a place in popular mythology. Writing in 1931
of the scripts commonly received by production companies for evalu-
ation, one commentator singles out those involving “an almost lyrical
taste for science, modern inventions, progress . . . the ship that sets sail,
the airplane that crosses continents, the car that roars past, the loco-
motive that burns up the track—the public recognizes the grandeur of
all that.”13
St. Exupéry had articulated all this most effectively for more sophis-
ticated audiences in Courrier-Sud (1929), Vol de nuit (1931), Terre des
hommes (1939), and Pilote de guerre (1942): the aviator as modern
knight, his horse and armor a plane and a leather flight jacket, pitting
himself against the forces of nature—sandstorm, darkness, distance—
isolated in the heavens high above humanity, but committed to the
task of welding scattered communities into a single human family.
This romantic adventurer, one of the principal figures of the man of
action of the period, promoted not only by St. Exupéry but by Mon-
therlant, Hemingway, and Malraux, had already been called upon by
Renoir in La Grande Illusion (37.54), in which Gabin’s Maréchal is a
 xxii | Introduction
crashed pilot. Of course, Renoir himself was an aviator in World War
I, crashing his plane and trailing a game leg around for the rest of his
life, but this would have no significance for the present purpose had
the aviator not already been established as a mythic figure, embodying
popular fantasies and aspirations.
Like Renoir, but more spectacularly, Roland Toutain, who plays Ju-
rieux, was an aviator noted for his daredevil exploits. The role of Jurieux,
therefore, is picking up on discourses surrounding Toutain in fan mag-
azines of the previous ten years, capitalizing on public knowledge about
his exploits and his reckless personality.
This discourse was woven not only around Toutain, but around any
star whose biography could be stretched to accommodate it—Murat, a
pilot in World War I, André Roanne, “a flying ace,” or Marie Bell, who
owned her own plane and was reported to have made various attempts
at long-distance records.
For the next twenty years, the aviator was to be one of the most
common figures to appear in fan magazines (see chapter 8). In fact, in
representing his popular hero as an aviator Renoir was picking up on a
standard mythic figure of the thirties, who had already figured in such
films as Sous le casque de cuir (31.126); Brevet 95–75 (34.18); Anne-
Marie (36.6), scripted by St. Exupéry; Courrier sud (36.28, from the St.
Exupéry novel); Avion de minuit (38.7); and a host of reverential docu-
mentaries such as Pathé’s Les Routes aériennes (1938) and Les Acrobaties
aériennes. Subsequently, the aviator was to continue his career not only
in Le Ciel est à vous, but in Ceux du ciel (1940), Mermoz (1942), Retour
de flamme (1942), Les Ailes blanches (1942), Aux yeux du souvenir (1948),
Le Paradis des pilotes perdus (1948), Au grand balcon (1949), which like
Courrier-Sud recounts the exploits of the Aéropostale, Mermoz, and
Didier Daurat, and Dakota 308 (1950–51) in which Toutain again
plays the pilot. So we can safely say that from 1930 to 1950 the fig-
ure of the aviator had a widely recognized role in French films. Look-
ing back at the changes wrought to Louwyck’s novel Retour de flamme
between 1929, when it was published, and its screen production in
1942, Garçon notes the new focus on aviation, specifically, as the field
of human endeavor foregrounded by the plot. Totally absent from the
novel, it is the backbone of the 1942 film: “Between these two dates, a
shock was felt that brought aviation to the forefront of contemporary
concerns.”14 By 1950, however, advances in technology had been such
as to deprive the aviator of the mythic status which they had previously
helped to bestow on him. Now, he was no longer an aviator, but simply
a pilot. This “banalization” of the role of aviator is apparent in the way
it becomes available to “ordinary people” such as the housewife in Le
 Introduction | xxiii
Ciel est à vous, or, more relevantly, its immediate predecessor, Sur le
plancher des vaches (39.85), which was contemporary with Renoir’s film
and which cast Noël-Noël as an ordinary Frenchman who is privileged
to gain access to the mythic status of aviator.
4. In terms of technical coding, the oppositions exploited in the opening
scenes of La Règle du jeu are equally recognizable. It would be futile to
detail the innumerable films in which different locales embodying the
contrasting concepts of order and disorder were represented through
the use of such contrasting technical practices. The influence of the
expressionists on any representation of disorder in the early sound cin-
ema has been more than adequately chronicled. The first five years of
French sound film are full of underworld locations inhabited by what
the French called apaches and their molls, attracting post-expressionist
technical practices. The “street,” notorious in German films of the twen-
ties, was almost as common in French films of the early thirties, and its
representation as a place of danger normally involved nighttime light-
ing, with looming shadows and odd camera angles and framings. Sub-
sequently, the development of “poetic realism” focused attention on the
signifying function of sets and lighting as a means to characterize
threat, anguish, and despair.
Pepe le Moko (36.99) provides an example of the use of these already
conventionalized technical practices in its opening sequence. The op-
posing locations of police station and Kasbah attract, respectively, inte-
rior and exterior settings, open and constrained spaces, uniformly lit or
mysterious, involving slow editing and fast, level camera and highly
variable angles. Cumulatively, these contrasted technical practices serve
to construct, respectively, a coherent site inhabited by the forces of law
and order, and a bewildering site into which those forces are unable to
penetrate. The analogy with La Règle du jeu, in which airfield and cha-
teau are characterized, respectively, as places of disorienting confusion
and of utmost clarity by analogous techniques—rapid camera move-
ment contrasting with static observation, shadowy nighttime shapes
contrasting with orderly interiors, a confused babble of voices contrast-
ing with posed speech—is quite striking. Again this is not to say that
Renoir was in any sense imitating Duvivier, which would be to person-
alize and particularize the relationship, but simply to note that it would
have been normal and even conventional to consider opening a film
with contrasting locations which established the conflict to be worked
out in the narrative, and subsequently to mobilize available technical
resources so as to characterize those locations in sharply opposed ways.
5. To return to a more general level, it would not be hard to show that this
particular variant of the popular hero is often represented in the period
 xxiv | Introduction
1929–39 as a doomed figure, coming into conflict with material forces
too powerful to allow his continued existence. In L’Argent (36.8), it is
the power of capital in the form of the banking establishment, rather
than the rules of the social game; but in one way or another the forces
of order, of a ritualized frozen and outdated social structure, or of a
heartless political or economic materialism conspire to undermine the
ideals of the romantic hero or even to bring about his death.
This general formulation of the situation is helpful in reminding
us of the analogies between La Règle du jeu and other contemporary
mythic representations of the outsider figure hounded by an implaca-
ble destiny, played, as often as not, by Jean Gabin. Rather than distort-
ing La Règle du jeu in order to tout it as a prophetic film foreshadowing
World War II (as if a prophet were needed to foresee that in 1939), we
should see it as arising, like many films of the preceding decade, out of
a climate of despair and disillusion generated by the depression and by
the failure of the Popular Front. In killing off Jurieux, Renoir is better
seen as recapitulating a well-known textual strategy involving the death
of romantic ideals than as prophesying some violent future reality.
6. Finally, and still on a very general level, we should not forget that this
initial scene of the film, as Renoir himself later acknowledged, presents
us with an outsider figure irrupting into a rigidly controlled and self-
satisfied order. The role of the outsider, of course, is to show up the
hollowness of the said social order, to expose it to ridicule, to subvert
and disrupt its routines and assumptions. It is not really surprising,
under these circumstances, that he often suffers for his presumption.
But again we can note that this is far from an original narrative open-
ing. Renoir had himself used it a few years earlier in Boudu sauvé des
eaux (32.25, from a popular play by René Fauchois), just as Dostoevsky
had routinely used a “holy fool” or “idiot,” and just as, in the years pre-
ceding La Règle du jeu, such films as La Terre qui meurt (36.127) had
used the marshlander Jean to show up the farmers’ world, and Caval-
cade d’amour (39.11) had used that old favorite, the troupe of traveling
players, to call into question the values of a feudal world.
It is a strategy that has a long history in French literature: Montes-
quieu’s Persians and Voltaire’s extra-galactic creatures had a similar
function, as had the Chinese visitors in Malraux’s La Tentation de l’Oc-
cident (1926) and the multiple sets of outsiders developed by the surre-
alist Morand—Asians visiting London, Americans visiting Spain, and
Turks visiting Norway—not to mention Camus’s L’Étranger (1942).
Always, the outsider’s fundamental function is to denaturalize the ide-
ology of the visited society, to distance the reader or viewer from the
mores of that society, and thus to call into question the rules of the so-
cial game.15
 Introduction | xxv
So, rather than exclaiming over the creative genius displayed by Renoir
in the opening scenes of La Règle du jeu, we might rather admire the way in
which, in the process of composing the film, he and his associates drew on a
number of very general elements, but also on a number of very precise ele-
ments, made available to him at the time by the current repertoires of the
cinema and surrounding media. Our admiration for the film and for the
filmmakers’ achievements will be no less, but our understanding of the
process of filmmaking and of the place of this specific film within the inter-
textual web of thirties cinema will be enormously increased. Moreover, if
we do not proceed thus we are liable to be misled, by the disappearance of
so many films contemporary with this one and by the canonic elevation of
Renoir to the status of artist, into believing that his “genius” and “original-
ity” extended far further than they did. He was, in fact, drawing on the
repertoire provided to him by his own and previous ages, in this and other
media, and was being judged by his audiences according as they recognized
and appreciated what he was doing with that material. Rather than appeal-
ing to transcendent aesthetic criteria considered appropriate to works of art,
this study aims to identify the criteria by which audiences of the day were
judging Renoir and other filmmakers of the decade via generic patterns,
contemporary commentaries, and box-office returns. It is worth noting
that, despite the notorious and perhaps not entirely spontaneous protests of
the audiences of the time, who were reputedly disconcerted by its mixture
of modes, La Règle du jeu was far from unsuccessful by box-office criteria. It
was bidding fair when the war interrupted its exclusive release to rate among
the top third of films in a very successful year. Wherever relevant, the vari-
ous chapters of this study, particularly those in part 1 dealing with the dif-
ferent types of filmic conventions, will return to this film in order to
identify further elements of the contemporary repertoire which Renoir and
his collaborators mobilized when transposing de Musset’s play.
Of course, several other critics have explored a similar line of inquiry
over the last few decades, or have focused on related aspects of the thirties
cinema, not least Ginette Vincendeau, who has traced the Gabin myth
through its main manifestations and has set the cinema of the Popular
Front within a broader context of contemporary production;16 Michèle
Lagny, whose group undertook an extremely ambitious semiotic and struc-
turalist exploration of typical generic patterns in the colonial and war gen-
res, among others;17 and Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, whose study of
the distinctly odd array of gender relations developed in many wartime
films traces the origin of these relations back to the cinema of the thirties.18
Jeancolas took a more institutional approach in 15 ans d’années 30, which is
based, as its title suggests, on the proposition that the cinema of the war
years forms a single block with that of the late thirties, and that the ideol-
ogy of Vichy is already present in the cinema of 1935.19 François Garçon
 xxvi | Introduction
took this observation a stage further in De Blum à Pétain, published the fol-
lowing year, proposing that the films of this period demonstrated French
society of the time to have been, as Marc Ferro notes in the introduction,
“ready, even predisposed in advance, so to speak, to adopt the Vichy pro-
gram.”20 This emphasis on socio-political, or at least ideological, aspects of
late-thirties cinema was at the heart of Geneviève Guillaume-Grimaud’s
work, which was also limited largely to the better-known political films of
the time, despite the fact that these would have been almost unknown to
contemporary audiences.21
It was perhaps the Cahiers de la Cinémathèque de Toulouse that first
began the exploration continued here of the hidden bulk of thirties pro-
duction when it published its 1977 volume Le cinéma du sam’di soir. To this
was soon added Raymond Chirat’s Cinéma des années 30.22 While it would
be impossible (and indeed undesirable) to ignore the achievements of these
critics, in the present study I attempt to limit my focus to the views ex-
pressed by critics and commentators writing at the time the films appeared
on such matters as genre, convention, stereotype, and myth, together with
the views expressed by the spectators of the time on these same matters
through the box office. The study is therefore at once more ambitious, in
trying to take account of the total filmic and critical output of the thirties
free from any subsequent critical interpretation, and also, necessarily (and
as a result of this very ambition), somewhat less profound in its exploration
of any one given set of conventions and stereotypes that it brings to the sur-
face. Inevitably, however, it provides both supplementary evidence relating
to the above-mentioned critics’ commentaries and new evidence for further
commentators to work on.
 Part One

THIRTEEN HUNDRED FILMS

[W]hat is re-presented in representation is not directly reality itself

but other representations. The analysis of images always needs to see
how any given instance is embedded in a network of other instances.
—Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images (1993)

When you come to think about it, everything is an adaptation of

something else. . . . Certain scenarios that are supposedly original in
fact resemble any one of a thousand novels or ten thousand plays.
—Coissac (1929)
 ONE

Identity: Reflecting on the Self

I n Part One of this study, we explore the thirteen hundred films produced
during the thirties in order to see what mythic identities were embodied
in them. The investigation has been organized as follows: the present chap-
ter deals with films which explicitly foreground questions of identity in a
thematic way, while subsequent chapters explore the different sub-types of
identity, beginning with the most broad and communal forms (what it
means to be human, to be French, to be male or female, to be middle class
or working class, to be a parent or a child) and moving toward the more
specific and personal (what it means to be a teenager, to be sensual or self-
disciplined, to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or aviator, to be a success or
failure, to be an intellectual). Inevitably, not all such identities are relevant
to the films of the thirties, and we deal only with the mythic identities
which recur sufficiently often to suggest that they were of importance to the
filmmakers and audiences of the day. Part 1 closes as it opens, with a topic
that provides an overview of these identities: “what it means to be an artist.”
In films which represent the nature of art and the artist, a certain reflexivity
often incites the filmmakers to discuss the function of the films that they are
producing and the relationship that those films establish between them and
their public. In so doing, they occasionally debate, overtly or metaphori-
cally, the role of the cinema as myth, and of the filmmaker as mythmaker.

1.1 TYPICAL IDENTITY NARRATIVES

A number of well-known films of the classic period will immediately
spring to mind as dealing with the question of identity. In Le Grand Jeu
(33.62), the protagonist tries for most of the film to decide whether the
barmaid whom he meets in an Algerian village is the same person as the so-
ciety woman who had been the cause of his disgrace. His ambivalence is
echoed by the spectator’s, since the two characters are played by the same
actress, but another actress’s voice is substituted for hers in one of the roles.
The film also raises the question of identity in relation to all foreign legion
 4 |   
films, in which a common theme is the abandonment of the protagonist’s
old and tainted identity in favor of a new start in a new environment. Who
is Pierre’s friend Nicholas? Does Mme Blanche know? Why is his photo in
the newspaper that Pierre discovers in his belongings? We will never know,
because “he has earned the right to be silent about his past.” In a somewhat
similar way, in Hôtel du Nord (38.50), the character played by Jouvet, in an
attempt to put rival criminals off his track, has totally transformed his per-
sonality, becoming the antithesis of the person they had known. Other
Carné films of the classic period were to explore questions of identity in no
less overt a fashion. In Les Visiteurs du soir, the inhabitants of the chateau
are faced with the task of recognizing as envoys of the devil the all-too-
charming guests whom they take in. Their task is further complicated by
the fact that one of the devil’s ploys has been to send a female envoy in the
guise of a male. In addition, at one point the devil exploits his ability to as-
sume the appearance of one of his less conscientious envoys, in an attempt
(alas, ineffectual) to corrupt the heroine. In Les Enfants du paradis, Jericho
the second-hand-clothes seller, in his role as provider of costumes to the
troupe, is effectively a seller of identities, which makes it all the more ironic
that, much to his outrage, his own identity should be “stolen” by Baptiste
for use in one of the mimes. That mime is watched by Frédéric, now a fa-
mous actor who, like many famous persons, prefers to conceal his identity
when among the public. And, just after the mime, Garance encounters La-
cenaire, who does not at first react to her greeting because he has assumed
so many names and identities over time that he tends to lose track of them.
As he remarks, insolently, to the Count’s supercilious inquiry as to who he
is, asking people “who they are” verges on the impertinent.
In Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (35.27), the evil Batala, who is believed
to have died in a train accident, conceals his survival by appropriating the
clothes and identity of a priest and reappears in a publishing community
that is now thriving as a result of Lange’s exploitation of his fantasized Ari-
zona Jim persona. Even in La Règle du jeu (39.78), the climactic “accident”
has the gamekeeper shooting Jurieux under the impression that he is shoot-
ing Octave, who has just lent Jurieux his coat. And of course, here as else-
where, this standard narrative mechanism of farce—the loan or exchange
of clothes, names, or identities, leading to “comic” incidents involving mis-
taken identity—conceals more serious questions about the nature of the
poachers/rabbits that the gamekeeper is employed to eliminate.
Indeed, wherever one looks in the classic cinema, the question of iden-
tity looms large. Over 25 percent of plot summaries reveal identity to be
central to the films of the thirties, and on closer analysis the proportion in-
creases still further: of those I have viewed, another 30 percent mobilize
one or more of the tropes listed in this chapter. One reason for the theme’s
pervasive influence is that it is closely associated with the notion of “act-
 Identity | 5
ing,” and thus with the notions of roles and of sincerity. Characters who
are accustomed to spinning a line in their role, say, of lover—for instance,
in Gueule d’amour (37.57)—have inordinate difficulty in convincing the
person they love that this time they are being sincere. Identity is also associ-
ated with the theme of free will and determination, as instanced most
memorably in overt Jekyll and Hyde stories such as Le Testament du Dr
Cordelier and many more oblique films involving split identities, or in La
Bête humaine (38.12), in which a genetic fatality, momentarily dominated,
proves in moments of stress impossible to control. In a number of interest-
ing films, the question of identity is foregrounded via some narrative pre-
text such as illness, a road accident, or a wartime injury which results in
memory loss, and a consequent quest to (re)discover who one really is.
If certain common thematic preoccupations tend to foreground ques-
tions of identity and the nature of the self, so do many generic formulas of
the classic period, which was no doubt a principal cause of the popularity
of those genres. Of course, most murder mysteries involve an investigation
to determine the identity of the criminal, which is a far from trivial task
since it involves discerning indexes of concealed guilt that are often ob-
scure, and thus of discriminating between the guilty and the innocent in a
world in which no one is entirely one or the other. The task is rendered ap-
propriately difficult in that criminals tend to hide behind a public facade of
respectability, and police officers tend to operate under cover. As Fleury re-
marks to the girl who is being used as bait to catch the murderer in Pièges
(39.71), she seems to turn up in a number of places in an amazing array of
different roles. Nobody is what he or she seems, but if there is one consis-
tent factor in the genre it is a determined cynicism concerning the appear-
ance of respectability.
Likewise, certain traditional mechanisms of melodrama—babies aban-
doned, stolen, substituted, or swapped at birth, or identical twins, or or-
phans—are also a means of articulating anxieties about identity, since they
involve the relative importance of nature and of nurture in the develop-
ment of the personality. But it is the comic genres that most frequently de-
ploy narrative mechanisms foregrounding identity, relying for their effect
on such procedures as mistaken identities, assumed identities, aristocrats
pretending to be servants or swapping roles with their servants with amor-
ous intent, people with the same name or appearance as one another, and
people who have constructed a false or fictional identity for themselves, per-
haps subsequently being trapped into living up to it. Finally, though they
were never common in the French classic cinema, horror films, with their
literal transfigurations of the self into something other, splitting of the self
into doubles, and selling of the self to the devil, make explicit what is often
only implicit in less generic films. But wherever they occur, be it within
genre conventions or in “authored” films, the thematics of identity call into
 6 |   
question easy assumptions about the self and its relationship to society,
gender, class, and nation, if only often to replace them by equally facile
assumptions.
As a general principle, there are four categories of narrative dealing with
identity:

• Those in which characters actively conceal their identity for interested

motives.
• Those in which characters involuntarily become someone or something
else.
• Those in which characters are mistaken for someone else, thus getting
drawn willy-nilly into a world of confused identities.
• Those in which characters construct fantasized identities, whether for
themselves or as totally independent characters.

In the first category, the protagonist has agency and is thus in control of
the situation to some degree, at least at first. Criminals may adopt the facade
of a respectable identity, a famous personage may travel incognito, two in-
dividuals may exchange identities, or characters may disguise themselves as
someone else, whether by way of masks, disguises, or disciplined transfor-
mations of their personality. The second category—of involuntary trans-
formations—includes the horror transformations into werewolf, vampire,
or other monster, Dr. Jekylls into Mr. Hydes, and the eugenic determina-
tion of a suppressed aspect of one’s personality, but also those involuntary
transformations due to memory loss or other traumatic event.
Of the first two categories, the former (in which X poses as Y) is by far
the more common. Almost as common, however, is the third category, in
which one character is mistaken for another. In the extreme, this type of
story may be linked with the second category, as when doubles or, even
more clearly, identical twins “doom” the protagonist to be forever defend-
ing himself or herself against imputations arising from the other’s activities.
In both cases, the confusion can become a narrative pretext for suggesting
that, in some oblique way, X is not incorrectly mistaken for Y—there are in-
deed important aspects of Y in X. Finally, in the fourth category, blowhards
and braggarts often find themselves trapped into living out the fictional
identities that they have created around themselves, and the compulsive
storyteller may find his or her self diffused among a number of equally fan-
ciful invented selves. The resultant split or multiple personality is some-
times presented as psychotic (not infrequently when it is embodied in Le
Vigan), and at other times as triumphant, as in the case of the chameleon
trickster who cannot be pinned down. Almost as common, especially in
“poetic” films, are fictional entities invented by characters as supports for
their own identities. In the more banal instances, these personae may be in-
 Identity | 7
vented relatives who serve as scapegoats for the protagonist’s escapades, or
they may verge on fairy folk, figuring the protagonist’s fantasized escape
from an intolerable reality. There is always a strong element of wish fulfill-
ment associated with these fictions, especially in the case of fantasized dou-
bles who dare to indulge the desires which the protagonist is physically,
morally, or psychologically unable to explore. At the other end of the spec-
trum, genetic or, more commonly, social determination often takes the
form of a set of mechanical creatures—clockwork dolls, puppets, robotic
chess players, or simply mechanical musical devices—which bear witness to
the relentless fatality impending over the characters.
Before considering any further the thematic implications of these ques-
tions of identity, we should acknowledge that they are articulated by a num-
ber of readily recognizable narrative mechanisms which have inherently
pleasurable effects. This at once links the present topic to a number of oth-
ers, and helps to explain why such topics were commonplace. As a narrative
ploy, for instance, abandoned, stolen, or swapped babies lead to enigma nar-
ratives driven by such questions as “Who am I?” “Is she who she thinks she
is?” “Whose son am I?” “By whom was he abandoned, and why?” Enigma
mechanisms, in turn, lend themselves to a form of detective narrative in
which the protagonist seeks out clues to help solve the mystery. An analo-
gous set of enigmas can be generated by memory loss, as the recovering pa-
tient gradually pieces together clues to his or her earlier existence.
Such narratives normally place the spectators in a position of ignorance
analogous to the protagonist’s and allow them to explore and resolve the
enigma along with the protagonist. Much of the pleasure is generated by
curiosity progressively satisfied and by related identification mechanisms.
Other texts, however, prefer the surprise effect of a series of stunning and
unexpected revelations, more typical of melodrama than of the detective
story: a character discovers to her astonishment, and to ours, that she is the
daughter of a countess stolen at birth, that the man with whom she has
fallen in love is the son of her boss, or is a crook/police officer in disguise, or
that the elderly man whom she is resigned to marrying is in fact the father
of the man she loves. Or we discover that the man with whom the queen
has fallen in love is a revolutionary bent on overthrowing her; or that the
heir to the throne whom the tramp resembles and has replaced has turned
up again, so the tramp can return to his happy-go-lucky life.
Perhaps more common than mechanisms dependent on mutual igno-
rance are those which place the audience in a position of privileged knowl-
edge: we know, though the characters don’t, that she is not a common
working girl but a countess/film-star/rich industrialist’s daughter in dis-
guise, and that he is not a “mere” mechanic but a famous composer/mil-
lionaire/baron, or the czar himself. We know, though she doesn’t, that he is
only pretending to be a crook/happily married man/assassin, because he
 8 |   
knows that’s what turns her on. We know, as the American tourists or slum-
ming aristocrats don’t, that these are only actors putting on a show of being
thugs and whores to give the visitors a thrill. We know, as everyone else
doesn’t, that he is a famous tenor/politician/film star traveling incognito,
that his young wife has gone to the ball not with an elegant male admirer
but “merely” with her female cousin dressed as such, that the wife’s sup-
posed lover is in fact “merely” her father, and the husband’s supposed mis-
tress is “merely” his mother. In particular, we know that these supposed
women are in fact unemployed men dressed as women to get a job in a fe-
male orchestra, or tramps dressed as women to get into the reception for a
free meal, or a young admirer dressed as a maid-in-waiting to get into the
duchess’s bedchamber. It is at least partly from our superior knowledge that
we derive pleasure, as we watch other, less knowledgeable creatures fall into
ridiculous traps of their own devising.
When we share with the protagonist a knowledge about his or her iden-
tity that others refuse to accept, the result is often a drama in which the
spectator’s principal pleasure is in seeing wrongs righted: mistaken for a
criminal because of some fortuitous similarity of name/appearance/voice,
the protagonist finally proves himself innocent; disbelieved and reviled by
the community, the famous tenor finally proves his identity by bursting
into song; having nobly taken the blame for the legitimate son, the adopted
son finally clears his name; having been despised and manipulated, the
humble teacher turns the tables and proves himself an improbable master
of manipulation.
In a more comic mode, the satisfaction of seeing the con man get his
comeuppance produced numerous narratives in which the female secretary
is passed off as the wife, until the wife herself unexpectedly returns; in
which the waiter claims to be a prince, until the prince himself turns up; in
which the nephew pretends to be his aunt, until the real aunt turns up; or
in which the bandit adopts the identity and residence of an upright bour-
geois, until the bourgeois unexpectedly returns home. These pleasures in-
teract with the comic confusions arising from having two husbands, two
wives, two aunts, two bankers, or two princes, whose entrances and exits in-
tersect balletically.
Finally, an analogous form of audience satisfaction arises from seeing
braggarts or hypocrites caught out in their own fantastic claims for them-
selves and having to try to live up to the mythic qualities and roles (aviator,
explorer, racing driver, Tour de France cyclist) which they have appropri-
ated. These satisfactions are compounded when the characters prove grotes-
quely inadequate to the task—the lover passed off as a singing teacher proves
to have a far from exemplary voice, the tramp passed off as an interpreter
and the window-dresser passed off as an American business colleague prove
to have surprising linguistic inadequacies. The pleasure is almost as great
 Identity | 9
when, against all odds, the comic inadequate finally, through the interven-
tion of fate, wins the car race or the Tour de France.
An essential mechanism of these confusions of identity or assumed
identities is that they involve extremes of one sort or another—extremes of
wealth and position are exchanged for or disguised as extremes of poverty,
as are extremes of class (noble and menial) or gender (vamp and soldier).
The tramp has the same name as a millionaire, or is the double of a wealthy
banker, the parish priest finds himself in military uniform, while on a
desert isle the baron and the ship’s stoker exchange roles. Sometimes, these
diametric opposites are exploited purely for comic effect, but often there is
a suggestion that a fundamental identity exists between, for example, the
respectable mother and the chorus girl, or that what the prissy author is
lacking is precisely the common touch which the new persona provides.
But even to describe such narrative mechanisms and the pleasures they offer
is to indicate the wealth of thematic material which they articulate, and
which offers more specific pleasures of a mythic or ideological nature. This
thematic material lies principally in the field of personal identity, social
identity (class, career and wealth, status), and gender, though it also less di-
rectly brings into play racial and national stereotypes. These matters will be
dealt with at greater length in their respective chapters, but recognizing the
way in which they emerge from this central preoccupation with identity
serves as a preliminary indication of their relative importance.

1.2 CLASS AND GENDER IN IDENTITY NARRATIVES

From the fairy tale, many thirties comedies inherit a wish-fulfillment happy
ending whereby the loved one turns out to be someone of great wealth or
high social status, often of the nobility. A rich countess may pretend to be a
working girl (29.1), or a princess may travel incognito as a woman of the
people (30.36); an exiled queen may hide her identity (30.55), a princess
and an officer may pose, respectively, as a manicurist and a grocer’s assis-
tant, or the rich Lord Kingdale may pretend to be the poor Biscotte in order
to accompany pretty Solange on a trip to the Côte d’Azur (31.98; see also
33.20). In all of these, the main function of this plot element is to set up a
final delightful revelation for the protagonist who thought he or she was in
love with a mere commoner. An archetypal example of this narrative pat-
tern is provided by Le Congrès s’amuse (31.38). Christel, the humble work-
ing girl, accidentally becomes involved with a passing celebrity when the
bouquet she hurls is thought to be a bomb. The relationship between the
celebrity and Christel develops rapidly, until to her astonishment she dis-
covers she is involved in a relationship with the czar of Russia himself. This
allows for a standard revelation of male magnificence, which is from time
to time throughout the film contrasted with her waif-like wonderment.
 10 |   
Identities are further “amusingly” confused by the fact that the czar has a
stand-in, also played by Garat, to perform certain duties, and Christel is
represented as not responding to the sexual chemistry of the stand-in in the
least. Moreover, the czar mixes incognito with “the people” in order to con-
duct his affair with Christel. If only they realized who it was (!). Czars in
particular are disposed to dream of wandering freely among their people,
incognito (38.56); sometimes, for a brief moment, a czar can even become
a simple lover out strolling with his girl.
Such poses and disguises suggest a residual fascination with and admira-
tion for the aristocracy; yet this admiration is really common only in the
sentimental comedy of the early thirties, or in the melodrama of substi-
tuted babies of the same years, in which an orphan is revealed—say, by a
birthmark—to be the countess’s daughter (32.50) or the duke’s daughter
(35.84) or the pasha’s son (30s16). Instances from the late thirties are rare,
though in Mayerling (36.77), the man she loves and believes to be a com-
moner turns out to be the archduke, while in Place de la Concorde (38.79)
the chauffeur turns out to be a duke. Another way in which this fascination
with a title is expressed is in narratives in which the poor and insignificant
pose as counts or princes, seeing this as the most likely way to impress—a
waiter passes himself off as a prince (33.69), a street singer as a baron (30.78),
an elevator attendant who has won the lottery as a count (34.30), and a car
saleswoman as a countess, to impress a mechanic (33.139), while a young
Arab girl is passed off as a princess (35.92), and an actor pretends to be a
prince (34.81; cf. 33.30).
The thirties fairytale does not rely solely on aristocratic titles, however;
a millionaire or famous artist (film star, tenor, diva, even composer) will
serve the same function, as will a bishop’s son (30.75). Given the social con-
text, it is not surprising that extremes of wealth should acquire intense sig-
nificance. The fact that counts, countesses, millionaires, and film stars so
often adopt the guise of, or exchange roles with, their secretary or accoun-
tant is no doubt due to the convenient proximity of characters holding
those lowly positions, but it would also seem that the mythic roles of mil-
lionaire, film star, or famous singer were felt to be so powerful that no one
could be expected to evaluate objectively the “person” behind them, so, as
in legend, such mythic creatures tactfully veil their divinity behind a more
human role before approaching any targeted mortal. In effect, they feel the
need to test the sincerity of a potential relationship, given the near certainty
that it would otherwise be tainted by the targeted mortal’s desire for wealth
or fame. Thus, a young millionaire hides behind a job as a barman (33.106)
or swaps identities with his secretary to test the sincerity of the woman he
has met (31.107), a millionaire and his servant involuntarily exchange roles
(34.22), a rich American poses as his own secretary (35.60), a wealthy man
takes the position of secretary to the woman he feels he could love (31.94),
 Identity | 11
the man loved by the blind shepherdess turns out to be an American mil-
lionaire travelling incognito (37.92), and, in a slightly different register, a
wealthy woman hides her wealth and becomes governess to the girl whom
she feels needs looking after (37.66). From 1933 on, musicians adopt the
same practice—a famous composer gets the job of servant to the woman he
loves (33.126), a famous singer disguises himself as a gondolier (33.28),
while others find true love by posing as humble working men (34.67;
38.58). Once assured of the sincerity of their lowborn or poor lover’s affec-
tion, of course, they can cast off their disguise and complacently reveal to
their dazzled partner their true identity.
Narratives such as these, which allow the revelation of great wealth or
renown as a reward for true love, are paralleled by fantasies in which hum-
ble people are taken or pass, at least momentarily, for people of transcen-
dent wealth or artistic ability. A clerk who has been unable to bank the day’s
takings (33.145) or who is the victim of a practical joke published in a
newspaper (34.27) is taken for a millionaire; a taxi driver’s daughter is mis-
taken for a millionaire’s daughter (36.95); two fishermen pass themselves
off as wealthy businessmen to win their girls, who in turn are pretending to
be film stars (38.109). In some of these narratives, there is an implied cri-
tique of the wealth and status so ardently sought or so haphazardly ac-
quired, but even narratives which seem to decry these mythic roles are often
pandering to them obliquely: though a millionaire, he retains his humble
day job as a waiter while living it up in the evening (30.65), or pretends to
be his own secretary, to get a bit of peace and quiet (31.87), or adopts the
identity of his accountant to go on a spree (36.137; 38.67). Renowned
artists are likewise given to renouncing the hurly-burly of publicity and
fame for “the simple life,” perhaps leaving a double behind to take care of
the shop (35.58).
It is noticeable that the role of millionaire in these fairytale scenarios is
curiously devoid of commercial context. There is seldom any sense that the
wealthy have actually earned their wealth by financial or industrial activi-
ties. Indeed, as we will see, involvement in commercial activity was more
likely, in the thirties, to have extremely negative connotations, with bankers,
financiers, and industrialists suffering the most consistently unfavorable
representation. In this sense, the millionaire of early-thirties fairytales is
close to the aristocrat in that he or she inherits a largely decontextualized
and dehistoricized status. The same is true of “the boss” with whom the sec-
retary or typist, in true “Mills and Boon” fashion, establishes an unwitting
relationship while on holiday (31.42; 31.47).
There are, however, several recurrent narrative patterns which more se-
riously call into question the fairytale status of millionaires and princes.
Frequently, having tasted the suspect pleasures of such positions due to a
confusion of identity, the protagonist will ultimately reject them, returning
 12 |   
to the simple life of ordinary working-class existence, or perhaps to that
other mythic extreme of thirties existence, the open road. The elevator at-
tendant who has won the lottery takes great pleasure in showing up the
hypocrisy of the wealthy, to whom he has hitherto been invisible but who
now court him assiduously; ultimately, though, sick of their unctuous
ways, he opts to marry the humble seamstress who has been true to him
(34.30). In Renoir’s film, if not in the original play (32.25), Boudu, having
tasted the delights of middle-class existence, opts to abandon it for a life on
the open road, just as Charlot had done innumerable times in the twenties.
In Rothchild (33.113), a tramp of that name exploits the fact in order to
taste the life of high finance, only to return to the road at the end. Perhaps
the most entertaining version of this theme is Un soir de bombe (35.117), in
which a happy-go-lucky tramp, rendered amnesiac by an accident, is mis-
taken for a banker who has decamped under threat of blackmail. The
tramp is installed in the banker’s residence and proceeds to live it up for
once in his life. He and his mate soon get bored with this existence, how-
ever, and hit the road again—though not before seeing the banker con-
signed to a lunatic asylum. Money and propriety combine to make life
intolerable for the free spirits of the thirties—all you need is the open road
and a good mate to stand by you. À nous la liberté (31.1) proposed a similar
message very early in the decade.
The stand-in narrative, in which a commoner replaces a prominent
public figure, is also often mobilized to call into question the qualities of
the original incumbent, since the stand-in, with no training and often drawn
from humble social position solely on the basis of resemblance, proves infi-
nitely more competent as president, banker, government negotiator, or
prince (34.97), often taking over the incumbent’s wife or mistress as well as
his position. A music-hall singer doubles for a banker, fooling the minister
and even the banker’s own wife (35.48); a street cleaner doubles for the
president, to the people’s evident satisfaction (34.77); a fairground girl
doubles for the baroness, to the baron’s evident pleasure (34.4). The num-
ber of such films appearing in 1934 is astonishing, and all that appear be-
fore or after are less striking. Many derive from the “understudy” narrative,
in which the sickness of a leading actor, or singer, or jockey (etc.) provides
the opportunity for the stand-in to succeed (e.g., 36.75; 30.67), or, less com-
monly, and later in the decade, to fail dismally, as in La Fin du jour (38.37).
For instance, an actress abandons her role and is replaced by her stand-in
both in the play and in her husband’s affections (35.36). The classic in-
stance is Le Roi bis (32.123), in which the king doesn’t feel up to his public
role and hires a detective to find a double to substitute for him. The hum-
ble street-seller who moves in becomes the lover of the queen, whom he also,
incidentally, imagines to be a double. Six years later, yet another humble
Parisian shop owner stands in for a debauched prince (38.110). It is worth
 Identity | 13
mentioning for their relevance to this theme the two “role reversal” films of
the thirties, in which a person in authority and a menial wrecked on a des-
ert island (33.29) or conscripted into the military (35.29) find their hierar-
chical status reversed. In the first of these, Charlemagne, a stoker orders a
baron around until they are rescued and traditional patterns re-established.
The implication that working-class people had superior practical survival
skills in demanding situations proved immensely popular with the public of
1933, especially outside Paris.
The picture of authority as impotent, debauched, and incompetent
which emerges from such identity narratives is reinforced by the parallel set
of stand-in narratives which show it as corrupt and self-interested, seeking
to avoid responsibility and to shift the blame for its misdemeanors onto the
poor and needy. Such narratives are common from 1932 to 1937. All in-
volve doubles who agree to take the blame for a rich and powerful man’s
incompetence or criminality. A stepson takes the blame for the real son’s
botched medical work (32.27); a worker agrees to take the blame for a rich
man in exchange for his son’s education (34.78); a tailor substitutes for a
banker when gangsters threaten (35.49); a down-and-outer is induced to
double for another scheming banker (37.35); a fashion designer employs a
down-and-outer to do time for him (36.98); another down-and-outer is in-
duced to take responsibility for an insurance fraud (36.76).
These latter narratives introduce the scheming upper-middle class,
which was to play such a large part in thirties cinema. Many films imply an
identity between successful businessman and crook. This may be done
jovially, as in À nous la liberté (31.1); with a curious ambivalence, as in Ces
messieurs de la Santé (33.23); or, with different connotations, melodramati-
cally, as in Les Misérables (33.92). In all of these, escaped or released crimi-
nals become rich and powerful figures in the community. An equally
fascinating film, Carrefour (38.16), based on amnesia, has the identity of a
respectable bourgeois called into question insofar as he may well be a for-
mer crook who has unwittingly assumed the personality of a dead hero.
Throughout the film, an ambivalence reigns in which respectable present
and possible criminal past are intertwined. A more explicit representation
of this theme was to occur in a very common narrative pattern of the for-
ties, which sees public benefactors gradually stripped of their facade of re-
spectability, to be revealed as the head of criminal gangs. L’Étrange Mon-
sieur Victor (37.40) is probably the best-known precursor of these.
A variant which glamorized the criminal was the gentleman-crook nar-
rative, in which a suave and elegant man, often a count or a baron (32.5;
32.97), sometimes a (self-styled) English lord (30.34), turns out to be the
notorious master thief. Of the many elusive master criminals of 1932 who
could pose as high-society gentlemen, Fantômas is no doubt the best
known (32.59; cf 32.7). Le Roman d’un tricheur (36.115) contains an echo
 14 |   
of this narrative pattern. It was so common that lovers often posed as gen-
tleman thieves, or as equally romantic apaches, in order to seduce the
women they loved (30.39; 31.86; 39.75). In Jim la Houlette (35.62), one of
the multiple identity changes involves the novelist’s male secretary posing as
the notorious bandit Jim la Houlette in order to impress the novelist’s wife.
An odd inversion of this theme has Garat as a gentleman thief abandoning
his criminal activities and posing as a respectable wealthy man in order to
seduce the woman he loves, accepting that his fantasy will end when his
money runs out. The surviving copy has no trace of the up-beat ending
outlined by Chirat: the girl seems to have committed suicide when he aban-
dons her, and we leave Garat in the rain, plodding glumly through a bleak
Paris night (38.2).
It was particularly common for the respectable facade and double iden-
tity concealing criminality to involve legal personnel, who are hiding their
nefarious behavior behind the uniform of a police inspector or the robes
of a lawyer. Le Procureur Hallers (30.70) introduced this theme into the
French sound cinema, presenting a lawyer by day, a thief and pimp by
night, while others reveal the criminal to be posing as a police inspector
(30.59; 39.88) or a private detective (37.11). One of the many delights of
Drôle de drame is the way in which it plays with this established narrative
pattern (37.37). Allied to such stories are those in which judges rant at the
misdemeanors of the accused, only to discover that the latter are closer to
them than they could ever have imagined—a brother, perhaps (34.14), or a
son (36.27). It is, however, feminism, rather than the law, that is being
mocked when the aspiring female lawyer’s proposed husband, whom she
has rejected without ever meeting him, poses as a criminal in order to ac-
quire her as his defense lawyer and gradually initiates her into the supposed
ways of the underworld. Her chambers are rapidly transformed into a den
of vice, and she herself into a pseudo-apache in sweater and cloth cap, with
a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth (36.136). The effect,
nevertheless, is to poke sly fun at the law as an institution.
The critique of class often took the form of the “borrowed plumage”
narrative, in which it becomes apparent that all that separates class from
class is access to appropriate clothes (or cars, or houses, etc.). Once a worker
or tramp is appropriately clothed, he proves perfectly capable of carrying
off the role of businessman, banker, or noble with at least the same aplomb
and competence as a “true” member of the superior class. For this reason,
several films revolve around clothes shops. In Chacun sa chance (30.18),
Gabin, as a shop clerk, has the task of dressing the dummies in the shop
window. When an eccentric baron inadvertently borrows some of his
clothes, he in turn borrows an elegant suit off the dummy and leaves his
own on it, much to the fastidious shop owner’s horror. Gabin’s love interest,
a sweet-seller at the theater, is given the star’s elegant attire, so that when she
 Identity | 15
and Gabin first meet both are dressed in borrowed finery, with inevitable
misunderstandings about their relative statuses in society. Indeed, much of
the narrative depends on exchanges of clothing between rich and poor,
which result in the former being jailed as criminals and the latter being
welcomed into high-society venues and given limitless credit. Le Million
(31.84) presents a second-hand-clothes dealer, Le père la Tulipe, whose
buying and selling of old clothes for actors foreshadows that of Jericho in
Les Enfants du paradis, and underlines the relevance of clothes to the “per-
formance” of an identity.
The assumption or loss of any formally recognized uniform, such as a
military uniform in innumerable vaudevilles, or a clergyman’s clothes,
proved a popular narrative mechanism (32.30). In 1935, both Jules Berry
in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and Fernandel in Jim la Houlette assume the
outfit of a sleeping or dead clergyman to escape arrest, the latter being
trapped into having to fulfill his clerical duties in a new parish, with easily
imaginable consequences, while the former acquires an appropriately mis-
leading disguise for a seedy businessman on the run (35.27; 35.62). In fact,
of course, the effect here is to extend the connotations of disrepute and
complicity in right-wing corruption to the general category of clergymen.
The same could be said of Sans famille (34.92), in which a pickpocket dis-
guises himself as a clergyman to win the trust of some simple folk. As he
himself says, somewhat wryly, “If you can’t trust a clergyman, who can you
trust?” The general message of such films was that all such costumes are
part of a gigantic confidence trick: only their clothes distinguish the lunatic
or the escaped criminal from the priest, the count, or the financier. As the
baron says to Pepel in Les Bas-Fonds (36.15), voicing a commonplace of the
period, “Life is one long series of costume changes.” Identities are roles and,
given the appropriate accessories, anyone can act the role of prince or of
clergyman—often more competently than the prince or the clergyman can.
The lowly can also be trained in the roles of the respectable and the
noble of the land. It is not just costume, but manner, accent, taste, and so-
cial convention that make the difference between the privileged and the
underprivileged, and these, too, can be assumed—indeed, are nothing but
learned behaviors. Hence the importance of Pygmalion stories, which see
an urchin or waif “trained” in the ways of respectability so effectively that
her new identity deceives even the most refined arbiters of taste. In Cette
vieille canaille (33.26), the elderly doctor has the fairground waif whom he
has rescued and to whom he has become ambivalently attached trained in
the ways of his own world, notably through history lessons and the acqui-
sition of appropriate cultural knowledge. In La Rosière des halles (35.98),
the author hastily trains the market girl in the ways of elegant society in
order to take her out to a high-class restaurant, though in this case much of
the fun is derived from the catastrophic failure of his overly hasty training.
 16 |   
Perhaps the nicest example of the Pygmalion theme has Aouina, a happy-
go-lucky, tomboyish waif from North Africa, “civilized,” again by an au-
thor, into the elegant Princesse Tam-Tam. Aside from much false laughter,
this involves not just clothes and manicures but music lessons, dancing
lessons, and the acquisition of academic knowledge such as mathematics.
Essentially, however, in this film civilization itself is defined as the ability to
deceive and lie with conviction, and Aouina remains savage at heart (i.e.,
sincere, genuine), as she demonstrates by her ultimate return to her hum-
ble origins (35.92).
In terms of class, the other main direction toward which identity narra-
tives point is the shame involved in occupying humble positions—a shame
which drives people to conceal large parts of their lives from those around
them, and even from their own families. The best known of these “shame”
narratives is Le Chasseur de chez Maxim’s, twice filmed in the thirties (32.32;
39.13). In some respects, it resembles the famous German shame narrative
of the twenties, Die Letzte Mann, if only because of the porter’s role, and it
recurs, thinly disguised, in 1935 (35.127). More understandably, several
narratives depend for their effect on the desire of protagonists to conceal
their “shameful” profession of good-time girl (38.30; 38.69) or dancer
(37.25)
A large proportion of the films mentioned so far involve instances of
adultery, whether real, planned, or suspected. In fact, the most common
narrative motivation for concealing identity was to suppress knowledge of
adultery, to attempt to put oneself in a position to commit adultery, or to
test the validity of one’s suspicions of adultery. Alongside adultery, there is
a recurrent preoccupation with the legitimacy of offspring. Both children
who have never known, or who have come to doubt, the identity of their
fathers and exchanged, abandoned, or substituted babies are incited to ask
the question “Who am I?” “What are my origins?” “Where do I belong?” In
this sense, the family—particularly the middle-class family—is centrally
concerned in a high proportion of identity narratives, and the health of
that institution is significantly called into question. Perhaps the most as-
tonishing instance of this is to be seen in the blithely unselfconscious
racism of Le Blanc et le noir (30.13), in which a respectable middle-class
woman’s black newborn baby, conceived during a petulant fling on a par-
ticularly dark night, is (naturally) hidden from her by those attending the
birth and swapped for a baby of a more acceptable color (!).
A number of identity narratives hover between the public and the pri-
vate spheres in that they involve respectable, often married, men or women
who, tempted (perhaps extramaritally) come to lead a double life. In public
terms, such narratives present the two lives as, respectively, family life and
adulterous life, while in private terms individuals are represented as having
a double personality, as being torn between the superego and the id. In this,
 Identity | 17
they are variants of the lawyer-criminal, the gentleman-thief, or indeed the
queen who falls for a revolutionary, insofar as they all involve a tension be-
tween two personae, constituted, respectively, of self-discipline and self-
indulgence, observance and rejection of prevailing social constraints and
conventions. Often the working class is figured as the id. It and the crimi-
nal class are seen as classic sites of unconstrained morals, where there is free-
dom to transgress social conventions, and a number of thirties films tell of
lawyers or other professionals transformed and revitalized by contact with
the amoral life-force of the working class (e.g., 39.17). In effect, they are
discovering a hitherto unsuspected aspect (working class, underworld) of
their own personality. In other films, people bound by social convention
(middle class, wives and husbands, members of the aristocracy) “become”
members of the working class in order to experience genuine emotion, gen-
uine passion (31.7; 31.108; 31.124). But quite often the split personality is
overtly Freudian, as when the wife turns out to be a (former) midinette or
good-time girl (32.47) whom the husband had perhaps had an affair with
years earlier in Indochina (38.69), or when the wife is torn between re-
spectability and passion (32.85) and leaves her husband for three days of
passion with a scoundrel (32.29), or doubles as a tart to deceive her hus-
band (33.124), or transforms herself into a seductive coquette to retain her
husband (31.91).
The classic instance of this double identity is Sans lendemain (39.80),
in which Babs, the good-time girl and queen of La Sirène nightclub, strug-
gles to reassume her motherly identity as Eveline because her son has re-
turned unexpectedly from his boarding school and a former admirer has
turned up who is not aware of her descent in the world. She hastily con-
structs a semblance of respectability around herself, using borrowed money,
but is worried by the credibility of her act—is it convincing? Indeed, which
is the real her? Can Babs ever really become Eveline again? Finally, on the
point of success, she opts out, preferring suicide to living a lie for the rest of
her life. Yet, as so often in such stories, this film suggests that women are in-
herently duplicitous—at once Eveline and Babs, mother and whore. A sim-
ilar message emerges from a similar film, Le Drame de Shanghai (38.27), in
which Kay is at once a singer trapped in a sleazy Shanghai nightclub exis-
tence and the mother of a young daughter, Vera, who returns to Shanghai
from boarding school. The interconnection between the two roles is ex-
plicit: Kay has accepted the former in order to be able appropriately to ful-
fill the duties of the latter. Shucking off her persona as queen of Shanghai’s
nightlife, she attempts to reassume a credible persona as respectable parent,
but her past catches up with her and she is murdered saving Vera. As in the
previous film, the sensual, degraded nightclub self dooms any long-term
maternal relationship. In a sense, Kay’s former lover, played by Jouvet, is in
the same boat—once a sensitive, caring person, he too has been toughened
 18 |   
by life, and an analogous double self is attributed to him. As is usual in such
cases, however, it is violence, rather than sexuality, which defines the second
male self, and it is, moreover, not his drama which is central to the narra-
tive. Some texts do present a man’s duality as central, as when a prudish
man inherits a bawdy club and discovers a repressed part of his own per-
sonality (33.64), but when this happens there is none of the distraught in-
tensity that accrues around the female version of such dramas.
In the instances listed above, the Freudian split is figured as two sides of
a single personality, but often, without any change in significance, it is fig-
ured in two different characters. For instance, a husband may find himself
faced with a choice between his wife and a seductive woman of loose morals
whom he meets on a train (36.100); or between two Widow Martins, one
who keeps a respectable boarding house, the other a brothel (32.21); or be-
tween two identical women, one a society woman, the other a good-time
girl, who may just conceivably be the same person (33.62). Equally, he may
meet a woman strangely resembling his wife, who turns out to be her ille-
gitimate half-sister (35.102). A prudish man may have a twin brother who
is a scoundrel and whom he has to try to rehabilitate (39.15), or may invent
a fictional twin brother who does all the things he himself dare not do
(33.128; 38.85). In many cases of this sort, the two aspects of the single
human personality are allocated to twins or doubles, or to legitimate and il-
legitimate siblings, or are represented in parallel or sequential lives—but al-
ways with the same opposed characteristics, equivalent either to the ego and
the id or to the superego and the id.
It was normal to raise such fraught topics within the genre of the farce,
where nobody, surely, could take it seriously. There is a certain appropri-
ateness in this stratagem, given Freud’s discussion of the connection be-
tween jokes and the unconscious. A splendid example, which incorporates
both “doubled” personalities and a sequential transformation, is Drôle de
drame (37.37). Molyneux, the respected and highly proper author, is also
Félix Chapelle, the writer of gruesome detective stories that sell like hot-
cakes. His cousin the bishop also leads a double life—the height of propri-
ety by day but demonstrating regrettably lascivious tastes by night. Both
run into trouble trying to keep the two parts of their lives separate. As
Molyneux says, “A double life is no life at all.” Suspected of murdering his
wife, Molyneux is forced to flee, and, as Félix Chapelle, he is commissioned
to write sensational articles on himself. Meanwhile, the bishop, in an effort
to recover incriminating evidence, disguises himself in a fetching kilt. The
faint flavor of transvestism introduced by this disguise is underlined by po-
licemen dressing up as old ladies in order to trap Kramp, the dreaded
butcher of butchers. Kramp has been transformed into a criminal by Félix’s
gruesome genre tales, and is out to get revenge. In the course of his quest,
Kramp meets up unawares with Mme Molyneux and falls desperately in
 Identity | 19
love with her. Faced with his (naked) ardor, she is spontaneously trans-
formed from a harridan who detests soppy things such as flowers into a
girlish creature known as “Daisy.” This hilarious series of identity switches
and disguises, then, can all be traced back to the contrast between re-
spectable facades (as wife, bishop, policeman, moralistic author, etc.) and a
fascination with the forbidden (transvestism and violence, music hall and
murder).
Roughly the same set of Freudian oppositions, proposed in the same
farcical tone, structures Mam’zelle Nitouche (31.77), in which the two prin-
cipal sets are a convent and a music hall. Célestin, the convent organist, is
also Floridor, a closet music-hall composer, and one of his female choristers
becomes a covert star in his show, allowing for much climbing over convent
walls and hasty switches between salacious and religious singing, saucy ac-
tress and convent girl. The lieutenant, who is engaged to Denise, the con-
vent girl (whom for narrative convenience he has not yet met), falls for the
saucy actress at the music hall and breaks off his engagement to her other
persona. Incidentally, in the tradition of the military vaudeville to which
this film is distantly related, Denise is “rescued” disguised as a soldier, thus
once again introducing transvestism into the Freudian array of themes.
Related to these Freudian narratives, and straddling the same boundary
between the public and the private, are those narratives involving a sexual
relationship which turns out, once the identities of those involved are clar-
ified, to have incestuous implications. These will be dealt with more fully in
chapter 4, but they can be foreshadowed here since the narratives often de-
pend on people having or assuming false identities. In relatively few cases
are incestuous relationships dealt with openly. It is not often in these films
(though it occasionally is elsewhere, as in Le Simoun [33.116]) a question of
actual father-daughter, mother-son, or brother-sister relationships, but
rather of quasi-incestuous relationships between foster parents or foster sis-
ters, people who are believed (wrongly) to be sisters or fathers, or lovers
whom one is obliged by circumstances to pass off as siblings or offspring.
Thus a count passes off the woman found in his bed as his sister (32.90); a
sister falls for the man she believes (wrongly) to be her brother (32.138); or
a fan passes herself off as a male star’s foster sister in order to gain access to
her idol (39.59). To con beauty-parlor customers, a girl pretends to be her
lover’s mother, wonderfully rejuvenated (32.126); caught in her rooms with
a young student, a woman passes him off as the son she had at the age of
twelve (!) (32.63). In a classic instance, the Oedipal young pilot finds to his
horror that he has become the lover of his fatherly boss’s wife (35.42).
Again, a husband suspects an old banker of being his wife’s lover, but the
man she has been visiting turns out “merely” to be her father (33.79); a man
about to marry is informed (wrongly, as it turns out) by the bride-to-be’s
mother that his fiancée is his own daughter (34.29); a rich banker pretends
 20 |   
to be his own accountant, so has to pass his mistress off as his daughter
(38.67); or a woman learns that the man she loves is her own foster father
(39.92). Clearly, all such “pretext” narratives invoke mistaken identity in
order to talk of prohibited forms of sexuality. They are extremely common
throughout the decade.
An analogous fantasy involves women who marry for a second time,
only to find that their first husband, whom they believed dead, is, in fact,
still alive. Several films explore the protocols appropriate to such a biga-
mous situation: where lies the fault, and who should give ground in the am-
bivalent set of relationships consequent on the discovery? Some represent
the first husband as a sinister villain (30.62), while others blame the woman
for an over-hasty remarriage; in the extreme, the first husband triumphs
and manipulates the situation to his advantage (33s3). What they all have
in common is that they serve as pretexts for fantasized bigamy, in which the
legal husband or wife is conveniently, if temporarily, sidelined.
A similar point can be made about the numerous transgender roles that
find characters “obliged,” by circumstances beyond their control, to conceal
their identity beneath the clothing and appearance of the opposite sex.
These roles are particularly common in the comedies of the early thirties,
especially in military vaudevilles, in which women are frequently intro-
duced into the barracks in military uniform (31.77; 33.55; 33.145; 36.132),
or soldiers are dressed as women (38.62) or blunder around a girls’ school
pretending to be schoolmistresses (37.116). A fascination with the opposi-
tion between femaleness and the more aggressive aspects of maleness, as ev-
idenced in the soldier, is paralleled with a delight in undermining the latter.
At least two films take the woman’s potential military role more seriously,
having her join the legion as a Zouave in order to follow her love (34.98), or
in order to fight alongside her fellowmen on the barricades (33.92). More
simply farcical are those tales in which young men dress up as sexless old
women. The film based on Charley’s Aunt is the classic case (35.76), but not
the only one (33.124). Indeed, Un de la Canebière (38.109) reproduces a
number of the plot elements of La Marraine de Charley, including the
wealthy aunt impersonated to lend credibility to a financial scam. The re-
maining half-dozen cases include two instances in which a pair of tramps/
unemployed musicians dress as female musicians to get into a reception or
into a female orchestra (31.79; 35.45), and the story of a granddaughter
who, by mistake, sends her grandfather a photo of herself dressed as a man
and is obliged thereafter to live out the male role in his company (32.61).
While the tone of these films is generally comic, there are well-known mo-
ments in L’Atalante (34.9) when Père Jules models the dress for his boss’s
wife, and in La Grande Illusion (37.54), during the amateur theatricals in
the prison camp, in which the transvestite and gay implications of such
gender changes are foregrounded with disconcerting power.
 Identity | 21
The nearest these films come to dealing explicitly with same-sex rela-
tionships is when the woman goes to the ball with her female cousin
dressed as a man (31.65), and presumably in Sapho (34.93), which I have
not been able to view or to find an adequately detailed account of. In the
case of Un de la Canebière (38.109), a simple “pretext” narrative has Mar-
got making amorous advances to Aunt Clarisse, knowing full well that
Pénible has dressed as Aunt Clarisse to con his creditors, only to discover
that this is the real Aunt Clarisse (who is, of course, suitably outraged by
Margot’s advances). A mannishly dressed woman—a countess dressed for
the hunt—can be sufficiently credible as a potential lover that the boy-
friend bursts into his girlfriend’s room in a jealous rage (31.135). The most
complicated instance of cross-gender impersonation that I know of comes
from a plot summary for an apparently vanished film in which a female im-
personator falls ill, whereupon an unemployed woman takes over his act,
pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman (33.60). Then there is
the traditional tale of the young man who dresses as a woman to be admit-
ted to the duchess’s retinue. The new “serving girl” finds peculiar favor with
the duchess (32.65). The frequency of such narratives, the explicit nature
of certain titles (La Femme en homme, Sapho, Georges et Georgette), and the
lengths to which the films go to inject new variations into a widely recog-
nized set of conventions all attest to the intense fascination exercised by the
idea of transvestism.
At the level of the individual personality, certain character types are the
focus of attention in identity narratives. One is the chameleon trickster fig-
ure whose fictions about himself, constantly changing, weave a web of de-
ceit which he is unable to control. While there are not many instances of
this figure, of which the best-known example is Valentine in Le Jour se lève
(39.48), they embody a broader distrust of the intellectual life, of people
who are too clever by half and cannot be trusted. A woman plays an analo-
gous role in Naples au baiser du feu (37.80), while the criminal professor in
Alibi (37.6) who is a master of many disguises is recognizably related. From
1937 on, such trickster figures come to the fore in opposition to the simple
worker, but also in parallel to the rise of spy thrillers and the fear of infil-
trators. With such characters, one never knows where one stands.
Occasionally, the worker, in his quick-witted persona from the early
thirties, could himself be the trickster figure. This was the case with Le Roi
des resquilleurs (30.78), the plot of which is worth summarizing briefly be-
cause of its relevance and because of the immense popularity of the film. Its
basic premise is the widely used ploy, described earlier, of a street singer
who passes himself off as a baron in order to impress a pretty girl. The need
to squire her to various elegant events while avoiding the outlay of nonexis-
tent cash constitutes an on-going narrative joke. His trickster characteristics
are further in demand when he needs to get into the beauty parlor where
 22 |   
she works. He pretends to be a plumber, bursting in on various women in a
state of undress, then has to disguise himself in discarded female clothes, at
the risk of being subjected to breast enhancement and depilatory treat-
ment. His final rendezvous with her is at a rugby match, which he can enter
only by dressing in team colors. Taken for the new team member, he rather
lets the side down until an accidental injection of horse-dope triggers fan-
tastic feats of physical prowess, and he is carried off by his teammates in tri-
umph, having been instrumental in his side winning the game. Multiple
transformations of persona have allowed him to enter elite circles and to
cross both class and gender barriers, finally winning the day and, if not the
girl, then at least her stepmother.
In his rugby exploits he is not unlike the many blowhards and braggarts
who claim attributes that they do not have and are caught in the web of
their own deceit. Such characters are interesting as much for the mythic na-
ture of the attributes to which they (falsely) lay claim—aviator (31.13),
race-car driver (32s2; 34.102), incomparable athlete (32.11), Tour de France
cyclist (33.108), and African explorer (34.99). A solitary example later in
the decade has Fernandel trapped by his big mouth into the role of adven-
turer and record-breaker, trying to circle the globe in one hundred days with
no more than five sous to sustain him (39.16). Like the King of Con Men
in his rugby match, Fernandel’s character accidentally wins his race, just as
the feckless fool trapped in a knight’s armor, careering all over the field on
his drugged horse, accidentally wins the tournament (35.1). The mythic
roles to which these characters aspire join the aristocrat, the millionaire, the
artist, the clown, the crook or convict, the good-time girl, and the tramp as
emblematic figures of the thirties, in terms of which the class and family
dramas so central to the decade were played out.

1.3 IDENTITY AND DESTINY

A final theme raised by the identity narrative under consideration is that of
free will: of what importance is human intentionality, and to what extent
are human agents masters of their own destiny? Of course, in all narratives
there are vast gaps in logic which speak of determinants far more powerful
than the apparently motivated decisions made by the characters, but here
we are interested only in certain specific ways in which such forces manifest
themselves in identity narratives. On the one hand, a number of films
speak of the power of the human agent totally to transform his or her per-
sonality, at will. Puny intellectuals transform themselves from timid teach-
ers into something—anything—more admirable (31.14; 32.134; 33.109;
36.129), men or women in love totally transform themselves to become the
object of desire of their loved one, or crooks totally transform their person-
ality so as to be unrecognizable to police or to vengeful rivals. In the ex-
 Identity | 23
treme, Judge Hallers defeats “the criminal in himself ” apparently by sheer
force of will (30.70), as if Dr. Jekyll had defeated Mr. Hyde.
On the other hand, people are commonly portrayed as trapped in a life
which they have not chosen and cannot escape. Many identity films at least
imply one or the other of these, and some of them introduce episodes
which make it explicit. On occasion, destiny is even embodied in a narra-
tive agent whose role is to monitor or hunt down the protagonist, ulti-
mately intervening to ensure the predestined end. In Les Misérables (33.92),
Javert can be read as an embodiment of Jean Valjean’s criminal past, hound-
ing him implacably until he has expiated his guilt, and so, of course, can
the judge in Crime et châtiment (35.28). Indeed, more generally, this is one
aspect of the crime genre that made it so popular both with the general
public and with ambitious authors. A more portentous death figure hounds
the child in Le Roi des aulnes (30.77), finally claiming him as his own, while
the cynical Lord Oswill provides a distinctly more grotesque but no less ef-
fective counterpart in L’Homme à l’Hispano (33.65), and for much of La
Bandera (35.6) the bounty-hunter played by Le Vigan fulfills a similar func-
tion. These are as nothing, however, compared to the embodiments of
death and destiny that were subsequently to frequent the films of the occu-
pation.
Destiny is not always represented in such negative terms, however. An
obscure and generally benevolent destiny, for instance, may be shown as
guiding the affections of lovers who, having rejected out of hand the mar-
riage proposed by their parents, fall for a stranger who turns out to be none
other than the intended bride or husband (31.77; 33.93; 36.136; 37.73;
38.1). Indeed, nearly all of the sixty-nine films of the decade in which peo-
ple discover to their astonishment, that X is none other than Y speak of
such a destiny, conceived as a sort of chess player meticulously moving the
pieces on the narrative board to bring about, through apparent coincidence
and despite the intentions of the participants, the predestined end. More-
over, within a fictional context, all of the many instances in which protago-
nists win at lotteries or at gambling, or inherit unexpected fortunes, imply
that a benign or malign destiny has singled them out for its “personal” at-
tention. Likewise, the “accidental” encounters which so often trigger crucial
narrative episodes are never in this fictional context the result of pure
chance or of coincidence, but rather provide an opportunity for destiny to
confirm that the protagonists whom the narrative has apparently elected at
random to introduce us to do indeed figure among the elect. We might
note, for instance, that if a young man is knocked over by a car it will prove
to have been driven by an attractive young woman who is “meant for” him
(33.40), and if an unhappily married man traveling alone in the mountains
runs out of gas and is forced to spend the night in a remote hotel, he will
find there the attractive childhood friend whom he has always really loved
 24 |   
and who has also run out of gas (35.41). Such events are so common as to
barely register as coincidences when viewing a film, and they are particu-
larly common in the early thirties (e.g., 31.14; 31.62; 31.79; 31.142; 32.149;
34.27).
Cars are not the only form of transportation mobilized to this effect.
For some reason, no doubt related to the disruption in daily routines occa-
sioned by any long journey, but also to the mythic exhilaration associated in
this decade with train journeys, a large proportion of such encounters take
place on trains, and almost as many on ocean liners. The titles of a number
of thirties films promise as much—Les Surprises du sleeping (33.121), Com-
partiment de dames seules (34.29), Un train dans la nuit (34.107), Train de
plaisir (35.114), La Petite Dame du wagon-lit (36.100), and so on. Melo-
dramas, of course, are notorious for the presence of coincidences that
imply an arbitrary and apparently malevolent destiny, which, once the
characters’ fortitude has been sufficiently tested, intervenes just as arbitrar-
ily in its more benign guise. Narratives such as those of Les Deux Orphelines
(32.50) are riddled with a series of calamitous misfortunes, which are fi-
nally resolved by a contrary series of benign eventualities. In general, one
could say that destiny is generically predisposed: a fundamentally benign
destiny presides over comedies, while its malign counterpart presides over
dramas, and particularly over tragic dramas. In the latter genres, it is given
to a sort of malicious irony, ensuring that just as events seem to be turning
out well and the characters are managing to take control of their existence,
a “totally unforeseeable” (yet oddly appropriate) tragedy will strike them
down. Just as Henriette recognizes that the poor blind beggar singing in the
street below is her long-lost sister, the police burst in and arrest her (32.50).
Just as Fritz summons up the determination to break with the baroness, his
mistress, in order to devote himself to his pure young love, the baron dis-
covers the key to his quarters among the baroness’s possessions (33.76). Just
when the relief column appears and Pierre seems saved, a stray enemy bul-
let strikes him down (35.6). Just when André and Françoise’s idyll seems as-
sured, L’Africain returns to reveal his secret and André flees, missing
Françoise by seconds (37.87). Just as Franck and Cora arrive at long last at
an understanding and seem destined for happiness, they run into a truck
and she dies (39.23). Of course, it is arguable that in many, if not all, of
these cases it is “the past sins of the characters” which are finding them out,
but this is just to say that a sadistic destiny presides over such narratives to
ensure that their sins will indeed find them out, and will do so just as they
thought they had left their past behind them.
Occasionally, these malevolent interventions of destiny are given a de-
gree of narrative foregrounding by being presented as the working out of
predictions and prophecies. The Tarot laid out by Madame Blanche in Le
Grand Jeu (33.62) is just the best known of such incidents. Christ, of
 Identity | 25
course, is free to foretell his own betrayal and death (35.53), but numerous
less qualified imitators in the form of fortune-tellers and sorcerers serve the
same narrative function, predicting the death both of kings (38.87) and of
underlings (31.32). Prophetic tramps are not believed by the foolish
(36.62), and husbands or lovers have good reason to be apprehensive when
importunate females propose to read their dear one’s hand. Florence reads
Hélène Maury’s in L’Équipage (35.42), predicting that she is unlikely to be
happy with the man she loves, and the fortune-teller reads Rose’s in Sarati
le terrible (37.103), foretelling the importance of another man. However
central as narrative mechanisms these “predictions” may be, serving to fore-
shadow certain possibilities and to arouse expectations (which may not, of
course, always be fulfilled [37.80] and which lend themselves to parody
[32.24]), they also serve to construct the idea of an apparently extra-textual
but in fact all-too-textual destiny, whose decisions are irrevocable and
whose pleasure it is to mock the petty plans of (textual) humankind. Some
similar implication is present where an overt repetition or circularity serves
to imply that abstract formal patterns imposed by “the nature of things”
guide and determine the characters’ fate, rather than any intentionality
on their part. Many of the best-known films of the decade are structured
around such formal procedures, notably La Petite Lise (30.66), Sous les
toits de Paris (30.84), Le Bonheur (35.12), Toni (35.110), and Trois valses
(38.107).
Although destiny, in its many manifestations, presides over the out-
come of a large number, perhaps even a majority, of the films of the thir-
ties, it usually intervenes anonymously and sporadically, infiltrating
through occasional interstices of the narrative chain. Nevertheless, there
are certain films which, like Procureur Hallers, take as their thematic center
the task of exploring the extent to which individuals can assume their own
destiny and determine their own identity. One of these, L’Homme de nulle
part (36.54), is perhaps unique in representing the act of divesting oneself
of one’s self as an exhilarating and liberating experience. Based, like L’Her-
bier’s silent film, on Pirandello’s Feu Mathias Pascal, it relates the story of a
man who comes by chance to be thought by his family and acquaintances
to have died. Immediately, he sees the opportunity to abandon his former
identity as a means of escaping the debilitating pettiness and grayness of an
unchosen existence, and as an essential first step in the process of con-
structing a self for which he can assume responsibility. The narrative thus
constitutes a sort of extended existentialist metaphor in which the protag-
onist learns to define the person he is to be. In one sense, the film suggests
that identity is superficial, as in the case of clothes and appearances—a
mere matter of plausibility and the appropriate documentation—but in
another sense, it suggests that what we normally take for a personality is the
dead weight of an involuntary past into which we have been unwillingly
 26 |   
socialized, and which must be shrugged off so that we can begin to con-
struct a more authentic personality from zero. There is a certain irony,
however, in having this growth toward self-possession triggered by a lottery
win toward which the protagonist has been guided by a kind of personified
destiny.
While it has a narrative that is the reverse of that of L’Homme de nulle
part, Le Grand Jeu (33.62) can also be read as a sort of relativistic morality
play. Guilty of an unspecified sin, Pierre has been banished from the world
of effortless pleasure that he had always taken for granted. Recapitulating
the biblical story, this “fall from grace” leaves him abandoned in a bleak and
desolate world—the foreign legion—where, through a woman who resem-
bles his former lover Florence, who has lost her memory and may even be
Florence, he seems at times to recapture glimpses of his pre-lapsarian para-
disiacal existence. What he has to learn, and has in fact learned at the end,
is that in this world there are no certainties and there is no going back.
There are no Platonic true images, only inadequate simulacra. In resigning
himself to an existence in “this world,” Pierre is resigning himself to the
human condition and learning to accept the inevitability of his own mor-
tality, as foreshadowed in that of his friend and alter ego, Nicholas. His
doom has been spelled out in the cards long before, as it so often was in
thirties films.
Perhaps the most interesting of the surviving films to focus primarily
on identity is Carrefour (38.16), which, in a sense, combines both of the
above narratives—a fall from grace and a process of self-definition from
zero. In addition, it involves a police investigation which parallels the pro-
gressive investigation by the protagonist of his own self. Roger de Vétheuil
believes he is a returned serviceman distinguished in combat for his bravery,
and a wealthy businessman with a happy family. When he is blackmailed by
someone who claims to have proof that he is someone quite other—a bad
lad called Jean Pelletier with a criminal record and a regrettable way with
women—he calls in the police. Yet little by little, as evidence accumulates,
he becomes less and less certain of his own identity, and more and more
convinced that the world of wealthy self-possession to which he has been
accustomed was a fraud, an illusion which he can never recover. As he in-
vestigates his past, he gets involved in a violent underworld which seems all
too familiar, and risks (re-)becoming the criminal and murderer who he
probably once was. He comes to accept that the war trauma which caused
him to lose his memory has unwittingly provided the equivalent of Math-
ias Pascal’s pretext for divesting himself of his former life—it has allowed
him unwittingly to exchange identities with the dead de Vétheuil and to
construct from zero a self which, as Jean Pelletier, he could never have
hoped to know, and which indeed even Roger de Vétheuil might never
have been able to construct. He has become the good and honorable man
 Identity | 27
who Jean Pelletier might conceivably have been, if born into different social
circumstances. His wife, the police, and his former mistress all seem to ac-
cept this, the latter sacrificing herself to protect his right to continue to live
(probably fraudulently) as Roger de Vétheuil.
Destiny, then, may be implicit or explicit, embodied or disembodied,
accepted or struggled against. It may be some distant, implacable force de-
termining the course of human existence, or it may be something much
more concrete—socio-political or socio-economic conditions which, to a
greater or lesser extent, determine the direction of the characters’ lives. On
occasion, it may be genetic and hereditary, as in La Bête humaine, where
Gabin’s compulsion to kill is beyond his control, and in the less well-known
Pièges (39.71), in which the character played by Pierre Renoir is driven by
an analogous compulsion and a similar sexual trigger. In most cases, these
operations of destiny are represented as implacable and irreversible. A fa-
vorite metaphor for this, or any, form of fatality which reduced the inten-
tions of the protagonists to insignificance was the mechanical doll, the
clockwork human, the robot deprived of soul and of will, which does what
it has to do.
The idea that contemporary industrial capitalism constituted a form of
enslavement of the masses, depriving them not just of their liberty but of
their very humanity, had been present in various expressionist films, not
least Metropolis. Tumultes (31.134) takes up this idea briefly in the opening
scenes, as does À nous la liberté (31.1) more systematically but more jocu-
larly. Factories become prisons manned by zombies without will or soul.
Ruled by clocks, slaves to the machines they serve, regimented and manip-
ulated by others or by the system, workers turn into mere automata. In À
nous la liberté, technological progress comes out quite well in the end, re-
leasing the workers, who have been given control of the factory, so that they
can become re-humanized by nature and leisure—fishing, dancing, and
playing games with one another—but later films which use the metaphor of
automata are not so benign in outlook. Of course, all of René Clair’s char-
acters are in some sense automata—mere ciphers, or chess pieces, scornfully
moved about on his narrative board, subject to the musical rhythms he im-
poses and to relentless formalist patterns of repetition and variation. They
have no more substance in Quatorze juillet (32.116), for instance, than do
the multiplicity of other objects that circulate, meet, and part, to fall in the
end into their predestined slots. So it is not surprising to find, at the most
dramatic point in the narrative, a player piano ritually patterning the scene
in which Jean is apparently enmeshed in an inevitable descent into the un-
derworld, and to find it “accidentally” triggered during the struggle between
him and his erstwhile criminal colleagues. The triggering of a pianola was
to figure, of course, at the climactic moment in an even more famous film,
Pepe le Moko (36.99), when Régis is cornered and begging for his life. The
 28 |   
hectic music that accompanies his execution may seem to be at odds with
the somber nature of the scene, yet it is oddly apt as a metaphor for the re-
lentless working out of his traitor’s destiny.
Something of this atmosphere of implacable inevitability carries over
into any scene with mechanical-piano accompaniment, such as that in
Ophüls’s Liebelei (33.76), in which the characters are again effectively pup-
pets caught up in and acting out an age-old narrative ritual that can end
only in their deaths. Even the recurrent return of a musical motif on a
gramophone can have such an effect, as in La nuit du carrefour (32.97). Yet
the presence of mechanical toys, and especially of mechanized humans,
foregrounds the theme of a relentless fatality more effectively, and was often
used during the decade. Such toys appear in both La Nuit du carrefour and
L’Atalante (34.9). When Juliette explores Père Jules’s cabin she discovers
amidst the baroque clutter that he has accumulated various mechanical
toys, including an animated conductor figure. Later, helpless and drifting in
Paris, she comes across a fairground attraction involving mechanical people,
dancing as she had danced earlier. With due allowance for the difference in
genre, such toys serve a similar purpose in Éducation de prince (38.29). As it
happens, the prince’s girlfriend lives, as had Père Jules, on a canal-boat,
where her father keeps an array of mechanical dolls (a clown, a dancing
bear, a doll, etc). Her father warns the prince about the tendency of human
beings to manipulate one another, as, indeed, his mother the queen and her
ally the industrialist are trying to manipulate him at that very minute in
order to enrich themselves.
The most complex use of this metaphor occurs in Le Joueur d’échecs
(38.54), which opens in an automated forge where Baron von Kempelen is
at work constructing automata. His quarters are crowded with shrouded
figures that can be set in motion by chain-pulls, making for one of the most
stunning sets of the decade. The baron is the protector, at Catherine the
Great’s court, of the Polish patriots/revolutionaries struggling for freedom
from Russian rule, and various of the automata are constructed to represent
the main protagonists, with interesting implications for the historical in-
evitability of the political outcome, but also leading to fascinating scenes in
which characters dance with their automated doubles. In supporting the
Poles, the baron is carrying out the posthumous wishes of a countess, and
apart from this executive role he, like his automata, has abandoned all hu-
manity. Pitied by the others for living exclusively amid characters lacking all
human warmth, he protests that this is the essence of their virtue—life’s
“vitality” is nothing but a weakness. He is working on an automated army,
the army of the future, which will eliminate life with ruthless efficiency. But
his prime ambition is to create a mechanized chess player which will be able
to defeat all human opponents because it will not be subject to their irra-
tional impulses. When the leading Polish patriot is wounded and must
 Identity | 29
hide, the baron trains him to live inside the automated chess player. But the
chess piece ends up as a gift for Catherine, who has penetrated the ruse and
plays with the baron’s fears for the Polish patriot inside it. There is a hallu-
cinatory scene in which the Russian army commander casually “slaughters”
various automata, hanging as from a gallows the one that is the double of
the baron, and setting the automated army in motion as he has just set his
own army in motion against the Poles. When in Catherine’s presence the
chess player is finally “executed,” it is the baron himself who staggers forth
from it, having sacrificed himself to save the Polish leader, and a final series
of images shows the baron’s body lying disarticulated in the snow, like an
automaton; the Russian army commander is also dead, surrounded by the
lethal automated army he has set in motion.
The automata are therefore used throughout the narrative to keep in
play the themes of doubles; of pawns, puppets, and puppet-master; of the
ruthless inhumanity of modern warfare; and of politics and narrative itself
as complicated chess games—not to mention the themes of history, of des-
tiny, and of the definition of life—what it means to be human. This, the
decade’s summative statement about the possible uses of mechanized hu-
mans in fictional narrative, provides a useful context for the mechanical
dolls in La Règle du jeu (39.78). There, the implication right from the be-
ginning, when they appear in the marquis’s quarters as his favorite collec-
tors’ items, is that they stand for the formally regulated world of the old
order, where all knew their place in the scheme of things, as they knew their
proper relationships one to another. If human beings are not free, it is be-
cause sociological conditioning has so regulated their behavior as to severely
limit the possibilities open to them. Such a world runs like clockwork, and
the film proposes reasons, despite its shortcomings, for which that world
should not be despised. Such a rigorously regulated behavior suppresses the
“rabbit” in us all, that natural complex of instinct and desire which finds its
expression in the various forms of poaching that are manifested both out-
side and inside the chateau. Gamekeepers are needed to maintain the rules
of the social game. The marquis and Schumacher are the formal represen-
tatives of this formal order, and the hunt scene in which they and their sort
mechanically and ruthlessly eliminate anything animal within range of
their guns foreshadows the final gunning down of that other animal/
poacher, Jurieux. His predestined end is foreshadowed in ways that would
have been perfectly familiar to audiences of the day—the discussion be-
tween him and Octave during the hunt in which they fear being mistaken
for rabbits, Schumacher’s threat to take a potshot at anyone “poaching”
Lisette, and not least the danse macabre of the amateur theatricals. More-
over, the mechanism by which destiny achieves its end might well have
seemed quite banal in its day—first, an ironic scene in which, “just as he is
on the point of giving up his mistress,” the marquis is glimpsed kissing her
 30 |   
by his wife, and second, not one but two exchanges of clothing, which lead
to two cases of mistaken identity. These mechanisms duly prove fatal. But
the end is far from random: Jurieux, after all, given all he has come to stand
for, is the “natural” antagonist of Schumacher the gamekeeper, delegated by
his betters to keep animals and poachers in check.
One of the less conventional aspects of the mechanical toys in this film
is their use to represent the compulsive instinctual behavior of certain of the
characters. As he is telephoning his mistress, the marquis winds up a me-
chanical doll and sets it going; as Marceau is romping around the kitchen
table with Lisette, he does the same. It is not only social regulation that de-
termines behavior, but fundamental human instincts, and the automata
come to embrace both sides of the opposition established in the opening
scenes. Unfortunately for the old order, the rules of their social game are
ceasing to be effective. The machinery is ceasing to function, or taking on a
life of its own, as when the pianola keys take it upon themselves to play the
dance of death, to Charlotte’s bemusement, or when the giant mechanical
organ, the pride of the marquis’s collection, jams and emits a horrible ca-
cophony during the “hunt” inside the chateau.
Throughout the film, these mechanical toys and dolls and the mechan-
ical musical devices which impersonally regulate the activities of the pro-
tagonists combine with a number of other powerful metaphoric devices to
comment both on the characters and on their actions, and to foretell and
shape the necessary end of a society whose ideological conviction and self-
confidence have failed. Renoir himself, both a dancing bear in and the
“conductor” of this social drama, is obliged to acknowledge his inability to
conceive a means of controlling the forces unleashed by this failure. Me-
chanical humans may be abhorrent, but animal humans are no less danger-
ous, and they are equally ruthless.
 TWO

Nation and Race: French and Not-French—

Stereotypes and Myths

2.1 NATIONAL AND RACIAL STEREOTYPES

O f all the major determinants of social identity in films of the thirties,

perhaps that which was least often insisted upon in identity narratives
was the protagonist’s nation of origin. This in itself is significant, suggesting
that national allegiance was considered something so simple and funda-
mental as to be unproblematic. A more detailed study of films of the thir-
ties set outside France and/or foregrounding a non-French protagonist only
serves to confirm this assumption: the vast majority of these films manipu-
late national stereotypes which are considered to be unproblematic and to
have an inherent comic or dramatic potential. Nevertheless, it is of interest
to note what those stereotypes were, and which were most commonly mo-
bilized. More generally, it is interesting to note with which areas of the
globe the French of the thirties considered themselves most closely engaged,
and in what way; or, rather, which areas had gained a significance in some
way connected with their own existence and needs. First, we look briefly at
the principal stereotypes represented in the films, then at the various func-
tions which these stereotypes served. Table 2.1 lists the principal nations, re-
gions, and ethnic groups featured in thirties French films and indicates the
number of films in which they were foregrounded.
The two most common nationalities are Americans and Russians. Of
these, Americans dominate the years 1930–33 (particularly 1931, when at
least fourteen films feature them prominently), while Russians dominate
the years 1935–38. In 1934, Gypsies suddenly appear in at least three films
and Hungarians in another four, while neither of these groupings occur to
any significant extent for most of the rest of the decade. British characters
appear sporadically at the beginning of the decade and again toward 1936,
characters from the Austro-Hungarian empire (particularly Vienna) figure
occasionally but regularly each year, while Italians appear rarely, and only in
the middle of the decade. It is surprising to see how seldom and how in-
nocuously Germans figure, even after the ascension of Hitler.
Table 2.1 Nations, Regions, and Ethnic Groups in French Films of the Thirties

Year 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 Total
Nation or race

United States 7 14 6 6 0 2 4 5 3 2 49
Russia 2 4 0 4 2 6 6 11 9 3 47
North Africa 1 5 2 3 2 4 5 7 4 2 35
United Kingdom 4 5 1 3 3 6 6 3 1 2 34
Orient 3 1 0 3 2 0 1 8 3 2 23
Spain 5 3 2 2 0 1 1 1 0 1 16
Austria 3 1 1 2 1 1 3 1 0 3 16
Fantasy 0 1 2 2 2 1 2 0 3 0 13
Germany 0 3 1 1 1 2 2 1 0 2 13
Jewish 3 2 0 2 0 3 0 1 0 1 12
Hungary 0 0 1 1 4 3 1 0 1 1 12
Gypsy 0 0 3 0 3 1 0 1 0 0 8
Italy 0 0 0 2 0 3 0 1 1 0 7
Other 1 4 2 3 3 1 5 6 3 5 33

Total 29 43 21 34 23 34 36 46 28 24 318
 Nation and Race | 33
It is also surprising to see how seldom most of the colonial territories
administered by France or in which France had an interest figure in the
films. The only recurrent site is North Africa, primarily Algeria, which fig-
ures as the prime locus of colonial rule, missionary zeal, and exile. Few of
the films presenting Asia or Asians deal with France’s colonies in Southeast
Asia, though several refer to their concessional access to China and Mon-
golia. Five films deal with Lebanon or Syria, while five deal with Egypt or the
Sudan, but the number of films focusing on South America outnumber all
these spheres of French interest put together. In six films, Canada or Cana-
dians are central to the plot, with primary reference to Quebec, and of the
five South Pacific films, three feature French Polynesia. In addition to Rus-
sia, the French clearly felt a residual relationship with other Slav or Latin
countries of Eastern Europe, such as Poland and Romania.
These numbers are not large, especially in the context of an output of
some thirteen hundred films. If one takes the minimum figure of three
hundred films in which foreign nations or nationals are central (in fact, a
viewing of all of the films of the period, if that were possible, would un-
doubtedly reveal numerous other foreign figures and settings, though mostly
of a secondary nature), the presence of Americans, Russians, and Viennese
is sufficiently frequent in the more successful films to be significant, along
with the colonial theme worked out in North African films. Because most
of the rest (and, indeed, most of these) deal in stereotypes, it is sufficient as
a first step simply to outline these stereotypes briefly in order to reconstruct
a representation of the world as it figured in the imagination of thirties
French filmmakers and their audiences.
It is perhaps significant that, among neighboring countries, neither Bel-
gians nor Italians appear at all frequently, and when they do there is little
consistency in the characterization. The Spanish, however, are very clearly
typed. Spanish womanhood is represented almost exclusively by the pas-
sionate singer/dancer swirling her skirts and clicking her castanets in the
local bar (five films). She is the focus of attention of all classes of Spanish
male—noble, bullfighter, fisherman, and bandit—and of any Frenchman
so rash as to venture south of the border (36.73). Her passion is matched
only by her religion, as when a novice is kidnapped from a nunnery
(30.20). It goes without saying that all Spaniards are highly emotional and
unstable, to the point of being dangerous. Indeed, the violence of their
emotions leads to their frequently being cast in the role of bandits, white
slavers, or terrorists. At the very least, they will be engaged in violent family
vendettas (35.4). The introduction of a Spanish character in a French film
invariably signals the onset of seduction, violence, and death.
In Vienna, on the other hand, the calendar is constantly set at the Belle
Époque of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Noblewomen are forever flirting
with dashing officers, to the chagrin of their husbands, who are distracted
 34 |   
by courtly intrigue. The life of Johann Strauss is told and retold (33.63;
36.141; 39s1). Elegant balls, at which the orchestra’s repertoire seems lim-
ited to the waltz, presage a duel at dawn, and fine points of honor lead to
suicide. Courtly intrigue and affectation become fossilized, inhibiting all true
feeling and spontaneity, perhaps leading to the death of Archduke Rudolph
(36.77), while liberal-democratic ideals threaten the end for the old order,
leading to the death of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo (38.108; 39.21).
Insofar as it participates in this imperial elegance, Hungary, too, has its share
of officers, noble families, balls, and operettas, but there is an underside to
the representation of Hungary that did not exist in the case of Austria: it
borders on Turkey, not to mention Transylvania, and is peopled, at least in
part, by a motley crowd of cardsharps, bandits, Gypsies, and fortune-tellers.
Superstition and instability are a recurrent motif, and vampires lurk in
neighboring shadows (31.146).
At the fringes of Europe, the representation of the Other in national
terms tends to give way to representation in racial terms. This is all the more
true the farther one departs from known territories. Arabs are not distin-
guished in national terms, and East Asia tends to be peopled by an undiffer-
entiated Oriental race, as the Pacific is by Polynesians. Some twenty-one
films are set on the coastal fringe of Southeast Asia, and despite the fact that
the races and nationalities involved range from Indian to Malaysian, Chi-
nese, Japanese, and Mongolian, there is a certain coherence in their repre-
sentation. A key feature holding them together as a group is the presence of
Sessue Hayakawa and Valéry Inkijinoff in the role of “the swarthy Orien-
tal.” Hayakawa may turn up as a Mongolian prince, a Chinese gang boss/
banker, or a Japanese spy, and Inkijinoff as a Malaysian, a Chinese sect hit-
man or bandit, a Mongolian maître d’hôtel, or a Japanese captain (reprising
in the latter case the role played by Hayakawa in the silent period). For the
most part, these Orientals are sinister figures, involved in the most various
forms of trafficking. They are also figures of power, sexually predatory and
fascinating to the European female. The Orient itself, in its more Chinese
manifestation, is not unlike the Kasbah in being represented as a labyrinth
of narrow streets, steep and cluttered, seething with a diverse humanity,
where street stalls impede progress and alien eyes form implacable judg-
ments. Concealed doorways lead to feverish gambling dens or the cool, spa-
cious, but no less sinister domain of the master, whose suave and impassive
exterior conceals a destructive lust. Prerevolutionary political intrigue gen-
erates tales of communist activists, gun running, triad generals with private
armies, and Europeans either caught up helplessly in the resultant chaos or
attempting to profiteer from it (37.75; 38.27). A surprising number of
these “exotic” films feature British territories—India, Singapore, and partic-
ularly Malaya—but then, the disorienting effect on the self-possessed Euro-
pean of such an Oriental experience holds as true for the English as for the
 Nation and Race | 35
French, and for the French of the thirties there was an even more radical op-
position between the Englishman and the Oriental than between the
Frenchman and the Oriental.
Indeed, the representation of Britishness in French films emphasized
precisely those stilted, stuffy, unworldly (or, at best, reserved) characteristics
most likely to be distressed by “Oriental” scenes of excess and emotional vi-
olence. This cold, haughty, distant, self-possessed temperament attributed
by the French to the English is often figured as aristocratic distance. Most
English characters in the period up to 1935 are noble males—lords, or sons
of lords, who may act the fairytale Prince Charming role. Equally often,
however, they get involved with foreigners drawn from one of the “passion-
ate” nations. If male, they triumph, at the cost of the foreigner, who may
sacrifice herself for love of him; if female, they are fascinated by the forbid-
den, but also terrified of it. In the middle of the decade, three dramatic
films propose relationships between an English lord and a lowborn French-
woman, such as a chanteuse, with consequent anxieties about misalliances
(35.125; 36.44; 37.122).
When the English are at home, however, they are engaged primarily in
murder mysteries of various kinds or in spy dramas. The former, drawn
mainly from English plays and novels in which Scotland Yard figures
prominently, are largely confined to the first half of the decade, especially
1930–33 (Drôle de drame [37.37] comes late in the series). The latter con-
stitute part of the shift of focus toward international politics in the second
half of the decade (35.100; 36.35; 36.119; 38.43) and toward the alliance
against Germany, culminating in Entente cordiale (39.33), which overtly (if
in a historical setting) promotes the necessity for the English–French po-
litical alliance to be maintained in the face of conspiratorial forces.
Of all the countries commonly represented in French thirties films,
Russia is the one with which the French appear to feel the closest affinity.
Many Russians were working in the French film industry in the twenties
and, although their industrial presence was not as prominent in the thirties,
Russian production companies, such as Albatros and Ermolieff, were un-
doubtedly influential in mounting a number of films dealing with Russia.
It is nevertheless true that German, American, and French companies pro-
duced as many of these films as did Russian companies, which suggests that
audiences were assumed by production companies of all nationalities to
have a predisposition toward Russia, its history, and its culture. This is fur-
ther suggested by a number of routine narratives that are set in Russia with
no apparent thematic justification, or that substitute Russian protagonists
for French ones: Russia was simply an alternative to France, with the added
exoticism of distance (37.124; 38.27). Certain of these “Russian” films are
analogous to the Viennese ones that deal with the old order, the aristocracy,
the military, debts of honor, duels, and emperors dallying with charming
 36 |   
peasant girls. Such narratives could be set in any Eastern European country
with the appropriate traditions (33.118; 35.30; 35.124; 39.7). There are,
however, four characteristically “Russian” categories of film produced in
the thirties—stories involving Russian immigrants in France, stories in-
volving revolution, stories evoking a colorful episode in Russian imperial
history, and stories based on the somber novels for which Russian literature
had become recognized.
The Russian immigrant population in France appears regularly through-
out the decade (at least ten films). Sometimes, a Russian political or family
drama spills over into Paris, which is seen as the natural refuge for any Rus-
sian forced into exile (33.73; 35.112). In general, life in France for these ex-
iles is seen as stressful, often involving persecution (37.55); it is natural that
obtaining a valid French passport should become an important preoccupa-
tion, perhaps even in the comic mode, leading a Russian princess in exile to
offer herself to a Parisian taxi driver (38.81). On the whole, however, Rus-
sians are seen as having the spirit and culture necessary to make their way in
Parisian academic and artistic life (31.9; 38.52). Montmartre seems to be
largely populated by artistic Russians, and the portrait that emerges is over-
whelmingly sympathetic.
It is understandable that these Russians should have wished to emigrate
to France, or indeed to anywhere, given the representation of Russian his-
tory, politics, and society that emerges from adjacent films. Russian history
is represented as involving a succession of despots, Machiavellian machina-
tions, and attempted assassinations, in which Empress Catherine and
Rasputin figure prominently. Russian history seen from below is equally, if
differently, debilitating. Adaptations such as Crime et châtiment (35.28), Les
Frères Karamazov (31.60), Les Bas-Fonds (36.15), and La Sonate de Kreutzer
(37.83) saw to that. The “underworld” in which people live is characterized
by prostitutes, extortionate money-lenders, thieves, and assassins, and their
life is one of misery, degradation, humiliation, sin, and depravity, except
when lightened by the spiritual purity of some flower-like young woman.
Only one film tries to bring together the squalor and the majesty of imper-
ial Russia, La Tragédie impériale (37.113), in which Harry Baur embodies a
magnificently riotous yet charismatic Rasputin.
The Russian revolution thus comes to seem inevitable, and a series of
films deal with plots to overthrow or assassinate one or another of the auto-
cratic czars. Any attempt by well-meaning advisors or consorts to mitigate
the harshness of imperial rule is ruthlessly curtailed by interested courtiers,
as when Katia tries to induce the czar to introduce democratic reforms, only
to see him assassinated on the eve of their wedding (38.56). Several films
set in the period 1916–18 involve disturbances leading up to the successful
revolution of 1918. Frequently, French nationals are drawn into such revo-
lutionary machinations out of sympathy or by accident. The immigrant
 Nation and Race | 37
population in France is itself occasionally involved, plotting the overthrow
of the recently established communist régime (39.60) or reluctantly ac-
knowledging its legitimacy (35.112). It is clear that the Russian immigrant
population consists essentially of the entire Russian aristocracy in exile, and
is thus essentially antipathetic to the revolution. Yet, if only because of a
general analogy with the French revolution, the French cinema is well dis-
posed toward the idea of a popular revolution. The solution identified by a
surprising number of films is to focus on Polish attempts to revolt against
the Russian oppressor. Certain films deal with later, unspecified attempts to
liberate a country, probably Poland, from the ruthless Russians—espionage
narratives at the frontier of Poslavie, for instance (31.101), or on an un-
specified Russian border (36.10). Such revolutionary narratives increase in
number in the late thirties, and their titles are often significant (Le Rebelle,
Le Patriote). Russian Cossacks besiege Poland (36.125), Russia is metony-
mized as a citadel from which imprisoned Poles struggle to escape (37.26),
or sympathizers within Russian court circles strive to help Polish rebels es-
cape the clutches of Empress Catherine (38.54).
The representation of Russia, then, is complex to the point of being schi-
zophrenic. Russian aristocrats are ruthless and authoritarian, except when
they have emigrated to France and become artists, students, and taxi drivers.
Revolution and liberation are essential Russian phenomena, except when
they are characteristic of Poles revolting against Russian oppression. Despite
this ambivalence, one thing is clear about Russian history, politics, and so-
ciety: it essentially came to an end in 1918, and nothing of any importance
(to France) happened thereafter. Two isolated adventure films, one set in
Manchuria in 1928 (33.10), which has a group of political refugees fleeing
the Russians and caught up in a local civil war, and the other set in China at
around the same time, which has similar refugees caught up in the troubles
in Shanghai (38.27), only serve to emphasize this absence by their isolation
and their Asian setting.
While the French could always recognize one or another aspect of their
existence or their history in the Russian experience, the fascination that
they felt for America arose primarily from its very otherness. While that
otherness was in part due to the longstanding antagonism between Anglo-
Saxon and Gallic cultures, the antagonism is tempered in the thirties by a
reluctant admiration for the Americans’ apparently effortless wealth and for
the narrative ease, industrial dominance, and unrivaled glamour of the
American cinema. The latter, in particular, can stand as a metonym for the
love-hate relationship that is common to much of the representation of
America in the thirties.
More films feature the United States and Americans than any other na-
tionality. In part, this is because of the American intervention in French cin-
ema in the early sound period (though the same cannot be said of Germany,
 38 |   
which intervened almost as aggressively, if more tactfully). Well over two
thirds of the films featuring Americans were made in the period 1930–33,
and nearly half of those (fourteen in the period 1930–32) were multiple-
language versions with an American master version, often drawing on a
prior American novel or play. Thus, they are a product of the incipient cul-
tural colonialism which the French saw the American cinema as threaten-
ing. Nearly all of them, whether made by American or French filmmakers,
are romantic comedies, and a surprising number deal with romantic rela-
tionships between an American male and a French female, or, less com-
monly, the reverse. Throughout the decade, and again whether made by
American or French filmmakers, the nature of the starkly contrasting na-
tional temperaments embodied in these “partnerships” is consistent.
If we are to believe these films, there are two qualities that America has
to offer the French—wealth and fame/glamour. There are three qualities that
France has to offer the American—tradition, an artistic/cultural ambience,
and warmth/humanity/sensuality. Typical narrative lines might involve:
• A ruined French aristocrat who, to earn the right to marry a rich American
girl, accepts an offer to go and work in her father’s factory. He is too suc-
cessful, becoming so Americanized that she no longer recognizes the light-
hearted Frenchman she had fallen for; he must backtrack and demonstrate
his Frenchness by abducting her romantically (30.42).
• A young American woman travelling in France with a jealous older hus-
band makes herself up as an old woman to reassure him, but a French lad
sees her without her wig, falls for her, and courts her; happily, under the
influence of France (notably champagne and vivacious girls), the husband
has acquired tolerance and humanity (32.103).
• A young American businessman, fed up with the hurly-burly of his busi-
ness life, inherits a tumbledown chateau in Normandy and, while visiting
it, learns the pleasures of lazing around doing nothing in the agreeable
company of an attractive Frenchwoman (38.97).
• An American banker buys a French chateau out from under the very nose
of the local countess; his wife and daughter come to take possession of it
and are both successfully romanced by local Frenchmen—an aviator and
the countess’s son; the aviator marries his American girl, while the banker
proves remarkably tolerant of his wife’s “flirtation,” offering the young
count a job in his business (33.1)

Rich widows and divorcees and millionaire businessmen are the stock
American characters of the genre, frequently providing a naive fairytale
ending, while uncles or sons return from America with the know-how to
serve their French family’s fading commercial fortunes (30.56); the lure of
Hollywood and stardom, nonetheless, is no less intense. From 1932 on,
 Nation and Race | 39
young French women and men alike are fascinated by the possibility of
marrying a star, or of being discovered and whisked off to stardom (32.142;
33.90; 37.97). French self-respect requires from time to time, however, that
this glamour and wealth be seen as mere tinsel, a frivolous illusion (33.101),
and the American cinema becomes the butt of satire (37.104). At least four
narratives have French men or women, particularly aristocrats, fascinated
or tempted by the wealth and glamour of an American relationship, only
to realize the superior, if humbler, virtues of their original French admirer
(30.57; 31.36; 31.96; 32.35)! In the other direction, timid young Amer-
icans are sent to Paris to learn about life (31.13) because sensuality is, as
everyone knows, alien to them (31.100); the French nightclub, the mi-
dinette or chanteuse, and the thrill of visiting some (perhaps hastily con-
trived) atmospheric dive (30s5) is what attracts them. If male, they buy up
French chateaux; if female, they are seduced by handsome French musi-
cians, or even by Michel Simon (38.18). Culture, tradition, sensuality, and
joie de vivre are thus effortlessly acquired, in return for wealth and business
know-how.
The abrupt cessation of these stories in 1933 is followed by a sparser se-
ries of analogous stories from 1935 to 1938. These are now interspersed,
however, with quite different narratives, as when a Hollywood star’s assassi-
nation in Paris provides a sensational pretext for a police drama (37.114),
or when an American diplomat caught up in the Munich crisis neglects and
thus loses his French actress wife (39.77).

2.2 THE FUNCTIONS SERVED BY NATIONAL STEREOTYPES

There is some minor interest simply in noting and describing the half-
dozen national stereotypes which figure most prominently in the French
mythology of the thirties, but, as the instance of America and Americans
makes abundantly clear, the prime interest in such a study must reside in
recognizing the underlying function that they served for the French them-
selves. French filmmakers selected and mobilized, and French audiences ap-
preciated and approved through the box office, those foreign stereotypes
which provided them with some form of mythic satisfaction as they con-
templated what they as French men and women were, or were not, or
would like to be, or must never be. More particularly, these national stereo-
types serve the following six functions:

• They recognize/regret the end of an era, and in so doing, they embody a

nostalgia for the supposedly simpler world of the past.
• They seek to speak, under cover of “foreignness,” of erotic excesses which
cannot be figured as a legitimate part of any society, even French society.
 40 |   
• They serve to define the inherent virtues of Frenchness and to promote
the French nation as the highest embodiment of civilization, as evidenced,
say, in its beneficent actions beyond its borders.
• They speak of an apprehension about the political disruptions of the con-
temporary world and of the need to prepare for war, or, more generally
(but obliquely), of the inadequacy of contemporary political and eco-
nomic structures.
• They propose an international coterie of cultured aesthetes to which the
French belong by right, and whose existence is intrinsically more valuable
than is that of the political and financial swindlers with whom the audi-
ence is all too familiar, and in so doing, such films place the French film-
making fraternity implicitly in a relationship of comradeship with these
foreign geniuses.
• They debate, through stateless people such as Jews, Gypsies, and immi-
grants, the adequacy of the contemporary nation-state, and possible inter-
nal threats to it.

These functions seldom correlate neatly with specific foreign countries

or peoples. As we have seen, the exotic as erotic might be represented by the
Chinese, the Malayan, or the Spanish, while the civilizing mission of the
French might be evidenced in any “backward” region—not just Algeria,
Tunisia, and Morocco, but also Syria, China, and Manchuria.
Certain of these functions are worth exploring more fully. Overt cri-
tiques of political authority tend to be confined fairly exclusively to fantasy
kingdoms invented specifically for this allegorical purpose. Although René
Clair’s Casinario is perhaps the best known (34.35), numerous other fanci-
ful kingdoms surround it, with names such as Cerdagne, Polestrie, Silistrie,
Donogoo, Vodénie, Tryphème, Chimérie, and Slopoldavie. The most com-
mon narrative pattern structuring these allegories is the “substitute king”
pattern, in which the king or prince of the fantasy realm proves inadequate
in some way and has to be replaced by a humble citizen whose fortuitous
resemblance to the monarch predestines him for the position. This humble
citizen is, surprisingly, often found on the streets of Paris—as when, for in-
stance, a Parisian street vendor replaces Fernando XXIII of Chimérie
(32.123), a record seller replaces the Slav prince of Polestrie (37.81), or a
lowly Parisian storekeeper replaces the prince of Vodénie (38.110). An
analogous narrative has the young king of Silistrie introduced as a Parisian
student, and relieved to be able to remain so when a republican revolution
sweeps his country and deprives him of his throne (38.29).
In nearly all these cases, the political and financial establishment is pit-
ted against true love, and the public sphere is seen as inherently inimical to
the private. Perhaps more important, authorities of all sorts are seen as in-
adequate clowns, if not insane fascists, and any hope for the state lies with
 Nation and Race | 41
the humble man in the street, whose resourcefulness is a match for any
challenge and whose value system is infinitely preferable to that of the es-
tablished authorities. Le père Lampion, for instance, is a gutter-sweeper
who effortlessly replaces the president of the assembly of his country, with
benevolent effects that are widely appreciated by the populace (34.77). Not
surprisingly, such allegorical critiques fall mainly within the years 1932–34.
The variant from later in the decade, Éducation de prince (38.29), pro-
vides an instructive instance of these fantasy-kingdom allegories. A pro-
logue in the comic mode establishes the fact that a revolution, in which one
authoritarian general has replaced another, has taken place in the banana re-
public of Silistrie, and that the French businessman Chautard is anxious to
install a puppet monarch in the cash-strapped state so that he can exploit its
potential oil wealth. But the prince, who is the obvious choice, is studying
in Paris and not anxious to return to Silistrie. He prefers to paint watercol-
ors and read poetry, and has been confronting the police on the Paris streets
with his left-wing student mates. The palace conspiracy funded by the
French magnate overrules his objections and, after a final few hours of free-
dom in which he discovers nature (camping, fishing, tranquillity), he is in-
stalled as king.
Essentially, to this point, the main purpose of the plot has been to rep-
resent all forms of authority and wealth as pompous, pretentious, arrogant,
brutal, grasping, and self-interested, and to contrast them with the gaiety,
simplicity, sincerity, and wisdom of the young and those of modest means
in Paris. The prince’s affectionate relationship with a French fellow student
is, of course, threatened by the devious conspiracies of the powerful, and
his girlfriend’s father provides a contrast between those who manipulate the
people and those who feel sympathy and understanding for them. A stan-
dard fairytale ending allows the student to be king of Silistrie while pre-
serving his values and his love for his French girlfriend, but the political
orientation of the film has long been established as communitarian and
profoundly distrustful of business and politics, separately or in alliance.
Alongside these allegorical critiques are a very few attempts to speculate
about the form of an ideal society. Donogoo (36.36), from the script of
which Romains subsequently fashioned a novel, postulates “an imaginary
town, invented by a geographer, which subsequently comes into existence
as a real community where all desires are given free rein.” Both this and
(even more improbably) Les Aventures du roi Pausole (33.12) were produced
by German companies—UFA and Tobis, respectively. The latter is more of
a sexual fantasy, involving the voluptuary King of Tryphème, whose idyllic
annual round requires that he service his 366 queens in succession. It is odd
to find a German company agreeing to release such a technically incompe-
tent film, with an incoherent narrative and no justification except titilla-
tion.
 42 |   
In the “real” world, contemporary political strife of a contentious na-
ture is always distanced by being set “out there” in China or Mongolia, or
at least in Spain. Malraux’s attempt in Espoir (39s6) to introduce a realistic
representation of fascist aggression and republican response is well known,
but it was not released until 1945. Given the relative lack of restraint
shown by the cinema in its representation of sexual matters, and the rela-
tive ineffectiveness of any formal censorship, it is quite striking how rare is
the presence in films of the 1930s of any concrete reference to the ideolog-
ical conflicts that were tearing apart contemporary Europe. The prerevolu-
tionary struggles in China receive a little more attention, notably in Pabst’s
Le Drame de Shanghaï (38.27), which devotes a good deal of space to con-
structing a sympathetic portrait of Tchang, a communist agitator who is
attempting to politicize and mobilize the workers of Shanghai. The private
story of a Russian family’s attempt to escape from the strife-torn city in-
tersects with the Black Serpent’s nefarious nationalist plots to assassinate
Tchang and defuse the revolutionary potential of his activities. The final
scenes of the workers’ uprising incorporate a Potemkin-like sequence in
which the workers appeal (successfully) to the Black Serpent’s militia:
“Don’t fire on your brothers! Let’s join forces!”
If contemporary political processes were seldom dealt with overtly,
neither was the erotic. In France, as in America, thirties films tended to ex-
ternalize erotic desire, projecting it onto exotic characters of a swarthy
disposition, whose dark skin served as a metaphor for the evil passions
seething within. The dark seductress may be a Spaniard, a Hungarian, or
an East Asian; She is frequently a Gypsy as well. Passionate, tempestuous,
given to excesses of jealousy and revenge, she can lead the civilized Euro-
pean (i.e., the white man) to betray his birth and give free rein to instincts
better left repressed. This may lead to actual or attempted murder—
drowning in the Camargue (34.89), murder by her father “according to the
inexorable law of the Gypsy” (32.69), hara-kiri, self-immolation, or en-
tombment (37.110). Alternatively, this “dark side” may be tamed by Chris-
tian marriage to a Hungarian noble (35.8) or other Eastern European
officer (35.66).
It is a common narrative pattern for a wellborn lady to have to choose
between a handsome Gypsy and an army officer (34.20). Sensuality could
be contrasted with propriety, passion with frigidity, and intensity with dis-
cipline as the moral poles between which such exotic dramas were acted
out. Gambling, with its connotations of risk and intensity, is often associ-
ated with sensuality as a central element of the fascination of the exotic.
Whether in Macao or Mongolia, Hayakawa’s roles explore these connota-
tions. In Forfaiture (37.48), as a Mongolian prince, he presses his attentions
on a French engineer’s wife, using her gambling debts to entrap her. Once
she is in his power, he brands her with a hot iron. The balance of fascina-
 Nation and Race | 43
tion and revulsion which he arouses is nicely constructed, and Francen as
her husband, in his recurrent role as the honorable but rather unimagina-
tive French professional, accepts her protestations that she may have been
foolish but was never unfaithful.
Race and sexuality link the exotic and the erotic again in La Dame de
Malacca (37.30), though this time the sensuality of the Orient is most em-
phatically triumphant. Here, the white woman is trapped in a loveless mar-
riage to a stuffy doctor (English, of course), whose milieu is defined by
bridge and the necessity to flatter those in authority in the interest of ad-
vancing his career. Dreaming of romance and the jungle, whose combined
forces might subvert the propriety and convention of respectable English
society, she meets on a ship Prince Selim (not Hayakawa or Inkijinoff this
time, but a heavily made-up Richard-Willm). The usual storm, which dis-
rupts the Englishmen’s card game, but which she finds exhilarating, facili-
tates her acquaintance with the prince. We find out that he had been to
England to study but could never get close to the English because of their
distance and formality, and because he had “dark blood.” “The heart speaks
more truly,” she says.
Once in Malaya, and despite her husband’s warning that all natives are
thieves, she finds herself in sympathy with the life of the Malayans. The
identification between Malaya and sensuality is made clear in such scenes as
that in which Selim is showing her the exotic flower which blooms for a few
hours of a single night. As they speculate about the possibility of their own
relationship blooming, a brief, almost subjective image is presented of sev-
eral bare-breasted native women flashing past. It is clear, however, that Ma-
laya represents for her not just release and sensuality, but something more
violent—or, rather, that conventions broken and sensuality unleashed can
be not just exhilarating but destructive, if taken to excess. The Malaya to
which she escapes is a place of seedy bars, cockfights, drunken sailors, and
loose women. Sexuality is closely allied to chaos and nearly leads to her own
death; she must learn to navigate between the extremes of formality and
sensuality, both of which are represented as intolerable in their pure state.
The prince marries her and engineers her rehabilitation, such that she can
lord it over the desiccated expatriate Englishwomen who have come to
stand as the principal representatives of propriety. In sum, as effectively
as any film of the decade, La Dame de Malacca demonstrates the function
of the exotic as erotic, aligning the dark-skinned and the foreign with the
heart, liberty and sensuality, against rules, conventions, and calculation, but
also with the risk of chaos and death, against security and belonging. It is
fascinating but frightening—necessary, but needing to be skillfully negoti-
ated if one is to survive, let alone benefit.
As well as linking sexuality to darkness of skin, the exotic genre com-
monly linked it to the “primitive” and barbarous, which could be repre-
 44 |   
sented as dangerous, violent, and evil, or as a welcome escape from the re-
strictive conventions of the hyper-civilized. Gauguin’s South Seas produced
tales such as that of a French man and an English woman, both pilots en-
gaged in a record attempt, who crash separately on the same desert island.
Free from family expectations and national stereotypes, they establish an
easy relationship, but once rescued they are quickly reminded of the force of
convention (37.7). This is a readily recognizable sort of tale, in which a nat-
ural catastrophe fortuitously results in the disruption of conventional pro-
prieties and lets the heart speak, or lets innate talent come to the fore at last.
In a slightly more deliberate vein, a stoker, disgusted by the social hierarchy
and inequalities that he has witnessed on board ship, deserts to a South Sea
island and sets up house with a native woman. Rescued, he realizes all that
he is losing and plunges overboard to swim back to his island (30.15).
If the exotic is often erotic, and sometimes a form of purification, for-
eignness is almost as often interpretable in a quite different way—as a fasci-
nation with “high culture.” The importance of art and the artist is a large
topic that will be dealt with more fully later. Here, we may note that while a
large number of exotic creatures are wild and passionate singers or dancers,
many others are cultured artists or musicians, gazing soulfully into the mid-
dle distance as their fingers (tactfully hidden by the frame of the piano) per-
form improbable and apparently effortless feats of virtuosity. The spiri-
tuality of the aesthetic is seldom questioned in these films, which typically
focus on the life and loves of some real or fictional foreign artist. One of the
few relatively consistent characteristics of the Italian is as a romantic cul-
tural figure—most obviously in a film about Pergolesi (32.8), but also as a
singing gondolier or a romantic tenor. The same is true of Vienna, where a
series of films focusing on the lives of artists culminates in Gance’s ponder-
ous and pretentious life of Beethoven (36.135), which likens his sufferings
to the martyrdom of Christ.
Such films about foreign artists complement the numerous parallel
films dealing with the lives of French artists, such as Gance’s almost equally
atrocious but very popular film on the composer Charpentier (39.49). As in
the case of American films, in which the French tended to emerge as sensi-
tive and cultured aesthetes, all of these films about artists directly or indi-
rectly cast the French in a favorable light as cosmopolitans with an inherent
appreciation of things cultural. This is very obvious in the case of Chopin,
who is, after all, an honorary Frenchman (34.25). More reflexively, as many
studies of French film criticism have shown, French filmmakers seem from
the beginning to have categorized their own activity as art, subject to the
same romantic myths as painting, music, or literature, and the celebration
of great artistic achievements of other nations was an indirect way of in-
serting themselves into this ahistorical and transnational company of mas-
ter artists.
 Nation and Race | 45
But for thirties filmmakers and their audiences, the French have other,
more practical and material virtues, and these are concretely displayed in
their activities in colonial territories. The engineer is a key figure in many
of these narratives—a dynamic professional devoted to transforming the
primitive societies he finds into productive communities with an industrial
infrastructure and a modern communications network. In the thirties, the
activities of these engineers range from railway construction to oilfield de-
velopment, and they may even conceive of building floating islands in the
mid-Atlantic to serve as airports (32.72), or tunneling under the Atlantic
from Europe to America (!) (33.134). The more extravagant feats come from
the early thirties and verge on science fiction, while the more prosaic feats of
civil engineering date from 1936 and take place mostly, but not exclusively,
in East Asian countries where French trading concessions gave France a
commercial and political foothold. French engineers are constructing or
maintaining railways across China and Mongolia (37.90; 37.48), or even
Ethiopia (33.116), but are thwarted in their fundamentally humanitarian
mission by the jealous feuding and short-sighted self-interest of local tribes
or bandits and hampered by their wives’ descent into melancholy and mad-
ness. Indeed, in these exotic tales the “male engineer” is seen as an appropri-
ate contrasting role to that of the erotically aroused wife or foreign vamp
spy, since such a contrast recycles standard gender oppositions concerning
reason and instinct, the public and the private, the reliable and the treacher-
ous. In romantic comedies, this led to several films in which the hero was
nominally qualified as an engineer, without actually having to engage in any
engineering activities. It was simply the case (at least from 1933 on, since
earlier examples tended to represent engineers as gullible and easily conned)
that engineering was seen as an appropriately dynamic career for a hero.
The one interesting exception is St. Exupéry’s scenario for Anne-Marie (36.6),
which proposes a female engineer in civil aviation around whom no fewer
than five adoring pilots cluster and who undertakes a daring record attempt
in the course of which a sixth pilot saves and wins her.
Because there are so many more of them, the films set in Algeria, Mo-
rocco, Tunisia, and other French regions in North and West Africa provide
a more complex picture of Frenchness in action overseas. In this context,
the focus on civil engineering which predominates in other French spheres
of interest can be seen as simply one stage in a grand narrative about the es-
tablishment and consolidation of Empire. This narrative is constructed
piece by piece by the films of the decade and establishes the essential ele-
ments of the relationship between the Frenchman and the Arab. It consists
of five main stages:

• Exploration of “ virgin” territory.

• Pacification: the military suppression of rebels and bandits.
 46 |   
• Missionary work: colonizers and missionaries establishing outposts of
French society and culture, and demonstrating the superior spiritual val-
ues thus made available to the colonized.
• Civilization: engineering works (railroads, oil wells, dams, roads) to make
the newly settled land habitable.
• Integration: the development of a complex love-hate relationship between
the colonials and metropolitan France in which North Africa is the same
but different.

Alongside this public story of national expansion, there are three typi-
cal “private” narratives that intersect with, or find fruitful ground in, the
colonial narrative:
• The foreign legion story, in which individuals, fleeing shame or the law, join
the foreign legion and are redeemed, often at the cost of their lives.
• The inter-racial story, in which relationships of friendship, respect, and
love develop between representatives of the colonial power and the in-
digenous population.
• The Freudian drama, in which (as in other exotic countries) forbidden or
repressed desires are worked out under cover of an exotic otherwhere.

The public story expounded in the grand narrative is similar in general

form to the conquest of the west as outlined in the Western genre, with its
pioneers, settlers, railroads, combats with Indians, and ultimate transfor-
mation of a wilderness into a garden. Indeed, Raoul Walsh’s Big Trail is the
American master version of La Piste des géants, in which a caravan of French
settlers duplicates in the French-settled southern regions of what is now the
United States the standard pioneer/settler narrative of the central-western
states. In Africa, analogous narratives tell of Brazza’s exploration of the
Congo and establishment of Brazzaville (39.6), and of de Foucauld’s ven-
ture into Morocco disguised as a Jew in preparation for subsequent French
expeditions and appropriations, and his later venture into the southern Sa-
hara as a missionary (36.7). One of the most popular elements of the narra-
tive is pacification of the newly explored regions. The legionnaires, though
themselves outcasts, rejects, and criminals, are led by noble officers who
have a visionary approach to France’s civilizing mission and always have the
betterment of the locals at heart. In Africa, it is largely the legion that is
shown undertaking, in the most arduous fashion and under the oppressive
heat of a desert sun, the manual aspects of the engineering feats which will
transform that desert into a fertile land (39.44). In this aim, however, they
are hampered by the greed of marauding bandits; by the incomprehension
of the local tribespeople, who, when not engaged in fratricidal wars, join in
resisting all attempts at civilization; and by the treacherous behavior of for-
 Nation and Race | 47
eign and even French gunrunners who arm the local tribespeople. If the
arms dealer is male, he commits suicide, leaving his wife to come to terms
with the heroic French officer (38.8); if female, she falls for the heroic
French officer herself, but it can never be, and true to his duty he blows up
her yacht with her in it (37.45).
The standard heroics of the small band of brothers overcoming hordes
of indigenous tribespeople forms a climax to many of these films. It is com-
mon for the protagonist, if not of the whole detachment, to die tragically,
with the officer perhaps reduced to blowing up the besieged outpost to pre-
vent the capture and torture of his few remaining men (36.111), though
their resistance to that point is represented as beyond all expectations: theirs
is a glorious death (35.6; 38.38).
The foreign legion story that intersects here is well known: wanted for
murder (35.6), fleeing scandal (33.62; 39.15), having broken with the fam-
ily (34.82), or simply because of some unnamable but unspecified shame
(five films), the son/brother/husband/lover flees to the legion. There, in the
company of others of his kind, he learns a form of rough brotherhood,
combined with grudging respect for the officers who drive their men hard,
but drive themselves even harder. Memories of the woman who was the
cause of their disgrace, or glimpses of someone who might even be her
(33.62), or her actual arrival (38.78), or even, in one case, finding her now
married to his captain (31.120) complicate the process of rehabilitation
and redemption; but in the climactic battle the exile proves himself a man,
and either dies gloriously for a cause greater than his own personal exis-
tence, or, renouncing definitively any personal happiness, re-enlists in what
has become the only life worth living (36.134).
The best known and easily the most popular of these foreign legion
films is La Bandera (35.6). It is exceptional in that it is set in the Spanish
foreign legion rather than the French, but otherwise it follows classic lines.
Gabin, as Pierre, in one of the roles which established him as a star and
which served to define his screen persona, has blood on his hands and no
money. Forced to join the legion, he experiences all the standard induction
procedures—mates and rivals, drink and cards, bars and billiard halls, girls
and horseplay, the native woman with whom he establishes a more endur-
ing relationship, backbreaking work, and the gradual approach of combat
with the indigenous Arabs, which will end with his heroic death defending
a remote outpost against impossible odds. An added interest in the film is
the slimy presence of le Vigan as Lucas, who may or may not be a police of-
ficer but who, a little like Javert in Les Misérables, slyly pursues Pierre until
the final climactic siege when, alone with Pierre facing the alien hordes, he
develops a respect for the man he has sought to betray and is himself trans-
formed by the experience.
 48 |   
Unlike exploration and pacification, colonization and civilization are
not, for the most part, represented heroically in North African stories. Co-
lonials are most commonly found in the seedy bars and bistros of remote
outposts, surrounded by the debilitating signs of their decline into native
ways of life. On the other hand, the spiritual values that France had to offer
the African continent are most effectively propounded in L’Appel du silence
(36.7), which, with La Bandera, was the most successful of all North
African films, and one moreover which had been sponsored by the Catholic
church and funded by public subscription. A conventional recounting of
“the life of a great man,” L’Appel du silence relates the life of Charles de Fou-
cauld first as a military man, then as a missionary. It thus combines the paci-
fication story with the humanization story, and pivots around a central
scene in which Charles, having explored and pacified much of Algeria, Tu-
nisia, and Morocco, is finding inadequate the material mastery provided to
him by French arms, industry, and science, and is looking for some higher
cause. In a church in the desert, Christ’s face appears to him, accompanied
by a portentous clash of orchestral sound; he burns his past and abandons
his former self and the world to take on the silence of the monk and of the
desert. Numerous parallels with Christ’s life should have reassured the Tua-
reg that his quest has divine approval, but, instead, when he is betrayed by
his own Judas, they slaughter him and his congregation. Altogether, the film
manages to represent both the material and the spiritual forms of civiliza-
tion that France was bestowing on the natives, while leaving no doubt that
the latter are the more profound and enduring.
In this spirit of universal brotherhood, numerous films tell of amicable
or intimate relationships developing between the French and their Arab
“brothers.” This may happen in the army, as for example when a young
French officer loves a Moroccan girl who momentarily believes that the
French are responsible for her parents’ death and intends to kill the officer.
Of course, the real assassins are ultimately unmasked (37.86). A classic, if
trashy, example of this situation is to be found in Baroud (31.18), which
has survived in its British version. The French captain in the foreign legion
is a close friend of the Arab pasha’s son, but falls for and courts the pasha’s
daughter unawares. Since he is an infidel, this means dishonor for the Arab
family, and his friend is distraught at the thought of having to kill him. But
just then, dissident rebel tribesmen attack the loyal pasha’s fortress and the
two friends are reunited in defense of it. Naturally, a French relief column
arrives just in time. The brotherhood of the French and of “sensible” Arabs
is reaffirmed.
French civilians are just as liable as are their legionnaire compatriots to
strike up such brotherly relationships—between, for instance, a young
colonial and the Caid’s niece (35.15), between a Tuareg and the French girl
 Nation and Race | 49
whom a young colonial saves in the desert (31.46), or between a young
medical couple and their indigenous patients, leading them to adopt the
daughter of a local rebel engaged in yet another fratricidal war (34.48).
Friendship, respect, compassion, affection between peoples of different
races—all are possible in the more humanitarian order being created by the
French, but they are in tension with the tendency in these films to see
North Africa in the same light as other exotic locations—intrinsically other,
and therefore a suitable field on which to act out the unleashing of Freu-
dian repression. A common pattern, perhaps best known from Pepe le Moko
(36.99), is to set up a triangle in which the male protagonist has to choose
between a French and an indigenous woman. In this opposition, the
French woman is coquettish and calculating, the indigenous woman pas-
sionate but also compassionate, and true to the death. This pattern also ap-
pears in Loti’s Roman d’un spahi, filmed earlier the same year (36.114).
More generally, French women in Africa are sexually destructive, often in
perverse ways. Re-enacting their roles from L’Équipage (35.42), Vanel and
Aumont are manager and assistant in a remote colonial outpost. The man-
ager’s wife, who has destroyed him and driven him to Algeria, turns up at
the remote agency that he runs, and seduces and destroys his “son” before
being killed by marauding bandits (38.95). In an analogous story, Vanel is
again the paternal partner in a foreign legion friendship when his younger
colleague gets involved with his wife (38.57). In yet another film of this
sort, Gabin and Aumont act out the Oedipal triangle (37.72).
It is not only father/son partnerships that evoke Freud. In Sarati le ter-
rible, Raimu is the patriarchal master of the Algerian dockyards, obsessed
by an incestuous love for his niece (37.103). Even more explicitly, in Le
Simoun, a colonial whose wife dies summons to Algeria the daughter he has
never known, and faced with her resemblance to his beloved wife gradually
becomes sexually obsessed with her. The hot desert wind of the title is pres-
ent on the night that he declares his incestuous passion (33.116).
At the end of the grand narrative of colonization, then, French North
Africa is the principal element of an empire which itself, with the approach
of war, is represented in many documentaries as a string of pearls manifest-
ing France’s high destiny among nations. Courrier d’Asie (39s5) brings a
light admixture of fiction to this documentary tradition, as an average
Frenchman proceeds on a tourist voyage around the world from one French
sphere of interest to another, beginning in Marseille and touching down in
Tunis, Alexandria, and Beirut en route to Hanoi. But if these territories are
seen as intrinsically French, they are still other—the same as us, but differ-
ent—and this ambivalence allows both for humanitarian gestures of soli-
darity and brotherhood and for mutual recognition of difference. Attitudes
and values cannot be transplanted without modification. Some French men
 50 |   
and women find the adaptation impossible, as when a colonial brings his
girlfriend—a musical star—to Algeria, only to have her retreat to France
and her theatrical life (37.74).
But some North Africans find adaptation to France impossible, too, us-
ually because of its overly materialist preoccupations. This allows for a cri-
tique of contemporary French values from a spiritual standpoint, as when a
young Tunisian woman brought to Paris to study finds the worldly life of
the capital intolerable (35.92), or when de Foucauld arouses the natives’ in-
terest in France and asks the authorities to show them the cathedrals and
places of worship, only to have them shown the rush and bustle of indus-
trial progress. They return disillusioned (36.7). The former of these, Prin-
cesse Tam-Tam, constitutes a particularly forceful rejection of the supposed
advantages of Western civilization. Not only does Josephine Baker give the
Tunisian character a vitality and humanity notably lacking in the Euro-
peans, but the one Westerner who appreciates her, Max, is played by Albert
Préjean, intentionally or not, as a giggling, supercilious idiot whose appreci-
ation is valueless. Disillusioned by him and by the culture he represents,
which is equated with affectation, lies, and deceit, she returns to Tunisia to
marry one of her own. The final scene is one of the great moments of thir-
ties cinema: as she and her indigenous husband play with their cherubic
child in an idyllic Tunisian landscape, their ass comes upon a copy of Max’s
latest book, based on his relationship with Tam-Tam; it is called Civiliza-
tion. The ass curls its tongue appreciatively around the title page, gathers it
up into its mouth, and, in a close-up, munches meditatively on it and on all
it stands for.
Two fascinating films set themselves the task of representing this am-
bivalent relationship—Pepe le Moko (36.99) and La Maison du Maltais
(38.60). The former is famous for its characterization of the Kasbah as both
a refuge and a trap for the hero. He can reign supreme there, respected and
loved, free to do anything he wishes—except leave it. Technical codes char-
acterize the Kasbah as a place of chaos and instability, the lawless enclave of
a country in which the lawless find refuge, but it is also a place of true af-
fection, in which Pepe has his family and friends. Yet no one who has seen
the film will forget the nostalgic longing for Paris that emerges most power-
fully from the brief song sung by Fréhel about La Place Blanche. Pepe’s in-
digenous mistress and, later, Slimane the police spy both mock his inability
to return to the one place where he might feel at home, and Gaby, with
whom he has exchanged reminiscences about Paris, and notably about La
Place Blanche, comes to represent the home of which he dreams. With her,
he says, he feels as if he’s back in Paris. The representation of the colony as
exile is finally confirmed by the notorious dockside grill through which the
doomed Pepe watches the steamer departing, as Gaby returns home alone
(well, not quite alone). North Africa portrayed thus as a place of exile is
 Nation and Race | 51
well known from several surviving films—La Bandera, in which Pierre rem-
inisces about the streets of Paris to which he can never return because of his
crime, and Sarati le terrible, in which Gilbert, likewise exiled by a crime
which he has gone there to forget, carries on about the home he will never
see again. The same pattern occurs in Maria de la nuit (36.73), in which a
young French man exiled for a crime that he has not committed has to
choose between a Spanish chanteuse and a French woman who can open
the way to his return home, and again in Le Danube bleu (39.20), though in
this case the unjust exile is not from France.
But the theme of exile from France is nowhere near as common as the
theme of France as itself a place of exile from some imagined haven—“là-
bas”—where the protagonist might feel at home. For narrative purposes,
this imaginary land may be located in South America or, less commonly, on
other continents, but its main function is to reflect unfavorably on the con-
ditions of the daily life of the protagonist(s) in France. On the surface, it
might seem as if the themes of exile from France and exile in France are in-
herently incompatible, but the common representation of the protagonists’
daily existence as an intolerable burden excluding all possibility of social in-
tegration or personal fulfillment is common to both. This places them
closer to the theme of class and society, which will be discussed in chapter 3.
A film that deals with the contrasting representations of Paris and North
Africa in a more complex and balanced way is La Maison du Maltais. Greta
is a good-time girl working in a nightclub in Sfax. Consumed by tuberculo-
sis, she reminisces about the fields and streams of her childhood home in
provincial France. To this point, the film seems to be seeing Tunisia simply
as a place of exile. Her friend Safia, however, complicates this representa-
tion, as she has had an affair with Mattéo the Maltese but, wrongly believ-
ing him dead, leaves for France with an honorable French officer who offers
her refuge. Later, when Mattéo travels to Paris in cahoots with a North Af-
rican gang, Safia is faced with an impossible choice between on the one
hand the sophisticated elegance of her comfortable Paris life, which has
hardened her and led her to think of Mattéo in suspicious mercenary terms
of blackmail and buying off, and on the other hand the impoverished and
harsh North African world which is that of criminality but also of true pas-
sion, sincerity, poetry, and dreams. Her decision is preempted by Mattéo
the poet and gangster, who recognizes that he must withdraw from her life
for her sake (and for that of their child, who has been adopted by the
French officer) and commits suicide.
Alongside these political narratives dealing with colonization, settle-
ment, and exile, we find an equal number of narratives dealing with inter-
national conflict. Together, the two genres, like the Western and war genres
in America, provide the most overt forms of national self-definition. There
are three categories of narrative concerning international conflict—the rel-
 52 |   
atively rare war stories, most of which relate to World War I; the more com-
mon spy dramas, also centering on World War I but overlapping into the
interwar years; and the romantic and family dramas in which national con-
flict provides an often incidental crisis in a fundamentally private narrative.
A related category of film explores postwar internationalist and pacifist
themes consequent on the horrors of World War I. Cumulatively, these
films constituted about 4 percent of the output of the decade, and were
concentrated primarily (though not exclusively) in the years 1935–39. In
the twenties there had been very few films dealing with World War I until
1927–28, when a small group of influential films appeared, two of which
were completely refilmed in sound versions—Verdun, visions d’histoire, which
became Verdun, souvenirs d’histoire (31.147), and L’Équipage (35.42). Gance’s
1919 film J’accuse was also remade by the director in a sound version (37.64).
Of the dozen films of this genre produced up to 1934, most are not set in
France but deal with wartime conflicts on the margins of the Austro-Hun-
garian empire—in Poland, Russia, North Italy, Romania, Austria, or Ser-
bia—though two of the most effective of those set in France appear amidst
a sudden burst of six films in 1931—Verdun itself, and Croix de bois (31.45).
From 1935 on, however, the output increases and the focus is almost exclu-
sively on the French experience of World War I.
Romantic or family dramas in which the war figures incidentally are of
less interest here, though their number testifies to the extent to which the
recent experience of war was fundamental to the identity of families of the
thirties, to the point of forming an almost inevitable episode in any film
dealing with the evolution of family relationships. Typical episodes inserted
briefly in such family dramas are the departure, a brief montage of trench
warfare, a stretcher, a hospital, nurses, the recovery and return to find that
all has changed back home (36.115; 39.69). Believed dead, perhaps blind-
ed, the soldier finds that his romantic expectations have come to nothing, or
misunderstandings and losses have occurred that can only be put right
much later (37.46; 38.49).
It is the spy dramas which are most clearly formulaic, invariably under-
pinning a narrative of political espionage with a sexual narrative of seduc-
tion that puts to the test the national allegiance of at least one of the spies.
In most cases, the male spy is French, and his allegiance is tested by a seduc-
tive German woman who is either actively involved in counter-espionage or
unwittingly being used by the military. Usually these spies are foreign, as in
Mademoiselle Docteur (36.69), which is based on the exploits of Anne-
Marie Lesser and which is unusual in that it is told in large part from the
point of view of German spies and spymasters trying, with some degree of
success, to deceive and defeat the French. Mlle Docteur is sent on a mission
to Greece to penetrate French military and diplomatic circles but becomes
romantically involved with a handsome French officer, which inhibits her
 Nation and Race | 53
normal ruthless efficiency. The usual confusion of spies and counter-spies,
turncoats and traitors, intrigue, disguise, and deception constructs the
moral ambivalence of this world, which is echoed in a number of technical
codes (lighting, camerawork). Mlle Docteur steals crucial documents and
gets messages through the lines, but in the climactic German air attack she
is chased and gunned down by none other than the French officer with
whom she has been romantically involved. As in the earlier instance involv-
ing a female arms dealer, in any conflict between love and duty the French
officer is true to his calling, sacrificing the private to the demands of the
public.
In all these films, the most emblematic character is the beautiful female
spy. Closely related to the vamp, and often played by the same actresses, she
commonly serves the standard Western function of presenting temptation
by the female as inimical to male honor and duty, though that opposition
is all the starker when “male duty” involves a threat to the nation. Women
are associated with the enemy, and are thus inherently treacherous, but are
capable on occasion of redemption through sexual submission to the male.
Several of these narratives take place in Alsace, Belgium, and northern Eu-
rope, where borders and allegiances are less clearly demarcated. Thus a
German spy’s beautiful wife saves a French officer and they fall in love; for-
tuitously, her husband is unmasked and dies (31.138); a French deserter is
accepted into German counter-espionage and subsequently unmasked as a
French spy, but is saved by a beautiful German spy, who betrays her coun-
try for him (33.87); a French spy succeeds in obtaining the plans for a new
German airplane engine, so the Germans send their most beautiful spy to
seduce and kill him, but the two fall in love and she sacrifices her life to
save him (35.31); a beautiful German spy is fomenting rebellion among
the Ethiopians, but she falls for a French official and dies with him in the
resulting cataclysm (33.147). Whichever of the warring countries is the
setting, a local supply of seductive females is available for such purposes. In
Russia, one lures the hero into gambling debts and suspicion of treachery
(34.70). In Romania, one is sent to identify and kill a traitor in an air
squadron; having succeeded, she marries the French officer who had aided
her (31.126).
Fortunately for France, it, too, had a good supply of Mata Haris. When
German spies steal the formula for a new gas, a French female spy is sent
after it; like her foreign counterparts, she falls for one of those she is spy-
ing on (the son of the German general) and is thus faced with a conflict
between love and duty, but in the resulting moral struggle, duty inevitably
wins out over desire (36.68). The following year, the beautiful Alsatian
Marthe Richard’s “real-life” adventures were recounted; she gets herself
hired by the Germans and wins the trust—and more—of the head of Ger-
man espionage, who finally discovers the truth and commits suicide in de-
 54 |   
spair (37.70). Many of these spy stories involve confrontations between the
French Deuxième Bureau (manned almost exclusively, it would seem, by
Capitaine Benoît) and German counterintelligence (35.31; 36.53; 38.15;
39.27).
Aside from stealing documents, plans, and formulas, the espionage
missions may be aimed at establishing intelligence networks (37.107) or
opening secret routes through enemy lines (37.88). In a typical example, in
occupied northern France, German counterintelligence is trying to suppress
a transit route. The Deuxième Bureau is aided in its attempts to keep the
route open by the local populace, by the fact that the French officer in
charge has an identical twin who is the local abbot, by an Alsatian French
spy among the German ranks, and by a beautiful local woman who success-
fully attracts and dupes the German high commander. With twin spiritual
and military powers, and with sexuality on its side as well, the Deuxième
Bureau cannot lose, and the film ends with a montage of victory parades,
the Marseillaise, and the Arc de Triomphe.
It is characteristic of these formulaic spy stories, however, that the Ger-
mans are not portrayed at all badly. There is something of the knightly tra-
dition of the chivalrous duel about the clash of national interests as
portrayed in these films. The Germans are worthy adversaries and men of
honor (or at least the officers are), capable of dying nobly (31.138). More-
over, any simplistic national oppositions such as those outlined in Marthe
Richard are undermined by the extraordinary presence of von Stroheim as
the German officer who falls for the title character. His suicide, in which he
injects poison, strips off his rank, and sits at the piano to play a funereal
piece, steals the film and makes the French heroine’s victory appear squalid.
“I believed we were participating in a grand adventure,” he murmurs, “but
she was just a petty spy like the others.” Likewise, in Deuxième Bureau con-
tre Kommandantur, the arrival of a German officer midway through the film
to try to pierce the French codes and deceptions swings the plot from a spy
story to a mystery thriller in which, for much of the rest of the film, we
adopt the detecting German’s point of view. The audience tends to identify
with the investigator, and indeed the French victors ultimately acknowledge
his virtues and salute him: out of respect, they allow him to live (39.27).
Of course, several of these films were German co-productions, and sev-
eral others were directed by Germans. Nevertheless, the absence of any ran-
cor in the portrayal of “the enemy” is significant. This same absence of
rancor is apparent in the few more straightforward war stories of the
decade. Combined with a lack of heroics and a reluctance to single out in-
dividuals as protagonists for the audience to identify with, this makes all
these films somewhat akin to the humanist pacifist films which were
markedly more common than simple war stories. Thus, Croix de bois (31.45)
follows a squad of enlisted men as they form a unit, are initiated into battle,
 Nation and Race | 55
form bonds of comradeship, spend brief days of leave behind the front,
then return to the front to die. The anonymous horror of the experience, re-
created with mind-numbing authenticity, makes this film more a comment
on the horror of war and “the pity of it all” than a celebration of national
heroism. An hour’s screen time of suffering, slaughter, and stolid en-
durance, unrelieved by narrative advancement, underlines the senseless,
shapeless chaos of the experience, while the briefer but parallel shots of
German soldiers enduring the same experience undermine any residual po-
tential for national self-righteousness. (Incidentally, the narrative concern-
ing induction into a military unit, noted above as underlying Croix de bois,
is in part strikingly similar to that, often unstated, which underlies the host
of military vaudevilles being produced at that time, though these deal with
the same material in a vastly different way.)
Similar observations about the connotations associated with German-
ness can be made of Verdun, which is distinguished by the anti-psychological
orientation of the characterization and the general theme of respect for the
enemy in a time of senseless collective suffering. Thus, these supposed war
films are not far from La Grande Illusion (37.54), in which von Stroheim
again brings an improbable humanity to “the enemy,” or the peacetime Al-
erte en Méditerranée (38.4), in which English, French, and German navies
collaborate to stymie a band of pirates who have stolen poison gas and in
which the German captain dies saving a ship of French passengers. The
more overtly internationalist films produced during the decade suggest both
a professional respect for and a closer understanding between officers of dif-
ferent nations than between classes of the same nation, since the former
recognize a common code of honor and share a knowledge of the same
clubs and social circles—may, indeed, share common family bonds. The
men in Alerte harbor residual patriotic prejudices, which the officers “rise
above,” while the French officers and men in La Grande Illusion are fighting
for quite different Frances—on the one hand, Fouquets and Maxims, on
the other, one’s mates in the corner bar. “We have nothing in common,” as
Maréchal says to Boieldieu, whereas the transnational sympathy of “the
people” resembles that of the cows they tend, who “care nothing for nation-
alities.” Reconciliation is still the theme in 1938 (Paix sur le Rhin, 38.72),
when two brothers return to their family home in Alsace at war’s end, one
having fought for the French, the other for the Germans. Initial awkward-
ness gives way to a realization that national and racial antagonisms are base-
less and must be overcome.
A particularly fascinating film with an internationalist theme is Le Tun-
nel (33.134), which has survived, at least, in its 1935 English version. The
project to build a tunnel under the Atlantic is explicitly presented to its fi-
nancial backers as a way of uniting nations and continents and ensuring
peace, which perhaps explains their reluctance to fund it. One consequence
 56 |   
will be a reduction of armaments, to the fury of a fiendish arms manufac-
turer, who in the British version is French. Happily, his machinations are
confounded. The nobility of these internationalist ideals is somewhat qual-
ified by a speech late in the film in which the American president makes
it clear that the unity and peace that are envisioned are targeted primarily
at making the “Western confederation” (somewhat corresponding to the
present-day NATO) strong enough to confront the Eastern confederation,
which has been threatening world peace. It is not so much civilization
which is at stake as “our” civilization.
Most outspoken of all the internationalist films is Gance’s J’accuse, in
which the ghosts of the dead of the Great War are summoned to prevent
any recurrence (37.64). But numerous other films of the decade echo this
disillusion consequent on the horrors of an earlier conflict (34.24; 35.5), or
on family tensions generated by that conflict which can be resolved only in
the next generation (37.16; 37.46; 38.49; 39.7). The same disillusion runs
through Le Temps des cerises (37.109), in which young workers who have
fought heroically in the war find themselves no better off twenty years
later—indeed, exploited by the idle rich, their internationalist ideals and
class bitterness speak of a refusal in future to fight for France as they know
it. This film was, of course, made to promote the Communist Party’s poli-
cies with regard to the aged, and was never commercially released.
Outside all reference to the war, other films carry the same message of
reconciliation. Best known is Pabst’s Tragédie de la mine, in which, after an
explosion in the French mine, German workers come to the aid of their
French colleagues, only to see the mine tunnel connecting the two coun-
tries closed off again once the crisis is over (31.131). But other internation-
alist themes involve a music competition destined to improve harmony (so
to speak!) and understanding between nations (30.19), the foundation of a
Universal Republic in the face of a threatened comet strike on Earth
(30.38), and La Kermesse héroïque (35.67) in which the women’s policy of
providing plenty of food, wine, and sex proves effective in cementing inter-
national relations. It is not going too far to say that the overwhelming pro-
portion of films that deal overtly with international relations are in favor of
reconciliation and brotherhood, while the overwhelming proportion of
films that deal with Germany represent Germans in a generally sympathetic
and fraternal light. Although several films foreground xenophobic attitudes
among the French, they do so disapprovingly, except in the case of Guitry’s
Remontons les Champs-Elysées (38.87), which not only manifests a profound
distrust of the English, but characterizes the Germans by the tramp of fas-
cist jackboots. The immediate reference is to the Franco-Prussian war, but
it is nevertheless a little ironic in the light of Guitry’s subsequent wartime
behavior. In fact, this film makes clear the extent to which he despised not
just other nations but 90 percent of his own compatriots.
 Nation and Race | 57
Even as World War II approaches and films begin reporting on military
preparations at the frontier (38s3), the anti-German mutterings of a group
of schoolteachers (“Ach, foreigners . . . can’t stand them” [38.25]) are con-
demned and proved unjustified. Admittedly, it is again von Stroheim who
is the object of them, and the extent to which his presence as the personifi-
cation of Germany in thirties films “distorted” French representations of
that country is hard to estimate. Finally, L’Herbier’s Entente cordiale (39.33)
promoting Anglo-French solidarity by way of the Francophile Prince of
Wales, later Edward VII, as the source of victory in World War I, and un-
ambiguously foreshadowing the need for a similar alliance in 1939, pro-
claims in a postscript that it is “dedicated to all those who work for peace.”

2.3 PARIS AND THE PROVINCES

If the representation by thirties films of overseas territories and of war tells
us much about the hopes, fears, and beliefs of the French in that decade, so
does their representation of France itself. To some extent, all the rest of this
study deals with that topic, but as a form of introduction, it is useful to
identify the geographical, historical, and cultural aspects of France which
figure in these films—its internal topography, so to speak—and to ask to
what degree it is seen as a coherent nation and to what extent a fragmented
one, and to the degree that it is fragmented how the various fragments are
characterized. Clearly, most of France and most of French history figure
scarcely at all in films of this or any period.
A set of preliminary generalizations about French history in thirties
cinema would have to begin by acknowledging the minimal place that it
occupied. Costume dramas were not common as a genre—even in the
immediate prewar years, when a (relatively small) number were noted for
their technical skill, lavish sets, and popularity—and very few of them es-
tablished any recognizable connection with actual historical events. When
they did, it was primarily with the Napoleonic emperors of the nineteenth
century, though a few films dealt with the revolution or the last days of
Louis XVI. Effectively, French history was all but suppressed, and the past
became little more than a convenient setting for fantasized dramas. While
large numbers of films were set in the period 1870–1914, few made any at-
tempt to represent actual historical events or figures. At best, the French
cinema constructed an impressionistic portrait of the forms of everyday ex-
istence at two or three points in the preceding 150 years.
Specific historical references tend to cluster in the period 1750–1830,
from Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour (30.90; 33.21) through Louis
XVI and Marie Antoinette (29s1) and the revolution itself—Danton
(32.48), La Marseillaise (37.69), and the chaotic period which followed the
revolution (35.106; 39.89)—to Napoleon (31.73; 33.35; 34.46), including
 58 |   
Gance’s sonorized film (35s3), and l’Aiglon (31.3; 33.3). The focus, not
surprisingly, is on the few archetypal figures who can be represented as
standing for all that is most glorious in the French character. Several films
use narrative devices to underline the importance of this past to the pres-
ent, such as Guitry’s Les Perles de la couronne (37.89), in which the necklace
links a series of historical events, or the brave revolutionary drummer’s
drumsticks in Trois tambours, which stir the courage of successive genera-
tions of the oppressed (39.89), or the soldier from Napoleon’s Russian cam-
paign who falls into a cataleptic trance and is revived a hundred and seventy
years later (34.46). The best known of these devices linking the past to the
present is the professor in Guitry’s Remontons les Champs-Élysées (38.87),
whose self-sufficiency is almost the equal of Guitry’s own, and who re-
counts the history of the Champs-Élysées in order to link up three hundred
years of French history. To a greater or lesser extent, all those mentioned so
far hark back to the era of the revolution and of Napoleon’s campaigns,
when the French national spirit is represented as having manifested itself
most forcefully in the commitment to high moral and spiritual values. It is
in the light of such films that we can begin to understand Duvivier’s odd
film Untel père et fils, which was made in 1940 but not released until after
the war, and which traces the strength of the humble French man in the
street from generation to generation.
Although a range of narrative techniques converge to serve a single
function in these films, it would be foolish to ignore the political battle lines
drawn up by these “history lessons,” as right-wing reverence for position,
authority, and tradition vie with left-wing revolutionary fervor to decide
which version of French history will become canonical. While there is
scarcely enough material to justify statistical conclusions, it is fairly clear
that a certain romanticized patriotism and national self-glorification com-
bines with Guitry’s portentous nonsense to give the right-wing version a
marked dominance over left-wing “views from below,” such as La Marseil-
laise and Untel père et fils (and, of course, the only two films of the decade
to deal concretely with the contemporary French political situation—La
Vie est à nous [36s2] and Le Temps des cerises [37.109]—but they were not
commercialized fiction films). Wherever audience reaction can be mea-
sured, the right-wing view proves to have been markedly more popular.
A similar set of preliminary geographical generalizations would note
that Paris is so insistently present as almost to coincide with the notion of
France itself, but Paris in these films is confined mainly to two named loca-
tions—Montmartre and the Left Bank, characterized, respectively, by artis-
tic life (36.75) and by student life (39.75)—though a usually unspecified
working-class suburbia, sometimes identified as Belleville, is also very often
represented. Outside Paris, the only region of France to appear at all com-
monly is the Midi, both for its quaint Provençal character and for its more
 Nation and Race | 59
glamorous Côte d’Azur/Riviera/Monte Carlo associations. The center and
southwest are almost totally absent as, more surprisingly, is Alsace-Lorraine,
until 1939 (39.57), though, as noted, the north is occasionally the focus of
international anxieties related to heroics in World War I. Le Havre appears
in Quai des brumes, of course, and occasionally elsewhere as the departure
point for transatlantic crossings, and Brittany appears more often, mainly as
a stark coastline on which austere fishing villages are to be found (33.102;
34.46; 38.44). It is dominated by the ocean: sea breezes are capable of
restoring consumptive urban children to health, but the cult of the sea can
also bring the threat of death (32.121).
But by far the most common region to appear in thirties films is the
Midi, Provence. The number of films whose titles appeal directly to audi-
ence knowledge of the south is sufficient indication that it was considered
a highly marketable region—Côte d’Azur, Justin de Marseille, Un coup de
mistral, Paris-Camargue, Au soleil de Marseille, Les Filles du Rhône, Titin des
Martigues, Un soir à Marseille, Un de la Canebière, Marseille mes amours.
One concrete reason for this intense presence was, of course, the existence
of a small-scale film production industry in Marseille— notably the ener-
getic Roger Richebé—supplemented very soon by the films of Pagnol,
funded by the success of Marius—Fanny, Angèle, Cigalon, César, Regain, Le
Schpountz, and La Femme du boulanger, not to mention Merlusse and To-
paze or Pagnol’s contribution to Toni. But aspects of southern France were
already consecrated in French literature, and several novels or plays were
filmed in the thirties based on these—Tartarin de Tarascon, Mireille, and
the Maurin books. Cumulatively from these and many other films of the
thirties, a relatively coherent picture of the south emerges: it is character-
ized by the sun, a more relaxed and leisurely lifestyle, not to mention an
accent and a vocabulary which lend color and humor to any narrative.
Southerners are more volatile and voluble than northerners, lacking any
neurosis or repression. Their emotions are never far from the surface: they
are expansive, quick to take offense, but quick to forgive and forget. Less
defensively individualistic than northerners, they have an easy set of social
and familial relationships, constantly threatened by their volatile explosive
personalities, but always triumphant. These characteristics lend themselves
particularly well to two genres, the comedy and the melodrama.
But although a certain coherence is apparent, there are several distinct
sub-territories within the Midi, each with its own distinctive markers. The
Côte d’Azur is the first to appear, dominating the early thirties and contin-
uing more sporadically throughout the decade. As might be expected, it
foregrounds the leisurely tourist lifestyle, but pushed in the direction of
glamour, elegance, and excitement. Attractive women recline on St. Tropez
beaches, seeking romance (35.96). Secretaries get a chance to play the
grande dame and seduce their bosses (31.42). Behind the Promenade des
 60 |   
Anglais, elegant hotels and palaces provide a stylish setting for boulevard
comedies (31.141; 32.14; 32.111; 38.69), as they do for convalescing roy-
alty (33.104). The convalescing lion-tamer, however, who desperately
needs a stay in an alpine sanatorium, is bullied by his selfish and pleasure-
seeking woman into a holiday on the Riviera which proves the death of
him (35.109). It is the universal holiday destination. When, in Paris-
Méditerranée, a romantic musical comedy, a secretary sets off on holiday
with a millionaire mistakenly believing him to be a poor salesman who has
won his posh car in a lottery, they will naturally voyage south, and the vari-
ous lines of action will converge on the Grand Hotel in Cannes. Fortunes
are won and lost, with the usual narrative consequences, at Monte Carlo
(31.25) or Juan les Pins (32.86). Attracted by all this wealth, crooks seek to
prey on the gamblers (35.63). And consecrating this early thirties generic
pattern, Guitry, in his one really magnificent film, Le Roman d’un tricheur
(36.115), has his philosophical con artist work as an elevator attendant in a
casino, get involved with a countess, and team up with a female thief to
cheat the casino and break the bank, only to be shamed into honesty, where-
upon he loses all he has gained. Consistently hilarious, the film assembles,
works through, and transfigures the scattering of conventions that had been
developing over the previous five years (and indeed somewhat before).
Farther west, in Marseille, the atmosphere, characters, and plot lines are
very different. Occupying a place in the local scene somewhat similar to
that of Paris for the whole of France, Marseille is represented as a complex
city dominated by its Vieux Port, its bars, and its underworld. No film set
there can resist a loving pan over the port and the transporter bridge, and
the characters who live in the latter’s shadow share the vitality of Parisian
working-class con artists (38.109). For Marius, of course, the sailing ships
leaving the port open onto the unimaginably exotic world “out there,” the
lure of which is too strong to confine him in his father’s bar and Fanny’s
arms (31.81; 32.58; 36.21), leading to a standard melodrama concerning
an illegitimate son and the discovery of paternity. But bars, docks, and
crime recur repeatedly (33.11; 34.96). As is frequently the case in the early
thirties, there is no clear dividing line between honorable working-class
men and women and the criminal fauna who haunt bars, run prostitution
rackets, and smuggle drugs. Not only are the latter often regarded with
sympathy and understanding, they even become folk heroes to the people
among whom they work, who have as little liking for the law as they do.
Prefiguring in some ways Pepe le Moko, Justin de Marseille (34.53) is
an amiable small-time gang leader and drug smuggler working the Vieux
Port area, with its nightclubs, brothels, and bars, now confronted by Italian
interlopers whom he finally dispatches. His gang, which is run as a family
affair, protects the weak and maintains a form of order in what would oth-
erwise be a cutthroat quarter. Justin himself treats women roughly, but they
 Nation and Race | 61
love him for it and reproach their pimps at any hint of treachery. He has an
understanding with the local police and arranges for them to clean up the
dregs of the rival gang after he has disposed of the chief. At the end of the
film, he is casually strolling through “his” Marseille, showing his new
woman the world over which he rules. In a similar vein, an amiable white
slaver who packs indigent girls off to the brothels of South America is well
regarded by his fellow citizens, though his activities are less well tolerated by
the local police and he is finally put away (37.49).
In its introductory segment, Justin de Marseille overtly likens the city to
Chicago. This is not, however, the only Marseille: elsewhere, local sports-
men are obsessed with soccer, perhaps ultimately making good in the big-
time sporting world of the capital (37.12; 37.102), while the Vieux Port
fisherfolk engage in frivolous romantic adventures, apparently unaware of
the colorful underworld operating among them (37.106; 38.109).
Even farther west again, from Martigues to Les Saintes-Maries de la
Mer, another set of characters act out more somber plots in the distinctively
flat and marshy setting of the Camargue. A certain Western flavor enters
these stories, if only because of the analogy between gardian and cowboy,
though horses and bulls replace the cattle of the Western genre. However,
the treacherous swampy ground of the region introduces a distinctive
gothic element into the range-riding narratives, and the bullfighting for
which the Camargue bulls are being prepared allows for macho heroics and
stories of pride, honor, and shame. Violent emotions, notably jealousy, are
the norm, often generated by rivalry between a simple local girl and a vamp,
perhaps from the city (35.87; 36.90) and very likely involved with crimi-
nals (36.116). In a more realistic mode, Toni replays this triangular drama
(35.110). The well-known treachery of womankind is metaphorically and
even metonymically associated with the treachery of swamp and marsh.
If the coast is characterized by three different atmospheres, the exten-
sive interior, with its bleached massifs, olive vegetation, and sparse villages,
which constitutes “the true Provence,” is characterized by a single atmos-
phere, most closely associated with the films which Pagnol set there over the
years. Essentially, this consists of innocent charm, exuberant fantasy, and
gentle humor. The villagers may be eccentric, they may allow their imagi-
nation to run away with them (34.99), they may engage in feuds with rival
villages (36.51) or with one another (33s5), but they are basically simple
and lovable (35.20; 38.38) unless the corruption of city life intrudes, as it
does so memorably in Angèle (34.5).
The harsh, bleached landscape reduces existence to certain basic ele-
ments, and in the Pagnol films from the late thirties on, those elements are
accorded a quasi-religious significance, which contrasts with the dismissive
attitude toward formal religion. “Bread,” “water,” and “soil” are what mat-
ter, and La Femme du boulanger (38.34) returns them to a more authentic
 62 |   
and pagan ritual, in which the sensuality of the flesh also plays an impor-
tant role. Regain (37.100) represents a high point in this consecration of
the basic prerequisites of social existence. In its celebration of the regener-
ation of an abandoned community through the mythologization of water,
earth, seed, the plow (here passed on from generation to generation), the
founding couple, and the produce of these—wheat and a child—the film
foreshadows the conservative values (“the soil,” “work,” “tradition”) pro-
moted a few years later by the Vichy régime. Moreover, in its distrust of
machinery and of “progress,” with the exploitation of human labor that at-
tends them, and its even deeper distrust of all forms of law, authority, and
broader social organization or regulation (“In general, the clothes you wear
for taking orders are no use for working in”), it embodies very forcefully the
right-wing anarchism that was one of the most powerful undercurrents of
French political and cultural life in the first half of the twentieth century.
Of the four sub-territories, this interior of Provence was the last to ap-
pear, taking over in the mid-thirties from the fading myth of the Côte
d’Azur and Monte Carlo. The mythic Marseille dockyard and street life
were largely exhausted by the end of the decade, and its bars, with their at-
tendant meridional characters, were losing their savor. A film from the end
of the decade has some of those characters reflecting on the decline of their
mythic existence and forming a club to attempt to restore to the commu-
nity its lost joie de vivre (39.18). The myth of the Camargue was to be per-
petuated, however, into the forties, while the connotations associated with
the parched interior are still as potent as ever.
Although, in mythic terms, the south was by far the most fully realized
region of France in the thirties, certain aspects of that representation were
shared with all other provincial regions, establishing a very general repre-
sentation of provincial life and character, as opposed to Parisian life and
character. This antinomy between city and countryside, which was the
dominant structural opposition of perhaps 6 percent of films made during
the thirties, is not, of course, peculiar to the thirties or to France. Ever since
the rise of the bourgeois urban community (and much earlier in other
forms—indeed, ever since the rise of urban existence), a consistent pattern
of contrasts has structured cultural representations of agricultural life and
urban marketplace life. These structural oppositions were enthusiastically
recycled throughout the thirties in France. Essentially, they involve a con-
trast between, on the one hand, the agricultural past, with its residual feu-
dal institutions, a continuing respect for local aristocracies, an attachment
to the land, and a conservative view of family and gender patterns, and, on
the other, a commercial and industrial future which is constantly evolving
and in which all social institutions and personal relationships are being
renegotiated. This opposition does not contain any inherent value judg-
 Nation and Race | 63
ment, each side being open to either positive or negative evaluation. The
calm certainties of the past can be represented as either reassuring or bor-
ing, while the dynamic flux of the city can be represented as either danger-
ously destructive or exhilarating. One of the more interesting measures of
the ideological orientation of a culture is the extent to which it will opt for
the feudal past or the urban future. While a number of French films of the
thirties are relatively neutral in their stance, merely exploiting the opposi-
tion for its known effectiveness, it is nevertheless apparent that in those
films which deal explicitly with this opposition the provinces benefit from a
markedly more favorable representation than does Paris.
Of course, Paris is not the only representative of the urban thirties in
French cinema of the decade. The same opposition is worked out in films
dealing with Canada, Morocco, and Hungary, while within France the agri-
cultural versus the urban may be played out regionally in terms of Nantes,
Marseille, or any other regional capital. Nevertheless, the myth foregrounds
Paris as the archetypal urban agglomeration, in which all these antinomies
are pushed to the limit. If the representation of Paris and of the future is far
from favorable in this decade, it is due largely to two factors, both associ-
ated with class relationships. Paris is seen as the site of conflict between the
working class and the haute bourgeoisie, and both of these classes are inex-
tricably involved with criminality. On the one hand, in a cultural tradition
inherited from the nineteenth century and more immediately from the
apache of the 1920s, the working class is seen as harboring or as merging
into the criminal underworld of the city. On the other hand, as a result of
the inheritance of embezzlement scandals culminating in the great depres-
sion, members of the haute bourgeoisie are seen as greedy, corrupt, incom-
petent, and hypocritical, considering themselves above the law.
These factors will be explored in more depth in the next chapter; for the
moment it suffices to note that when they are taken in conjunction with the
tendency to link unbridled sexuality with the night life, students, and artists
of Paris, the city is far more often in the thirties seen as a site of sexual li-
cense and criminality than of freedom and social justice. This is not so ap-
parent till 1932, but thereafter the proportion of negative representations is
about three to one. In addition, and largely as a consequence, as the decade
wears on the city comes to be seen as the site of various forces tending to
undermine commonly held values, and more specifically as the site of an
individualism which is destructive to any sense of community. The
provinces, on the other hand, benefit from association with nature’s healing
powers, which constitutes the decade’s principal myth of nature (though
not its only one). A visit to the provinces can thus provide a necessary pu-
rificatory experience for the jaded or corrupted urban individual—it is a
source of salvation, or at least of healing.
 64 |   
Not surprisingly, this geographic opposition gives rise to a recurrent
narrative trajectory: most commonly, provincials visit Paris and are horrified
by what they see; if not irremedially corrupted, they return to their provin-
cial village sadder but wiser. Thus, in melodramas innumerable innocent
provincial girls are attracted to Paris only to be seduced and abandoned by
callous Parisians (e.g., 32.74; 35.98). This narrative normally results in an
illegitimate child and, sometimes, a descent into prostitution. This, in turn,
brings them into contact with pimps and thugs, police raids, brutality,
and other sordid aspects of the all-too-familiar Parisian underworld (32.87;
35.34). The Parisian locations most cited as triggering this downfall are
nightclubs, though night life of any sort at all is considered dangerous. Ac-
tresses are particularly common agents of degradation, though all artistic
and student life is considered intrinsically impure. A provincial girl’s period
in Paris studying will almost inevitably lead, through involvement in one of
these milieus, to prostitution, drugs, and (at least attempted) suicide (e.g.,
36.19). Parisians are sophisticated, fast-talking confidence artists, all too
capable of conning the gullible provincial. Provincial men who go to Paris
seeking their sister are likely to find that she has been corrupted by the big
city (36.130); after rescuing or attempting to rescue her, they return grate-
fully to Arles or Brittany. If they fall for a Parisian woman, perhaps not real-
izing that she comes from Paris, she is sure to turn out to have a shady sexual
past which renders her unsuitable (34.93; 36.31). Even the threat of a visit
to Paris by a provincial fiancé (“to learn the ways of the world”) is enough to
win him his modest country girl, and it may become necessary for a fatherly
provincial figure to travel to Paris in order to put his wayward young relative
on the right track (35.16)—a nephew, in this case, who was about to desert
in favor of an actress the girl he had seduced and made pregnant. Indeed,
these narratives frequently end with a return to the country, where modesty,
fidelity, community, and affection ultimately provide the necessary purga-
tive process.
Occasionally, rather than a return trajectory of this sort, a man is torn
between a wife in the provinces and a mistress in Paris (37.87), or vice versa
(33.54). Occasionally, the conflict is triggered by the visit of a Parisian to
the provinces, which causes a scandal or, at least, reveals an irreconcilable in-
compatibility between the two sets of values. Typically, a model marries
into a provincial family and, try as she might to please her provincial in-
laws, she cannot ever be other than an intruder (30.93), or an actress finds
herself lodging with a provincial judge (38.80) of the strictest morality. In
these stories, the provincial family is invariably stern, austere, and disap-
proving, while the Parisian is at least provocative and often ruthless, such as
the actress in Paris-Camargue who is out to wring everything possible from
the provincial heir (35.87). Alternatively, the provincial is something of a
simpleton, naive to the point of gullibility, like Molière’s Monsieur de Pour-
 Nation and Race | 65
ceaugnac (32.93), and easily conned by the fast-talking sophisticated trick-
sters of the capital. Thus, a provincial whose quaint ways have been paro-
died by a Parisian comedian goes to Paris and is made fun of by the
comedian’s circle (36.86). Thus, a provincial, lured into standing for parlia-
ment by a volatile Parisian actress, comes to realize the callousness and hol-
lowness of the city, and returns to the country (38.33). Thus a naive but
lovable provincial girl implicated involuntarily in the comic sexual com-
plexities of a middle-class Parisian household will fall back in relief on her
working-class aspirant from the adjacent marketplace, the nearest Paris can
offer to sincere affection (35.98). Often, of course—indeed, usually—the
gullibility of the provincial simpleton is found to conceal a superior wisdom
which sees him or her safely through all trials. In Pagnol’s treatment of this
theme, Le Schpountz (37.104), the innocent and gullible provincial harbors
dreams of becoming an actor, and a passing Parisian film company sees in
him the ideal butt of their jokes. Mocked and manipulated, dressed grotes-
quely for comic roles in what he had been led to believe were serious dra-
mas, he finally comes to realize that these Parisian filmmakers, whom he had
thought his friends, are, in fact, heartless, arrogant, and cynical. Other com-
mon themes of the thirties intersect with this one to allow the provincial to
triumph and return as a prodigal son to his modest family home, the virtues
of which he has now learned to appreciate, but the general narrative trajec-
tory is exemplary, as is the association between modern media, Paris, and
corruption.
At the beginning of the decade, in Le Rosier de Madame Husson (31.118),
the cinema is already foregrounded as prime agent of immorality and licen-
tiousness in the provincial town—indeed, Monsieur Husson reputedly fled
Madame’s rigid morality for the traditional Parisian actress, ending up in
the cinema with her. Likewise, at the end of the decade we find a Paris radio
station “discovering” the authentic charm of a provincial family, and ex-
ploiting it to detrimental effect (39.37). As the agent of contact between
city and country, the media were seen as emblematic of the social mobility
that was to disrupt age-old traditional structures and corrupt the innocence
of country ways. In Le Schpountz, this factor is exacerbated by the Ameri-
canized ways of the production team, which identifies Paris not only with
national forms of degradation but with international threats to national in-
tegrity.
Paris is not always represented so negatively, however. If the provincials
have so often to go through a learning experience involving disillusion, it is
precisely because the illusion exists as a powerful reality in the first place:
Paris has a special fascination for a younger generation of provincials who
are apparently beginning to find the constraints of rural existence intolera-
ble, and to whom the media have been whispering of more exciting possi-
bilities. Two Paris districts hold a particular attraction—the Left Bank/
 66 |   
Montparnasse and Montmartre/Pigalle—though it is quite astonishing to
note how relatively infrequently even these two neighborhoods figure in
films of the decade. They are respectively, of course, the retreats of students
and of artists, though the distinction is not very clear. Only two films refer
to the Left Bank in their titles—Rive gauche (31.115), which tells of a
model’s love for a composer, her momentary distraction by a wealthy
banker, and her ultimate recognition that the Bohemian life of Montpar-
nasse holds superior attractions, and Quartier latin (39.75), dealing with
the romantic dramas of a female student’s life. The area clearly had not ac-
quired its full mythic status at this point, though it must be said that the
young as a category had not done so either. Pigalle/Montmartre figures
incidentally as the site of innumerable nightclub scenes in films of the
decade, but the only films in which it seems to be central are the Tino Rossi
vehicle Marinella (36.75) and Gance’s film on the life of Charpentier
(39.49). The latter constitutes a classic evocation of the mythic Mont-
martre of painters, poets, and musicians, living and loving in charming lit-
tle flats clustered on the slopes of the butte, where it always seems to be
springtime.
Both Parisian districts are therefore capable of contributing elements of
glamour and fascination to the portrait of Paris, though there is also an un-
dercurrent of sleaze, at least at the foot of the butte. The provinces, how-
ever, can be much worse. If the protagonist in Angèle is, in many respects, a
conventional product of the times—the seeds of corruption sown by a vile
urban seducer, the illegitimate child, the city, prostitution and degrada-
tion—nevertheless the severity of her treatment when she is brought back
to the country shows the rigid provincial morality in an unusually harsh,
and potentially sadistic, light. Films that take this further present life in the
provinces as a stuffy, boring existence, by contrast with which the city
seems to promise limitless freedom and independence. As the two songs in
Il est charmant (31.68) note, “There’s no laughter in Riom” (“On ne rit pas
à Riom”), so “Let’s talk rather of Paris” (“En parlant un peu de Paris”).
About half a dozen films overtly mock the hidebound morality of provin-
cial life, beginning with Le Rosier de Madame Husson and continuing with
La Dame de chez Maxim’s (32.47), in which a lively Parisian girl startles
provincial society, and La Route heureuse (35.99), in which a Parisian mar-
ries into a provincial family only to find it insufferably claustrophobic; she
would leave it forever, were it not that she discovers she is pregnant. These
few films link up with the “local making good in the big city” narrative
(34.31; 39.88) to provide the few relatively positive images of Paris as a dy-
namic and fascinating environment, though even here (as in Le Schpountz)
disillusion is possible (37.102). Disillusion is also the result in that better-
known film from this genre, L’Atalante, in which the young wife’s intoxica-
 Nation and Race | 67
tion with Parisian night life would have led her to follow the same path as
Angèle and dozens of others were it not for Père Jules (34.9).
A few films go to the extreme of representing the provincial world as
not just an outdated and rather quaint relic of the past, but as dying or
already dead. The agricultural economy on which it is based is seen as
exhausted, the land infertile, and provincial social structures are disinte-
grating; survival requires that the younger generation move to the city.
The first French color film, La Terre qui meurt (36.127), took this line. Al-
though ideologically wedded to the land, to patriarchal structures, and to
the age-old rituals of agricultural life, the film acknowledges that the chil-
dren are justified in leaving the dying earth and their dead mother for the
qualified but real pleasures of an urban industrial existence. Nevertheless,
the film ends with a new couple forming to undertake the regeneration of
the land, and a final title announces “Thus, despite everything, the soil of
France will become fertile again, through the love and work of its chil-
dren”—a lesson not far from that of Regain in the following year or of
Vichy a few years later.
But if La Terre qui meurt captures something of the ambivalence of the
period toward this antinomy of Paris and the provinces, city and country,
there is no doubt where its heart lies—close to nature and the eternal cycle
of the seasons. Most commonly, when a thirties film with an urban setting
allows its characters a visit to the country, it is figured as a moment of idyl-
lic transcendence, when the routines of daily existence and the struggle for
a crust can be momentarily forgotten. In Retour au paradis, a doctor quite
literally explores the health-giving qualities of a stay in the country for a di-
verse group of urban dwellers (35.94), and in numerous films Parisians,
wearied by the strains of their city life, find on a country holiday romance
and happiness which proves lasting (e.g., 38.58). For the working and
lower-middle classes, the Sunday in the country and the guinguette (open-
air restaurant) on the banks of the Marne constitute the equivalent of such
vacations in many late-thirties films, not least Partie de campagne (36s1). In
Le Temps des cerises, the workers experience a moment of pure pleasure dur-
ing an illegal fishing party on the boss’s property (37.109). But instances of
this effect abound in the decade: numerous films provide idyllic moments
close to nature, such as that in which the young Poil de Carotte bathes
naked in the stream, “rehearses” his wedding to Mathilde in the fields, and
processes accompanied by the farm animals (32.109). A particularly inter-
esting variant is found in Faubourg-Montmartre (31.55) when Ginette
momentarily escapes the working-class squalor, prostitution, and drugs
represented as typical of Paris and reaches a southern country village. Idyl-
lic farmyard scenes and strolls along country lanes are contrasted with sub-
jective memories of nightmarish city streets. But an abrupt change of gears
 68 |   
presents a quite different view of this country village: misled as to the na-
ture of the visitors’ relationship, the villagers turn against them and exor-
cise them in a charivari which resembles a medieval witches’ Sabbath, with
fires at night, wild dancing, weird carnival masks, and effigies on gallows.
The countryside—“la France profonde”—suddenly becomes a favored site
for the forces of superstition and unreason, and “nature” something dark
and primeval rather than idyllic and harmonious. Anomalous in the films
of the thirties, as far as I know, this episode recalls the expressionism of the
twenties and the rural gothic that was to appear in wartime films.

In sum, then, France’s principal internal frontier as constructed by the tex-

tual field of thirties films is between Paris and the provinces, while its prin-
cipal external frontier is between France and certain key countries—the
United States, Britain, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, Spain, the inhabitants
of all of which are contrasted with those of France in fairly stereotyped
ways. As the psychological distance from France grows, it is races rather
than nations that are stereotyped, notably Asians. Cutting across these cat-
egories, and potentially the more threatening precisely because they do not
fit, are Jews and Gypsies. Jews do not appear as frequently as might be ex-
pected in French films of this decade, given the long-standing anti-Semi-
tism of a large proportion of the French populace, particularly on the right,
but also given their presence in the literature on which so many of these
films were based, and the contemporary foregrounding of that stereotype as
a result of the racial policies promoted by the Nazis. I have been able to
identify only thirteen films produced between 1929 and 1939 in which the
presence of a Jew is thematically foregrounded, though more extensive
viewing, were it possible, would certainly have identified others. The image
of the Jew that emerges from these films is by no means as negative as one
might expect. Indeed, the majority of the instances are emphatically posi-
tive, representing Jewishness by way of attractive young women named Es-
ther or Rachel, or embodying them in solid, substantial, well-liked French
actors.
The prevailing stereotype of Jews at the time was not due directly to the
Jewish religion, of course, however much the original cause for stigmatizing
Jews may have been their supposed implication in the murder of Christ.
Rather, its basis was their particular cunning in the financial arena. Un-
doubtedly, a good deal of envy underlay this representation of Jews as usu-
rious. It resulted in a stereotype which involved sly and shifty characters
with wispy gray beards, hooked noses, rimless spectacles, a tendency to
hunch their shoulders and wring their hands, and an unwillingness to
spend their vast wealth on their own persons or their surroundings, which
are therefore smelly, dingy, and dilapidated. The sense of difference gener-
 Nation and Race | 69
ated by this image is only exacerbated by the occasional appurtenances and
symbols of an “alien” religion, and by the odd Hebrew phrase.
The literal mobilization of this image was, however, extremely rare in
the thirties. It is clearly present in Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier (33.59):
when Gaston’s creditors arrive to demand their due, they turn out all to have
Jewish names—Isaac, Cohen, Salomon—and manifest a greedy desire to
lay their hands on anything movable. Fortunately, Monsieur Poirier knows
how to deal with usurious Jews. This representation of Jewishness is also
present in Grémillon’s early film La Petite Lise (30.66), from a scenario by
Charles Spaak, in which the Jewish pawnbroker is accidentally killed in a
robbery planned by the desperate Lise and her pimp, but there is no sugges-
tion that the murder is either justified or “understandable.” Indeed, several
of the Jews who appear in these movies are or have been murdered, but their
status is always as victim, occasionally of anti-Semitic prejudice. A café pro-
prietor suffers agonies of guilt at having killed a Jew fifteen years before,
dreams he has been discovered, wakes, and drops dead (31.72). The Jewish
ghetto in a little Galician town is being looted, and our sympathies are with
the Jews, who suffer nobly under these indignities (30.31). Again, the Jews
in the Prague ghetto are being victimized and put their faith in the golem,
who is finally roused to destroy their persecutors (35.52). Admittedly, this
successor to the German expressionist cinema of the twenties associates
Jews with alchemical knowledge and strange rites, but no more so than
everyone else in the film; and it gives them all the stirring lines (“Revolt is
the birthright of the slave!”) and a plucky young girl (called Rachel, of
course) to lead their revolt.
Elsewhere, an attractive young Jewish woman is presented as a suitable
mate for an Austrian officer and gentleman, until her own people disap-
prove (30.31). Several films relate romantic tales involving young Jewish
couples, not least the Lévy series. The four films that constitute this light-
hearted series construct a Jewish family saga focusing on two (middle-aged
male) Jewish immigrants to America, their families, and their business op-
erations there and, later, in Paris (30.48; 31.63; 35.81; 36.74). These films,
especially the first, were immensely popular, as was Le Juif polonais (31.72),
and there is nothing to suggest in the surviving plot summaries that there
were significant negative connotations attached to the representation of
Jewishness in them, except insofar as a certain comic quaintness attaches to
any stereotype of that sort. Louis Bélières, who figured in over thirty other
films in that decade, many of them profoundly nationalistic, and Charles
Lamy, who often played a French aristocrat, acted the two lead roles in the
series, while Marie Glory and André Burgère, who played lead roles
throughout the thirties, played the young couple in the first. It is hard to see
any mobilization of anti-Semitic feeling in all this. Moreover, that glorious
paean to French nationalism, L’Appel du silence, was happy to remind view-
 70 |   
ers in an extended sequence that Charles de Foucauld had disguised himself
as a Jewish businessman to gain entry to Morocco (36.7).
It is true, however, that nearly all films in which Jews appear show them
as involved in finance and banking, or at least in prosperous affairs. The
well-known biography of the Frankfurt Rothschilds had led to an expecta-
tion, exploited to comic effect in Rothchild (33.113), that the whole point of
a male Jewish character in any film would be his financial adroitness. Given
the suspicion in which finance was held at this time, what is surprising is the
extent to which Jews escape any condemnation for their part in it. The enig-
matic film Ces messieurs de la Santé (33.23) is of interest here: the escaped
criminal and resurgent banker, Tafard, played by Raimu, is a Greek, but he
takes a Jew as his financial assistant to deal with the day-to-day aspects of his
financial wizardry. The latter conforms to the stereotype in being weaselly-
looking and sycophantic. As they triumph over the world of French capital-
ism, they draw on the help of a Jewish bank (called Moïse et Salomon, after
the characters in the Lévy films?). Yet despite his visually suspect appear-
ance, the Jewish assistant, like his master, profits enormously from their
gleeful, if dubious, financial deals and ends up wealthy and vindicated. In-
deed, his boss adopts a Jewish pseudonym once he escapes from jail in order
to put the police off his tracks.
This brief account of the representation of Jewishness in thirties French
films establishes an interesting framework for the two notable films in which
Jews appear later in the decade, La Grande Illusion (37.54) and La Règle du
jeu (39.78). Both use Dalio in the role, and he had not only played a Jew be-
fore, in Le Golem, but was himself Jewish (his real name was Israel Moshe
Blauschild). In La Grande Illusion, he is, like most of his predecessors, from
a banking family, the Rosenthals, and can afford regular food parcels, which
he shares with his fellow captives, as he shares the basket of theatrical cos-
tumes. He is quickly on good terms with “the men” and the particular mate
of Maréchal (Gabin), with whom he escapes. Interestingly, we are told that
his sort of person spells the end of the aristocracy, whose chateaux they have
bought up and taken over. It is therefore somewhat ironic, or perhaps sin-
gularly appropriate, that an aristocrat should sacrifice himself to ensure
Maréchal and Rosenthal’s escape. Although the representation of Jewish-
ness was predominantly positive throughout the decade, this film consti-
tutes a high point, and a deliberate statement of principle, given that
Rosenthal was a late addition to the script, replacing another “marginal”—
a dignified Negro intellectual who was originally to have escaped with
Maréchal.
In La Règle du jeu, the Jew (again of the Rosenthal family) has not just
displaced the aristocrat from the chateau, but has himself become an aristo-
crat in it. When one of the servants voices the expected anti-Semitic senti-
ments concerning Frankfurt yids (“métèques” ), the cook counterattacks
 Nation and Race | 71
with a peculiarly moving defense of the marquis’s sensitivity, his “true” aris-
tocracy, the more effective for being exemplified in something as humble as
the correct preparation of a potato salad. Not least important is the express
contrast between, on the one hand, the Jewish marquis’s “taste” and fitness
for the role and, on the other, certain French aristocrats’ unfitness. Of
course, the fact of having a Jew as a marquis is itself in line with the om-
nipresence in the film of an element of “outsiderness” even in those who
seem most to belong. After all, his wife, Christine, is not French but Aus-
trian, which was by no means a neutral observation in the context of the
day, since it both ties in with musicality (all Austrians were inherently musi-
cal) and explains her inability to treat her husband’s adultery as the conven-
tions of French society (and the boulevard genre) expect. For her it is an
alien tradition. Moreover, we are reminded that the most vigorous of all de-
fenders of the social rules, Schumacher himself, has a Germanic name and
is probably of Alsatian origin, judging by the vicious fate that he imagines
would have befallen certain poachers and fornicators if they had been
caught in that frontier territory. It is interesting to see Germans and Jews
aligned in this film in the common role of outsiders. Nevertheless, the in-
congruity of having a Jewish actor play a French aristocrat would have been
seen as provocative, and would have registered all the more strongly with
audiences of the day in that Dalio had for several years tended to be typecast
as a degenerate, a cowardly sadist, and a hysterical traitor.
 THREE

Class: Authority, Oppression,

and the Dream of Escape

3.1 THE REPRESENTATION OF AUTHORITY

I t was inevitable that one of the principal categorizations arising from an

analysis of thirties French films would be class. Capitalism was experi-
encing a crisis, and two radical alternative forms of social organization ex-
isted to further call into question the iniquitous class system that it had
generated. Innumerable studies have been devoted, in whole or in part, to
a discussion either of class relations in the thirties or of the representation
of class relations in the films of that decade. Particular attention has been
paid to the films of the Popular Front and the slightly broader category of
“poetic realism.” It should be noted, however, that those studies have been
confined mainly to about a dozen films produced in the years 1935–39—
a very small segment of the output of the French cinema. In attempting to
cast a broader net, the analysis that follows will ignore those previous stud-
ies and identify patterns of class representation with an origin earlier in the
decade. These patterns are unlikely to contradict in any radical way the ac-
cepted data about poetic realism and the Popular Front, but they may serve
to put them in a broader textual context, where it is more normal to relate
them directly to an extra-textual socio-political context.
It seems easiest to begin with the bourgeoisie rather than the working
class, because the representation of the bourgeoisie was more consistent and
coherent. Enough was said about the nobility in chapter 1, where the acqui-
sition of an aristocratic alliance was seen to serve in textual terms as little
more than a fairytale reward in romantic comedies of the first half of the
decade. Occasional recurrences of this function are apparent right up to
1938 (e.g., 38.79), but the representation of nobility is otherwise confined
to historical (costume) dramas, where it seems no less remote from reality
(e.g., 38.56). In those films, the nobility serves to provide visual spectacle by
staging ceremonial events involving elegance, grace, glitter, and a certain
statuesque solemnity. All matters of political import are settled by gaudily
 Class | 73
caparisoned men sitting around tables liberally scattered with chalices, and
all matters involving personal relationships are settled in the course of
stately balls and duels. Often, these personal matters are of a conflictual or
tragic nature, thus serving to oppose the public spectacle of the ball and pri-
vate tragedy. For instance, the disguised hero is captured at a ball (34.17), or
learns at a ball that his hopes of settling his gambling debts have been
thwarted and he must kill himself (34.70); or again it is at a ball that the
fiendish Russians come to suspect that the Polish patriot is hidden inside the
chess-playing automaton and decide to have it destroyed (38.54). Perhaps
the only films seriously to retain an overt reverence for feudal hierarchies are
Guitry’s Les Perles de la couronne (37.89) and Remontons les Champs-Élysées
(38.87), in which the most trivial, boring (and no doubt fictitious) anec-
dotes about monarchs and courtiers are presumed to have an intrinsic inter-
est, only the aristocratic are considered able to experience the higher and
finer emotions, revolutionaries are decried as slavering sadists, and “the peo-
ple” are seen as being intrinsically unreliable, if not treacherous, because
motivated exclusively by unthinking envy. A few other films, notably La
Grande Illusion, La Règle du jeu, and L’Homme de nulle part (37.54; 39.78;
36.54) “chronicle” the end of the feudal order with a certain comic regret
for a time when people knew their place and their betters had style, or dig-
nity, or a sense of social responsibility which is being lost either because of
the rise of the materialistic bourgeoisie or because of the spread of a drab
mass democracy.
By contrast with the declining nobility, almost the only occasions when
the bourgeoisie is represented favorably are those in which it either replaces
or is contrasted with that nobility. In the former, “the boss” replaces “the
count” in romantic comedies. Here, we are not really dealing with industri-
alists or businessmen as men of finance, but rather with “the boss” as a good
catch. In these “Mills and Boon” romances, typified by the Dactylo films,
the humble secretary wins the boss’s heart while vacationing on the Riviera
(31.47); the barmaid, romanced by a rich young industrialist to put pres-
sure on his family, proves so fascinating that he finally abducts her (31.125);
the young woman ruined by a banker becomes his chauffeur on a bet, but
their antagonism turns to true love, and, having won her bet, she tears up
his check (32.41). Occasionally, especially from 1933 onward, a problem-
atic aspect of these secretary-boss romances is introduced by the boss expe-
riencing financial problems consequent on the crash, as in the second
Dactylo film (34.32), in which the secretary’s boss (now her husband) is ru-
ined. Aside from such romantic comedies, the well-off middle-class male is
seen to advantage only when contrasted with a nobility whose scandalous
and dissolute ways he funds with a good-natured and ultimately benevolent
tolerance (33.59). Le Maître de forges, with its transfer of the qualities of
nobility and sensitivity to the bourgeoisie and its poeticization of the
 74 |   
dynamism of heavy industry, was remade in 1933 (33.80). This dynamism
is also admired in Chotard and Cie (32.34), which may begin by satirizing
the materialistic Chotard and contrasting him with the playful and indul-
gent approach to business of his son-in-law the poet, but ends with a ring-
ing assertion of the poetry and creativity inherent in mercantile dynamism.
Both films were produced in the early thirties, when it was still not uncom-
mon to celebrate the entrepreneurial ability of a bourgeoisie not dependent
on inherited wealth and power but able at will to start again from zero and
re-create an empire (33.96). It was in 1933 that Pagnol filmed Le Gendre de
Monsieur Poirier, in which the impoverished aristocratic snob has married
an industrialist’s daughter for mutual advantage, but also with mutual
scorn. The daughter truly loves him, however, and as in Le Maître de forges,
but with a gender reversal, he comes to appreciate her qualities and is re-
born as an honorable and self-respecting individual. This occasional fasci-
nation with the entrepreneurial drive and uprightness of the middle classes
does not entirely disappear with the crash: in L’Argent (36.8), the ruined
banker refuses to be defeated and mounts a new industrial project involving
the exploitation of radium, and in La Maison d’en face the sacked banker/
administrator takes over the brothel opposite and makes such a financial
success of it that he is able to take over the direction of another bank
(36.71).
The majority of the films mentioned here were based on plays or novels
of an earlier period. Nevertheless, the crash (which hit France in 1932) and
the scandals which accompanied it significantly clarified the representation
of the bourgeoisie, big business, and finance. A key transition film, fasci-
nating for the ambivalence of its representation, is Ces messieurs de la Santé
(33.23). At one level, it, too, is an account of a dynamic financier who, es-
caping from a prison where he has been wrongly incarcerated, starts from
nothing and builds a powerful business empire. At times, the film expresses
a sort of guilty delight in the way his cunning, his ability to think on his
feet, and his knowledge of the levers of finance, power, and human weak-
ness allow him to rise and rise, finally to regain his rightful place in control
of a firm. Moreover, everyone else also ultimately benefits from his rise. Yet
he has been imprisoned for corruption, and it is not until near the end that
there is any indication that this imprisonment might not have been justi-
fied: until then, what we see is an escaped embezzler conning and manipu-
lating others, as we suspect he had done before to earn his prison sentence,
working at best on the margins of the law and at worst in disregard of it.
For most of its length, that is, the film could be read as an exposé of the
methods of a corrupt financier. He is simply an amoral money-making ma-
chine—that is how he gets his kicks, and we are led to believe that there is a
natural hierarchy in which quick-witted con artists will always be able to
manipulate the system to come out on top.
 Class | 75
To complicate the representation, he explicitly represents “modern”
business methods: he takes over a backward family firm, uses aggressive and
deceptive publicity, thinks big, and seeks to inspire confidence without jus-
tification. He is of Greek extraction and works with Jews, including a Jew-
ish bank, since they understand this sort of business practice. He falsifies
mineral assays and engages in international arms trafficking, which is all
“just doing business.” Yet, ultimately, he is exonerated by the courts and
makes everyone richer and happier. So powerful is he that his final coup is
to confess that he’s the escaped embezzler so that the stock exchange, which
had come to depend on his high-flying deals, will collapse, and he can buy
up for a song everything he doesn’t already own—an ending used by an-
other film in the same year (33.113).
It is, then, an extraordinarily ambivalent film. All the “little people” sup-
port and love him, call him “an honest person in his way,” name their chil-
dren after him, or want to marry him, and the ending constructs him as the
savior of these little people, innocent of all past accusations. Yet, most of
the film has constructed him, convincingly, as quite the opposite. At the
end, the police apologize to him, pointing out how careful they have to be
these days, “with so many corrupt businessmen about.”
Of course, the negative representation of financiers did not derive
specifically from the crash. We are reminded by thirties films that Christ
drove the moneylenders from the temple (35.53), and that usurers were a
standard feature of nineteenth-century melodramas (36.41). But whereas
this past history has much to do with French attitudes toward Jewishness,
the banker of the thirties is condemned for quite other reasons. Not only
does he value money and property above human relations, but he is blamed
for professional incompetence and for using his financial power to exploit
others, notably workers and women. He is despicable for his desire to pull
the wool over other people’s eyes, and thus is closer to a con man than to
the traditional representation of the Jew. Numerous films represent him as
having ties with the underworld. Above all, he is morally tainted. Typical
adjectives describing the thirties banker are “seedy” and “crooked.” This is
such a standard character type in thirties films that frequently the banker/
financier/industrialist doesn’t have to do anything to earn the label “cor-
rupt”; it is simply assumed that any banker will be so, as an inevitable con-
sequence of his station or social role: to be involved with money is ipso
facto to be corrupt. When the fat boss in La Rue sans joie (38.93), who has
been making unwanted sexual advances to his secretary, is handcuffed and
led off by the police, there is no real diegetic explanation—an off-hand re-
mark suggests that not for the first time he has been fiddling the books, and
the implication is that he is “like all his kind.” His employees end up on the
street, and his secretary seems for a while to have no alternative but the
nearby brothel.
 76 |   
By this time, the representation of businessmen who manipulate the
market has become unequivocally negative. In Le Tunnel (33.134), made in
the same year as Ces messieurs de la Santé, a greedy financier planning a coup
very similar to Tafard’s—flooding the market with his shares to create panic,
intending in the resultant crash to buy up all the remaining shares—fares far
less well. His plan is looked on no longer as a cunning wheeze, but as typi-
cally criminal behavior. Betrayed by a colleague, the financier poisons him
out of spite. Thereafter, respectable financiers, when subjected to investiga-
tion, will inevitably be found to have conned investors into investing in
nonexistent oil deposits (33.111) or to have made their money by poisoning
orchards so that they could buy up the good land cheap (38.73), or to have
profited from gun-running, the responsibility for which they now hypocrit-
ically try to assign to the ship’s captain (37.75). In the comic mode, they will
sell their wife or daughter for a quick profit (36.113; 38.103), even if it
means disposing of an inconvenient son-in-law first (30.80). In Le Comte
Obligado (34.30), the greedy industrialists are perfectly willing to condone
their wives’ relations with the wealthy count in anticipation of a little in-
vestment in their super-phosphate scam, but are somewhat mortified to dis-
cover that he is their former elevator attendant. So it is not surprising that
by the late thirties, in a film exploring “behind the facade” of the respectable
world, one of the principal targets is a corrupt financier (39.25). In police
dramas of the day, a banker was either “one of the usual suspects” (33.85),
or the victim whom everyone would have had good reason to kill (38.14).
More generally, to be of the middle class, to be well off, was to be corrupt. If
the depression foregrounded the representation of class, it also polarized it,
so that the whole middle class lived under the shadow of its more extreme
representatives and their shady deals.
This polarization resulted, at the other extreme, in a mythologization
of the tramp figure, seen as totally disengaged from the world of money
and thus free of any moral taint. The tramp figure already had a consid-
erable cinematic history, notably in the Chaplin films, which established
him as a figure of innocence and purity, but in opposing him so consis-
tently to the banker/financier, thirties French films make of his conscious
rejection of the capitalist world a noble and heroic act. Tramps are often
seen participating in the mythic natural world, where simplicity and di-
rectness are figured by a life of lying in the sun, fishing, and lazing away
the days unhampered by social convention or economic constraints. The
final image of the protagonist definitively abandoning these constraints—
indeed, often abandoning a world of considerable financial ease—in order
to hit the open road is a standard ending to thirties films. This image is
gently mocked at the end of Les Bas-Fonds (36.15) with a slow iris out on
the departing tramp figures, but this mockery is itself testimony to the
stereotypical nature of the image. The ending of À nous la liberté is a pre-
 Class | 77
cursor, though in this case it is technological advances introduced by the
industrialist himself that have freed the workers to play skittles and go fish-
ing, and that have freed the industrialist himself to hit the road; more typ-
ical is Boudu (32.25), in which, having subverted the fraught middle-class
household, won the lottery, and married, Boudu abandons his respectabil-
ity and financial security, floating away down the stream to poverty and to
freedom. The final images establish the community of the open road as
the locus of true happiness.
Of course, this theme is not specific to the world of thirties tramps,
since it picks up on the well-known saying that money can’t bring happi-
ness. If you are wealthy, any apparent happiness is a momentary delusion.
You will soon find that your wife has been unfaithful and your supposed
daughter is not your own (30.27). However, thirties French films take that
saying a step further: only by rejecting money can you find true happiness
(32.102). In this tradition, a tramp becomes a banker and trumps his fi-
nancial rivals, only to reject it all and hit the road again (33.113); rather
than claim the reward for a valuable necklace, the tramp gives it away to a
young woman who’s been kind to him and hits the road again (36.45); a
tramp resembles a financier, doubles for him, and takes over, only to re-
nounce the financial life and hit the road again (35.117). In the latter case,
the financier’s life is represented as having been plagued by intolerable anx-
ieties, and now he is being blackmailed as well (and of course cheated on by
his wife—how could any woman be faithful to a banker), whereas the
tramp’s existence, on the contrary, before he is mistaken for the banker, has
been idyllic, strolling the streets with his mate, singing and playing a horri-
bly out-of-tune violin. The opposition between bankers and tramps rapidly
becomes conventional, with the one regularly becoming the other, and re-
verting (34.7); when tramps inherit fortunes or win lotteries, they readily
renounce the illusory promise of happiness that their apparent good for-
tune has provided (32.17).
Circus folk are frequently represented as sharing this footloose and
fancy-free life, and images of them hitting the road overlap with those of
tramps (39.4). More generally, artists of all sorts are represented as opposed
to the conventions of the bourgeois world, and thus able to move easily
back and forth between art and the road. In a classic instance, a Corsican
singer is a financier’s rival for a young woman whom he follows to Paris.
While the financier proposes marriage and sets off with both the woman
and (literally) a shipload of gold, the singer is “reduced” to sleeping under
the bridges of Paris with a group of tramps. They offer him a glimpse of
true community and human warmth and show a spontaneous appreciation
of his music. “We have nothing but the evening breeze, the rays of the
moon,” he sings, and they sing back, “We may be totally lacking in worldly
wealth, but we have a more valuable treasure” (36.11).
 78 |   
But if singers, musicians, poets, and circus folk were as commonly con-
trasted with bankers as were tramps, it was for a slightly different purpose:
tramps rejected money in favor of liberty, whereas artists rejected money in
favor of love. It was generally accepted that the wealthy had no access to ei-
ther of these. Thus, a model leaves her composer friend to marry a banker,
but she can’t forget her Montparnasse past and returns to a life of poverty,
art, and true love (31.115); the fat businessman has lecherous designs on
the young singer and tries to shut down the theater in which she and her
singer boyfriend are putting on a show (worse still, turn it into a movie the-
ater), but they dispose of him in a humiliating way and triumph together.
To a large extent, this opposition between banker and artist calls on stan-
dard knowledge of the incompatibility of art and commerce, of more in-
terest to the representation of art than of class; like the tramp, however, the
artist is the focus of identification in such stories, and his or her values are
thus promoted as superior (34.31).
Represented as they so often were—fat, greasy, or overly suave and slick-
talking, insincere and exploitative—it stood to reason that financiers could
not attract sincere affection, so the theme of money being incompatible
with true love evolved into a whole sub-genre of films in which someone in
a position of wealth agonizes over the sentiments of the woman (or man)
whom they love. Can they be sincere, or is it just the attraction of money
(35.95)? Many films assert this danger to be real, with the suitor seeking
nothing but mercenary advantage from a marriage (30.86; 32.73; 33.1;
33.13; 36.13; 36.63). Inherited wealth, industrial wealth, or a lottery win
brings suspect adulation. It is all too easy for a woman to be seduced by a
gleaming Hispano (33.65). It thus becomes conventional belief that rich
people can find sincere affection only by disguising their wealth (31.87;
31.107; 33.20; 33.106), pretending to be barmen, chauffeurs, secretaries,
accountants, or to have been ruined/robbed of their wealth (35.103). Alter-
natively, the rich woman’s poor suitor backs off for fear of being thought
mercenary (35.125). Sept hommes . . . une femme (36.121) combines both of
these: a rich widow is loved by a poor childhood friend who dares not de-
clare his love since he has nothing to offer her (well, if one excludes his
title). She collects around her numerous society figures who aspire to her
hand and her fortune, but when she pretends to have lost the latter they all
prove unworthy by backing off. Her childhood friend is about to declare his
love for her at last when she reveals to him that it was all a trick—she is still
rich—so once again he retires gracefully. Of course, all comes right in the
end, but the opposition of sincerity and wealth is archetypal. The heart is
more important than the wallet, as film after film proclaimed (34.30;
36.121; etc). The experience of wealth is enough to disgust or bore any
honorable man or woman, and innumerable such worthies reject rich
 Class | 79
Parisian or American merchants for the humble working man or woman
whom they have always loved (31.35; 31.111; 32.128; 39.39).
This world of mercantile insincerity is the world of schemers and slick
talkers out of which Prévert’s Batala arises (35.27). It is a world in which
dishonesty is the fastest route to social success and respectability, as Pagnol’s
Topaze learns to his advantage in a film remade by Pagnol himself four years
after its first production, though, interestingly, the remake did not enjoy the
enormous popularity of the original (32.134; 36.129). It is a world in which
politicians can be bought and sold and criminality is assumed to be endemic
in the establishment. Respectability invariably hides double dealing, as in
L’Étrange Monsieur Victor, in which Victor turns out to be a fence and mur-
derer (37.40). Press barons turn out to be arms traffickers and blackmailers
(38.14), and a banker (admittedly Oriental) is secretly running a gambling
den next door to his bank (39.51).
So, while many of these films, written and directed in the tradition of
the individualist psychodrama, focus on specific individuals who turn out
to be morally corrupt, there is often, if not always, an implicit critique of
the system as a whole, of which the banker and the industrial baron are em-
blematic figureheads. On occasion, this critique of capitalism becomes
overt. This is particularly true in 1934, not just because the depression,
which hit France in 1932, seemed to point to the economic failure of capi-
talism, but because of several specific financial scandals in that year. Never-
theless, examples of overt criticism can be found throughout the decade.
Characteristics of the system which come in for criticism are its tendency to
exploit and enslave, its tendency to favor organizational efficiency over hu-
manity, and its bureaucratic tendency toward red tape. The inherent con-
flict of class interests is seen as breeding distrust, injustice, and violence. In
the extreme, capitalism is seen simply as one of many hierarchical systems
that perpetuate privilege and constrain the human imagination.
Anarchic rejection of all authority sometimes borrows from surrealist
or, more commonly, from expressionist techniques and themes. Mad doc-
tors on the Caligari model are still to be found in France in the thirties, and
still in charge of mental asylums (30s7). Occasionally, the Germanic influ-
ence is direct, as in Dreyer’s Vampyr, also with its mad doctor (31.146),
while Lang has a lineage of mad doctors spreading death and destruction
in society (33.123). Even in 1934, an expressionist story is made in which
an alchemist transmutes lead into gold for the benefit of industrialists
(34.74), while the following year Duvivier retells the tale of the golem, the
weird clay monster fashioned by the Jews in the Prague ghetto, which
comes to life to destroy their oppressors (35.52). In general, tales of insane
authority and anguished oppression tend to be set far afield, in Mongolia,
Russia, or the Pacific, or in unspecified allegorical lands where the op-
 80 |   
pressed rise up to crush ruthless dictators (32.104; 33.150; 36.87; 38.99).
Clair’s mad financier/dictator in Le Dernier Milliardaire falls into this same
category (34.35). As in the original German expressionist movement, how-
ever, the very existence of such films, however abstract, speaks of a social
distress and distrust of existing governance.
More specific criticisms of a more clearly characterized capitalist soci-
ety can be found throughout the thirties, from Clair’s À nous la liberté
(31.1) to Quai des brumes (38.84). As is well known, the former focuses on
the dehumanizing and alienating effects of assembly-line practices, and
constitutes a critique of recent American developments. Produced in the
same year, Tumultes (31.134) also begins with a scene which implies that
the prison régime and workers’ daily routines on the assembly line are in-
distinguishable. In the same year, Pour un sou d’amour (31.107) is funda-
mentally a romance based on a rich man and his poor mate swapping
identities to test the sincerity of women’s affection, but at one point the
capitalist system is overtly blamed for the disappearance of any true human
feeling from the modern world. Whether in the comic or the earthy realist
mode, this characterization of the bourgeoisie as lacking in humanity,
warmth, or feeling is consistent throughout the thirties. In a startling comic
pastiche of the capitalist system, Fernandel, in Ernest le rebelle (38.32), is
shanghaied to work on a South American plantation where the workers are
treated as slaves overseen by ruthless managers and exploited by interna-
tional capitalists.
The harsh conditions generated for the bulk of the population by capi-
talism were the constant theme of a series of “realist” films, most of them
set in Paris. These tended to mix a more or less heavy dose of traditional
melodrama with vivid location shooting that evoked the poor quarters, the
slums, the depressed margins of Paris—the “zone.” In these repulsive sur-
roundings, living hand to mouth, often unemployed, never far from crime
or suicide, the poor are represented as hopelessly condemned to a life of
corruption, exploitation, and drudgery. From La Petite Lise (30.66) through
Faubourg Montmartre (31.55), La Rue sans nom (33.114), and Jeunesse
(34.52) to Le Temps des cerises (37.109), Les Musiciens du ciel (39.59), and
Quartier sans soleil (39.76), squalid slums and condemned buildings speak
of a suffering which is seen as an inevitable part of contemporary capital-
ism. The more melodramatic of these films opted to dramatize this suffer-
ing through the hardships of a pure young woman alone in a big city, sur-
rounded by corruption, trapped or tricked into prostitution, tempted by
suicide, sometimes saved at the last minute by the love of a fellow sufferer
(32.50; 33.92; 34.52; 34.92; 36.19; 38.94). The same story appears trans-
posed to Japan (37.124). Extensive poverty is the mark of a system which
breeds malice and viciousness in the worst, shame and humiliation in the
best, insanity and death in far too many.
 Class | 81
In the trial scene at the end of La Rue sans joie (38.93), in which Jeanne
is wrongly accused of murder because her poverty has pressured her into sit-
uations that look bad for her, her journalist friend develops a passionate in-
dictment of society in her defense, blaming the prevailing economic system,
which has forced many girls into prostitution. His harangue is greeted by
applause in court. In Ménilmontant (36.78), the system has created gross in-
equalities, poverty, and suffering, but the rich are either blithely ignorant of
this or arrogant and self-serving. When the poor try to help themselves and
actually improve conditions for their children, the rich and powerful take
over and hog the limelight. The lot of the poor is to be beasts of burden (lit-
erally, in the case of Arsule in Regain [37.100]). The rich regard them with
distaste, hate flowers, birds, and “love” (36.27), and will do anything to pre-
vent their sons from marrying across the class divide.
The bourgeoisie, who are represented as responsible for all this suffering
and degradation, or who are blamed for preferring to ignore it, for profiting
from it, and for doing nothing to rectify it, are inherently unlovely physi-
cally, an expressionist ugliness standing as a metaphor for their moral ugli-
ness (34.31; 36.99). Greed is often represented as their driving force,
making money their sole obsession, and human relations suffer as a result.
Families collapse (30.28), lovers are parted, hard-working people are ru-
ined. The corrupt banker becomes a routine mechanism for setting the nar-
rative machine in motion (30.21; 32.23; 32.41; 32.128; 36.132; 37.11;
37.35). As Pagnol proposes in Topaze, this world is one in which the dis-
honest flourish. In an even more cynical film, La Banque Némo (34.13), an
arriviste banker dabbles in shady deals but, protected by friends in high
places, enjoys the fruits of his criminal activities. Nothing can stop the rich
and powerful, it seems, except the masked marvel Judex, who kidnaps a
banker to punish him for ruining so many humble people and induces him
to repent his evil ways (33.73), or the master of disguise Arsène Lupin, who
disrupts a rich financier’s murderous activities (37.11). The rich have police
and politicians in their pocket, and to ruin them requires the fantasized in-
genuity of a masked vigilante, a lone avenger.
As the official administrators of a system whose effects were almost uni-
versally represented as degrading, bureaucrats might have been expected to
come in for severe criticism. Instead, throughout the thirties, public ser-
vants are seen as ridiculous—comical figures, pompous, inefficient, dull,
and pedantic, mindlessly implementing regulations which have long ceased
to be meaningful. This image of the bureaucrat has a long history, and the
principal instances of it in the thirties are drawn from plays of an earlier
decade—L’École des contribuables (34.37), from a play by Verneuil and Berr,
and Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir (36.80), based on characters by Courteline.
In the former, the taxation department is the butt of an ongoing joke involv-
ing a school which teaches taxpayers systematically to fiddle their returns
 82 |   
and which is taken over by the department itself to train its own staff. The
latter, also in the comic mode, is altogether more comprehensive and classic
in its ridicule: it is set in a government department manned by public ser-
vants who delight in thwarting their clientele by means of red tape, laziness,
and procrastination. Dossiers pass from office to office, absenteeism is the
norm, and the staff are eccentric to a man; they even transform their de-
partment into a rehearsal room for the Folies. A song whose theme is “It’s
not easy to do nothing” sums up their attitude. An ingenuous title at the be-
ginning advises the audience that just as Courteline was not ridiculing the
army in Le Train de 8h47 and Les Gaietés de l’escadron, so he was not ridicul-
ing the public service here—“after all, he was in the army and the public ser-
vice himself.”
In the dozen or so other films of the decade in which they figure promi-
nently, bureaucrats are consistently represented thus—sometimes eccentric,
lively, crazy, sometimes dull, fat, pedantic, but always inefficient, uncon-
cerned by either their own duties or their clients’ needs. A principal purpose
of such films is not to criticize the system but to contrast the regimentation
and regulation for which it stands with a freer, happier life based on gaiety
and good humor (31.103; 34.16) or a sensuality unconstrained by the pet-
tiness of social or moral strictures (33.12). That said, one of the most bril-
liant films of the decade was based on precisely such a bureaucrat. The
protagonist of Monsieur Coccinelle (38.66) is a civil servant in the Bureau of
Statistics. His daily routines are hilariously satirized, and all the standard
red-tape jokes are reinvigorated. A file of doomed men trudges through his
office as through the cityscapes of Metropolis, accompanied by funereal
music. His home life (at Béton-sur-Seine!) is even worse, and he dreams of
breaking out and becoming dictator of the world—like all wimps, as his
wife says. His aunt’s apparently unjustified belief in life as a fantasy end-
lessly rich with possibilities provides a useful contrast to his resignation.
Her (supposed) death brightens for a moment his drear existence, but out-
raging the social order she comes to life again and heads off into the sunset
with her lover, leaving M. Coccinelle thinking glumly, “Tomorrow, the of-
fice again.”

3.2 THE WORKING CLASS AND CRIMINALITY

On the whole, then, the social and economic structures of the day do not
fare well in thirties cinema. This is scarcely surprising in view of the pre-
vailing economic climate. It is interesting, however, to note the various
remedies which are put forward to solve this crisis. Where the problem is
seen as one of corrupt individuals, the solution is often a legal one, though
the legal institutions of the day are commonly seen as neither independent
nor powerful enough to contain the spread of corruption. Occasionally,
 Class | 83
however, members of the middle classes are offered a form of revitalization
in the course of which they rediscover a belief in life and humanity. This
may come from romantic contact with a vivacious woman (31.38; 31.43;
31.103; 34.44), but its true source is outside the realm of official sociality.
In the classic Dame de chez Maxim’s (32.47), for instance, it is specifically a
good-time girl who undermines the austere principles of Petypon and dis-
rupts the rigid morality of provincial circles. The revitalizing women are al-
ways women of the people or marginals from the world of the night, and
this marginality is the source of the vitality with which they can afford to be
so prodigal. The working class and its marginal associates have not been
stultified by the social and moral conventions which surround middle-class
life, and a dip into this hitherto unknown world of seething spontaneity
can work wonders for the pomposity of the arrogant rich—indeed, even of
the aristocracy (31.38). Such an immersion can provide not just a delicious
thrill of adventure, but occasionally a total transformation of the middle-
class self. Perhaps the most vivid instance of this is Circonstances atténuantes
(39.17), in which a judge (improbably played by Michel Simon) is stranded
by a car accident in a working-class suburb late at night; at first distastefully,
then more and more enthusiastically, he is forced into contact with a con-
vivial working-class community. The bar/hotel in which he and his wife
stay is called Les Bons Vivants, and under its influence the judge rapidly
loosens up and learns to appreciate the simple joys of working-class hu-
manity (notably as represented by Arletty).
As was often the case, the working-class community into which the
judge is received is involved in various marginal and even criminal activi-
ties, and he effectively becomes the leader of an amiable gang, learning
quite explicitly the joys of infringing on the legal regulations which he had
previously worked to uphold. Admittedly, he cheats a little, organizing rob-
beries involving his own petty cash, a motor-scooter that he has surrepti-
tiously purchased, and the tacky furniture from his own home that he has
always hated, but it is all in the interest of the new-found camaraderie with
his “mates” the criminals. In a somewhat similar way, and in the same year,
Fric-Frac (39.39) figures a conflict between the moral rectitude of middle-
class convention and the working class in its marginal/criminal guise, when
a jeweler’s assistant, destined for a life of stultifying rectitude in his em-
ployer’s shop and his employer’s daughter’s bed, accidentally discovers the
warmth, affection, humor, humanity, and community of the working class
(again in the form of Arletty but with Michel Simon now more at home
as one of the marginals). When he is caught up and caught out in their
less-than-legal activities, his newfound friends stick by him. They may be
thieves, but many respectable people would not have done as much, he
notes. The message of the film is that there is no such thing as respectable
people; they’re all thieves, but these people don’t try to hide it—they are
 84 |   
open and honest about it. If the jeweler’s assistant emerges from the “un-
derworld” at the end of the film to marry the jeweler’s daughter after all, it
is with a totally different slant on the world, not least because she, too, has
experienced the vivifying effect of the marginal. It was normal, then, for the
revitalization of the bourgeoisie to involve at least a metaphoric criminality,
and for the agent to be a worker, a marginal, or a social outcast. Boudu is
following in this tradition when he acts as catalyst for the revitalization of
the bourgeois family that takes him in (32.25). Stuffy, self-opinionated stars
are awakened by the rough passion of an apache (31.97); the pompous au-
thor who is so immersed in literature that he can’t remember enough about
love to write a convincing love scene has to be plunged into the world of
working-class language and feeling in order to regain his humanity (35.98);
in Dédé (34.34), a lawyer becomes humanized by contact with shop-girls
and criminals, while the respectable businessman’s wife fantasizes about an
affair with young Dédé, and ends up doing an erotic Arabian dance to es-
cape arrest.
Indeed, the identification between the working class and the milieu of
criminal activities is underlined throughout the thirties. “The people,” that
seething mass of humanity that inhabits the working-class quarters, is a tur-
bulent sea in which the shady elements swim with ease—or, rather, crimi-
nality is an insalubrious current in this social ocean. Some revel in it, others
do their best to avoid it, but, diffused and diluted, it seeps into every home,
and the working classes are shown as moving back and forth easily and, for
the most part, unselfconsciously between salubrious and insalubrious wa-
ters. The effect is to make of criminality a metaphor for the disenfranchised
status of the working classes, obliged as they are from time to time to ac-
knowledge their powerlessness and alienation.
In this respect, criminality functions very differently depending on the
class in which it was situated. In the middle classes, it acts consistently as a
metaphor for the moral and social corruption that exists behind a facade of
respectability, foregrounding the hypocrisy of the dominant class, and is
therefore condemned. In the working classes, it is seldom condemned,
often tolerated, sometimes celebrated. This situation is slightly confused by
constant interaction between criminality as it attaches to these two social
classes and criminality as it attaches to women as an “inescapable” aspect of
their gender, but this aspect of criminality, which has an even longer his-
tory, is dealt with in a later chapter.
Insofar as the working classes can be characterized by their association
with crime, they manifest four types of criminality—the picturesque
apache, the squalid social realist, the sentimental, and the poetic realist. The
first three are more apparent in the early thirties, while the last supersedes
them and, in some senses, gathers them into a more powerful dramatic rep-
resentation of the oppressed worker in the latter half of the decade. The
 Class | 85
gangster version of working-class life, a hangover from earlier decades, was
already largely exhausted in 1930. The apache himself was, of course, a col-
orful figure, inhabiting sordid bars and dingy apartments and warehouses;
decked out picturesquely in striped shirt, tall and violent, he was nonethe-
less the object of servile fascination for his women, whom he treated
roughly but who loved him for it. Often a pimp, he lived off his women’s
earnings, and prostitution was an inherent part of the underworld activities
in which he was involved.
Pabst’s version of The Beggar’s Opera, called L’Opéra de quat’sous (30.61),
draws on this tradition, as does La Chienne (31.31), various early Gabin
films set in the “milieu” (31.34; 31.36; 31.97), and some with Charles
Boyer (31.134; 34.55). Often, in this colorful and stylized world, it is quite
difficult to distinguish workers and workers’ unions from criminals and
criminal gangs, so interchangeable are the representations (34.34). Even
workers’ cooperatives, for instance, which are idealized in Le Crime de M.
Lange (35.27), can often seem rather like criminal organizations, and vice
versa. In Siodmak’s Tumultes (31.134), the “Coopérative des amis dans le
malheur” seems to be a Mafia-like ring of ex-convicts planning their next
coup, while in Dédé the striking unionists resemble nothing so much as
thugs as they run riot through the shoe shop. (34.34).
But that the figure of the apache is already on its way out in the early
thirties is signaled by a number of films which actually “perform” it. In the
course of one of the nightclub or variety acts which form an essential ele-
ment of the structure of many thirties films, for instance, singers, dancers,
or actors may act out typical scenes from the milieu involving principally
the apache and his moll (34.31); or perhaps a couple of Americans being
shown a faked version of Paris nightclub life may happen upon a poor un-
fortunate girl being maltreated by an apache (30s5), not realizing it is all an
act; or, as in Paris la nuit, a French countess may be treated to the same ex-
otic spectacle (30.63).
A more sordid connection between the working class and the under-
world is set up in realist melodramas about slum life in Paris. Here, the
connection is social: a certain inevitability attends the slide of vulnerable
working-class men and women into criminal activities. With no other re-
sources to call upon, and the constant need of money for rent or to feed the
family, survival requires extreme measures. These are true “street” films, in
which malice, lust, and the will to survive drive desperate people to commit
theft, rape, and murder. Such films aim to arouse pity for the plight of
working-class women forced into prostitution (33.41) or resigned to virtual
rape (33.114), or for that of oppressed but basically decent workers who are
induced to join in a hit on some rich apartment and whose past peccadil-
loes catch up with them, or who are betrayed to the police just when they
seemed to be making a go of it (33.114; 39.76). The titles of such films are
 86 |   
indicative of their mood and theme—Dans les rues, La Rue sans joie, La Rue
sans nom, Quartier sans soleil, Faubourg-Montmartre—though some, such as
Ménilmontant, have a more up-beat element. Les Bas-Fonds (36.15) and
Crime et châtiment (35.28) share something of this mood and theme,
though the gross artificiality of the sets works against the former, and the
motivation of the latter is philosophical/religious rather than social.
Alongside this linked representation of the criminal and the worker
there arose a more sentimental representation of “the little people of Paris”
—their struggles, their loves, their moments of despair and moments of
hope. The origins of this strand are generally attributed to Clair’s films, no-
tably Sous les toits de Paris (30.84) and, to a lesser extent, Quatorze juillet
(32.116), though it has not attained the level of affection and sentimental-
ity in these films that it was to acquire elsewhere. Clair’s ruthlessly clinical
portrait of the “little people” operating on the margins of legality and tak-
ing kickbacks from petty thieves, and who feel that it’s perfectly reasonable
to rob the rich and cheat their friends, is in fact far less sympathetic than is
usually acknowledged. Moreover, the air of unreality in Clair’s films is
heightened by Meerson’s magnificent but highly stylized sets. The actor in
Sous les toits de Paris—Albert Préjean—went on to make a number of films
in which his character works on the margins of the law—passing himself
off as the son of a rich man to make a killing (32.138), flogging to the
gullible public phony ways of transmuting metal into gold (34.73), con-
ning gamblers in a casino (38.51), or playing a petty thief who cons victims
in bars (34.96)—and occasionally goes to prison for it (33.127). Essentially,
however, he lacks any dramatic weight. These characters are amiable, good-
natured, full of a bumptious joie de vivre. The streets and bars that they in-
habit have none of the squalor or despair of true street movies. Around the
corner there is always an attractive affectionate working-class woman who
will win Préjean back to honest ways, or collect him at the prison door, or
head off to America with him (34.73). Préjean is better cast in Princesse
Tam-Tam as the middle-class author whose “civilizing” program strikes
Aouina as intolerably phony; one night, she plays hooky and plunges into
the world of the common people, who know how to enjoy themselves and
who have something of her own simple openness and genuineness (35.92).
Out of these three forms of worker/criminal of the early thirties grew
the doomed outcast of the late-thirties poetic realist film, fashioned largely
by Prévert and often embodied in Gabin. Basically, it took the social realism
and tragic compassion from the second form, blending it with the pic-
turesque stylization of the first and the sympathetic individualized protag-
onist of the third. Tourneur’s Justin de Marseille, one of the few of these
films to be set outside Paris, already brings certain of the relevant elements
together (34.53)—the underworld boss with a good heart who runs a tight
ship and for whom the little people of “his” city feel a real affection—an
 Class | 87
unofficial but more reliable and benign form of governance than the official
forces of order, a folk hero of the sort Gabin later embodied in Pepe le Moko
(36.99). Combined with the simple worker protagonist of Le Crime de
Monsieur Lange, this generated the figure of the outcast, deserter, and justi-
fied murderer of the late-thirties heroes played by Gabin, by which time the
dying hopes of the Popular Front had added the tragic sense of inevitable
failure already present in some street films (38.84; 39.48).
Throughout the decade, alongside this running metaphor of criminal-
ity and disenfranchisement, the worker is characterized by other metaphors
which serve to reinforce or to counterbalance this criminality: his being an
orphan, his ability to sing, his appreciation of flowers and nature. The fig-
ure of the orphan can seem omnipresent in films of the thirties. In at least
thirty-four films, the fact of being an orphan is foregrounded, with a
marked increase in frequency toward the end of the decade. It is best known
from Le Jour se lève (39.48), in which both François and Françoise are or-
phans, their names implying that it is the archetypal status of the French
people of the day. Other well-known instances are Hôtel du Nord (38.50),
in which much is made both of the Spanish refugee children orphaned by
the Spanish Civil War and of the orphan-like status of the doomed lovers,
and Quai des brumes, in which Nelly is effectively an orphan in the care of
her “guardian,” Zabel. Both she and Jean are “alone in the world.” So are
Jean and Eva in L’Escale (35.43), which is why they get along so well. He is a
solitary man, a northerner who has never been able to make friends easily,
and she is an orphan, “with no place to call home, and no one to wait up for
her.” It’s not surprising that she has fallen in with criminals, and will do so
again despite her desire to prove worthy of Jean. Les Deux Orphelines (32.50)
provides another example, in which the significance of the orphan (com-
pounded here by blindness) is foregrounded.
Because the orphan has no “home,” no sense of belonging, no commu-
nity, he or she is vulnerable to victimization by the “criminal” class—
namely, the rich and powerful. While a minority of thirties orphans exem-
plify this class-based vulnerability and alienation, however, most of them
belong with stories of “adopted sons and daughters,” where they focus at-
tention on dysfunctional families and sexuality rather than on class. They
will thus be discussed in a later chapter. For the present purpose, what is
most important about orphans is their marginality, which makes of them
victims unable to escape the hypocritical strictures of a tight-fisted bour-
geois morality. One recourse available to them is to adopt the strategy of
the tramp and take to the road. Indeed, orphans acquire significance as rep-
resentatives of a sort of inverse society, footloose and unencumbered by
conventional morality, as witness the high proportion who are taken in by
circus or theater folk in the late thirties (31.39; 34.115; 35.105; 38.111;
39.4; 39.92). Nevertheless, some of them serve to focus on the social causes
 88 |   
of criminality among the under-privileged and disenfranchised (38.83),
and thus to fill out the critique of a society which constructs its own crimi-
nals. The proposition that society constructed its own criminals was the
theme of a number of films in the period 1937–39, notably those struc-
tured around reformatories. In these films, the poor are forced into crime
by an unjust society, and it is rehabilitation, rather than punishment, that is
required (37.95; 38.83). This becomes most explicit at the end of La Tra-
dition de minuit (39.88), an interesting murder mystery in which a former
criminal who has found love and who dreams of going straight bemoans
the social determinants which have led to his criminal ways and which have
ensured that he will never be able to escape the destiny of the poor.
Against this background of anomie, disenfranchisement, and meta-
phoric criminality, the poor are regularly portrayed as having access to sim-
ple joys that their richer compatriots might envy. For one thing, despite
being characterized as outside official society, they are frequently—indeed,
normally—represented as belonging to a (anti-) community which has
more validity than that of the rich, because it is a community of the heart.
When the rich are represented, it is as isolated monsters or as oppressive and
self-interested families. It is rare to find poor or working-class individuals
represented as isolated figures, or even as families. They are usually seen in
groups of two or three “mates,” and most often as members of an extensive
network of supportive friends who come to their aid when the need arises.
The exception is in melodramas, in which isolation and its attendant vul-
nerability are an essential element of the generic mechanism. Elsewhere,
they share in a sense of belonging which is superficially at odds with their
marginal status. To some extent, this is a product of number and situation:
they are vastly more numerous than the wealthy, they live in populous quar-
ters where the nature of the housing does not allow the degree of privacy
available to the rich. Consequently, they live in public, on the street. Their
life is characterized by a number of popular sites such as the bar-restaurant
and the dance-hall, which appear so frequently that they constitute the stan-
dard backdrop to crucial narrative developments in films featuring the
working class. Their life, then, is by definition communal: they cannot help
but know a great deal about the lives and fortunes of those around them,
and their involvement in one another’s activities is therefore of a far greater
intensity than is that of the rich.
The sporting arena is of particular interest as a communal site. It ties in
with the popularity of the sportif (sporty type) in the thirties, with its em-
phasis on physical prowess, but it also allows for representation of the
masses as emotional, full of exuberance and vitality. The names of many
thirties films illustrate this tendency—Princes de la cravache (30.67), Les As
du turf (32.10), Rivaux de la piste (32.119), Direct au cœur (32.51), Prince
des Six Jours (33.108), Chouchou poids plume (32.35), Une femme au volant
 Class | 89
(33.141), Toboggan (34.100), Les Deux Favoris (36.32), Les Rois du sport
(37.102), Champions de France (38.19), Pour le maillot jaune (39.73). Clear-
ly, producers saw a title which announced a sporting theme as a desirable
form of promotion for their film. A great number of films involve a visit to
a racetrack or a stadium as a crucial episode in the narrative. Invariably,
these visits provide an opportunity for convivial interaction and a sense of
adventure, but also for greater interaction with petty criminals (pickpock-
ets, con men), and for the notorious gambling incidents which are pivotal
narrative mechanisms in so many of these films. The immensely popular
Théodore and Cie (33.124) begins at a racetrack, where two mates bet all
their money on a horse and think they’ve won, only to find that they had
registered the wrong number. The crowds, the tips, the race, and the comic
drama all construct the mates as amiable types who would rather live by
their wits than work, but who are suddenly desperately short of funds.
Another such film, Les Cinq Sous de Lavarède (39.16), ends in a bicycle
race: obliged to circle the world in one hundred days, Lavarède finally finds
himself on a stolen bicycle caught up in the final leg of the Tour de France,
which, of course, he wins. The comic bumbling and/or amiable hero can
always attain fame and win the girl’s heart by some accidental sporting
achievement. In fact, then as now, one of the few ways for a man of the
people to achieve fame and wealth was to excel in some sport. In all but two
films of the thirties, sporting accomplishments are seen as inherently and
unquestionably desirable and admirable. There are at least twenty instances
of protagonists who take up sports to impress a woman, who pretend to be
sporting types to win a woman, or who win a woman as the “natural” con-
sequence of winning a sports championship. The two exceptions to this
general rule are films in which sportifs are considered superficial when com-
pared to an artist (32.144) or to a doctor (38.119). In a number of related
films, the sporting hero is compensated for losing a crucial fight or race by
the love of an understanding woman. Occasionally, it is the distraction
and/or physical debility caused by love of a woman which is represented as
the cause of the loss (31.139; 32.51). The notion that sexual activity can
“sap vital fluids” and that abstinence breeds aggression and success were
common currency in the early thirties.
By far the greatest number of films featuring these sporting protago-
nists appear in the first half of the thirties—some thirty out of a total of
forty-five. Horse and bicycle races were among the most common sports,
and the most consistently foregrounded throughout the decade. Boxing
was common, but only in the first half of the decade, while the more “re-
fined” sports of tennis, golf, and rowing appear more in the second half. A
general trend from the boisterous and intensely physical toward the refined
and skillful is apparent. By the end of the decade, the sportif as hero could
be satirized in the Fernandel films Les Cinq Sous de Lavarède and Raphaël le
 90 |   
tatoué (39.16; 38.85); in the latter, not only are the various racing-driver
heroes of the decade mocked, but also the futuristic aerodynamic shape of
their cars.
The core of the working-class affection for sporting events is to be
found in the early Bouboule films of 1930–31, Le Roi des resquilleurs (30.78)
and La Bande à Bouboule (31.17), and possibly, though to a lesser extent, in
Le Roi du cirage (31.116), Bouboule 1er roi nègre (33.19), and Prince Bou-
boule (38.81), in all of which Georges Milton played the immensely popu-
lar ebullient working-class rogue who is never far from a boxing match, a
cycling race, a rugby match, or a race track. In fact, Le Roi des resquilleurs
can be thought of as a series of six acts or sequences, four of which focus
centrally on mass sporting events—the races, a boxing match, a bicycle
race, and a rugby match—into all of which Bouboule has to wangle his
way without paying. He and his mate are street singers, and one of the
other two sequences is set on Montmartre, where they stroll the streets with
a band, singing and selling their songs.
The contradiction is only apparent between the sporting man’s physi-
cality and the tendency of working-class protagonists to burst into song at
the slightest provocation. A crucial aspect of the “community” formed by
these poorer protagonists is their appreciation of a good song, and the two
instruments that best characterize their relationship to music are the accor-
dion and the harmonica. The middle classes never sing. They may sell pi-
anos or rent out theaters (34.31), but their interest in art or music could
never be other than mercenary, and is usually malicious. It is “the people,”
with their lively or sentimental songs, whose characteristic vitality and af-
fectivity is best captured in music. This is what music shares with sporting
arenas. In the grimmest realist drama, the disappointed protagonist can still
wander into a bar and sing a melancholy love song to the accompaniment
of an accordion (33.114). In a more positive mood, any moment of popu-
lar celebration will be marked by the appearance of an accordion and a sen-
timental song or dance (39.23). In Circonstances atténuantes (39.17), the
appearance of an accordion and the singing of “the people” (who had at
first seemed so sinister) in the bar is the key event that causes the middle-
class couple to revise their view of the bar-hotel where they have been
stranded, and to begin to see the people’s existence as marked by an envi-
able joie de vivre. Even in a spy story, the street accordionist is a key link in
the resistance chain (39.27). And, of course, Les Musiciens du ciel (39.59)
makes of the accordion something close to an instrument of salvation:
when the Salvation Army girl plays it, the con artist who is pretending to be
blind reluctantly begins to acquire a certain humanity. Indeed, it is the ugly,
destitute old man, who truly is blind, who teaches him to play the accor-
dion and thus “heals his soul.” Spiritual health and humanity are bound up
 Class | 91
in music, particularly the music of the accordion, and it is only the poor
who have access to it.
There is a distinct increase in the number of films featuring street
singers in the course of the thirties, with a sort of musical apotheosis to-
ward 1939. Even in 1934, however, the central characters can be street
singers—mates, one accompanying the other on an accordion (34.26).
Later, Fernandel plays an entertainer on a cruise liner, accompanying him-
self on the accordion (38.32). As with sport, there was a pragmatic connec-
tion here. In the thirties, as today, music was one of the few avenues to
fame and fortune for the oppressed. But, as represented in the films of the
day, it becomes much more than that: it is compensation for suffering, the
way to celebrate humble joys, and the expression of an otherwise inexpress-
ible humanity that has elsewhere been destroyed by a ruthlessly mercenary
society.
Most instances of street singers in thirties films accord with this set of
conventions: the singer, a working-class man himself, promoting the songs
of the day, focus of a sizable group of fellow workers who beat time and
join in as they get to know the words, or buy a copy of the sheet music and
sing along in pairs and groups, participating in one of the more recogniz-
able public ceremonies of working-class communal life. Among them,
there are usually some better-off people, the natural and proper prey of the
pickpockets with whom these street people are half in league. The arche-
typal (and perhaps the earliest) instance is Sous les toits de Paris (30.84),
where the protagonist is himself the street singer, and his sessions on the
street structure the narrative.
The role of street singer was more often a walk-on character role than a
principal role (34.26), but it rapidly became established as a focus of popu-
lar sentiment and good nature. A slightly more jaundiced instance from
later in the thirties (37.2) has the distraught heroine caught up in the bus-
tle and noise of a fairground, almost tempted by the sentimentality of a
street singer and his accordion accompaniment into believing in the sincer-
ity of a friend’s sexual intentions, until the reality of hotel rooms rented by
the hour supervenes. This is a rare instance in which the myths of popular
sentimentality and sincerity and of romantic love, for all of which the street
singer and the accordion stood guarantee, are presented as a seductive but
basically fraudulent illusion.
Although music is a prime signifier of the solidarity and humanity of
the working class, it is far more often associated with the male than the
female. For the working-class woman, however, a number of key images
recurred to indicate her parallel accession to a form of transcendence. Prin-
cipal among these were the occupations of florist and laundress. The con-
notations of nature, innocence, growth, and blossoming associated with
 92 |   
these activities combined to endow women with a quasi-religious status.
The best-known florist is probably Françoise in Le Jour se lève (39.48) who
in the opening sequence arrives at the sand-blasting factory where François
works with her (soon wilting) bouquet in her hand, and whose greenhouse
is an oasis of fertility and hope in a depressing slum landscape. Earlier in
the decade, Anna in Quatorze juillet (32.116) had also been a florist, and
her handcart of flowers had already guaranteed her a privileged ideological
status. In Drôle de drame (37.37), Madame Molyneux can’t stand trees or
flowers, which give her hay fever (and no doubt recall her husband’s pas-
sion for mimosa)—until, that is, Kramp the slaughterer of butchers, offers
her a posy, whereupon she becomes disconcertingly girlish and decides that
they are all right. Indeed, she becomes known to Kramp as “Daisy.” These
are only the best known of a large number of working-class men and
women whose relationships are authenticated by association with flowers.
Perhaps the first had been the protagonist in Jean de la Lune (31.70), whose
occupation is an outward and visible sign of his good heart and humble
status. Thereafter, female flower sellers prove irresistible to cabaret singers
(32.101) and to the sons of magistrates (36.27), whose middle-class fa-
thers, of course, can’t abide flowers or the sentimental virtues that they
symbolize. Such plots constitute a pale reflection of the myth of nature, as
it is represented in a cinema centrally preoccupied with urban lifestyles, but
it is crucial that it should be the poor who are illuminated by this myth,
not the rich.
Another form that the nature myth takes is the predilection of the
workers for the guinguette on the banks of the Marne. Of course, this phe-
nomenon functions as a sign of the worker’s desire for escape from the
grinding oppression of workday routine—a form of escape both more mild
and more realizable than other fantasized forms of escape—but it is signif-
icant that such an escape should be from the urban industrial domain to
that of nature. Une partie de campagne (36s1) is a relic of an age when it was
the lower-middle classes who were beginning to appreciate such an escape,
but La Belle Équipe (36.17) enthrones the guinguette as a mythic goal of
specifically working-class dreams. Its significance is most apparent in realist
dramas such as Jeunesse (34.52) because of the violence of the contrast be-
tween workday routines and the fantasized escape, but it can equally well
turn up in a musical as the logical place for a Sunday outing for lovers
(36.75). It is at a guinguette that Michel Simon and Arletty begin to teach
the jeweler’s daughter and the jeweler’s assistant the joyous ways of the peo-
ple in Fric-Frac (39.39). While the best-known instances of guinguettes
come from late in the decade, there is a classic example in Cœur de Lilas
(31.34), in which the undercover policeman, André, in his professional,
then personal, pursuit of Cœur de Lilas, moves through numerous typically
working-class locales, such as the bar-restaurant and the dance-hall. He
 Class | 93
ends up at a guinguette on the banks of the Marne, where he learns to his
dismay that she did indeed commit the crime that he is investigating.
If the florist connotes an alternative to and an escape from urban work-
ing-class routines, the laundress represents some sort of absolution for the
worker’s daily implication in industrial sin. The socio-economic oppression
which the middle classes inflict on workers is here often—indeed, nor-
mally—paralleled by sexual oppression, and laundresses are particularly
subject to sexual harassment from the arrogant rich. Valentine in Le Crime
de Monsieur Lange (35.27) is a particularly well-known example, and her
self-absolution particularly striking. Her colleague Estelle’s absolution, if
more difficult, is no less complete, but an earlier film, which has apparently
been lost, had brought together a number of these threads: a humble shoe-
repairer who “cultivates a single pitiful flower in a jam jar,” falls for a laun-
dress “whose virtue is under intense pressure” from a slick seducer (32.100).
Inevitably, the mild shoe-repairer wins out.
In the same year, Duvivier’s Poil de Carotte (32.109) presented the un-
happy boy of the title with a new serving-maid whose principal activity is
the family laundry. The washing scrubbed and hung on the line fore-
shadows his concomitant glimpse of happiness; later, he joins the young
Mathilde, with her crown of flowers, in an idyllic pastoral “wedding cere-
mony.” Such films established the routines for many later films. Zouzou
becomes a laundress (34.115), but it is her fellow laundress (named Claire!)
with whom Zouzou’s “brother” falls in love. In the next couple of years, a
number of laundresses characterize the working class (35.13), including
one who is an orphan (35.13), another who starts up a restaurant (35.20),
another whose role is to “purify” a brothel (35.18), and yet another whose
even more ambitious task is to purify an unhappy middle-class household
(36.117)—but then, she has St. Theresa on her side. All of these are res-
olutely positive figures. The last to appear is the only negative one: in En-
trée des artistes (38.31), the laundry where Isabelle works is a signifier of
ignoble commerce rather than of purification. What is more, it is overtly
opposed to Art, and what could hope to win out against Art in a thirties
film, especially when Jouvet is the prosecutor.
The “social roles” of florist and laundress, commonly available to the
working-class female, contrast interestingly with the equivalent role very
commonly assumed by the working-class male—taxi driver/chauffeur. Sev-
eral important protagonists of the thirties are taxi drivers, while many oth-
ers have mates or helpers who are so. To a certain extent, the recurrence of
taxis in these movies is due to their narrative convenience. The actions of a
narrative helper in transporting the protagonist across Paris or from one
level of reality to another (39s3) are facilitated by a job as taxi driver. In this
sense, the taxi is the rather pedestrian (so to speak!) equivalent of the magic
carpet or of the genie from a bottle granting improbable wishes. Yet its
 94 |   
archetypal significance as a marker of working-class characteristics is guar-
anteed by the fact that Bouboule himself, no less, is a taxi driver (even if he
does get his taxi stolen while at the races [31.17]). Several films foreground-
ing class in a parodic way use taxi drivers or chauffeurs as the working-class
component of an incongruous match, as when a lawyer pretends to be a
chauffeur to get at a hidden treasure (30.91) or a Russian princess proposi-
tions a taxi driver to obtain French citizenship (38.81). The chauffeur may,
in a “Mills and Boon” revelation, turn out to be a duke (38.79), or he may
pretend to be his aristocratic boss in order to rent out the chateau (35.119).
In all cases, the role of taxi driver is included specifically to contrast with
that of the elegant and the aristocratic. Harry Baur, playing the heroine’s fa-
ther in Paris, is a taxi driver who becomes convinced that his daughter, who
has aspirations above her station, is ashamed of her father’s working-class
background (36.95). If further proof were needed, one need only look to
Gardez le sourire (33.57), in which the struggling working-class couple,
after many trials, finally realize their dreams by purchasing a taxi.
This acts as a reminder that the role of taxi driver is a marker not just of
the character’s working-class station, but of his particularly prestigious role
as a working-class man who has made good. It is one way in which the poor
could have access to the toys of the rich. It was thus a signifier of technical
sophistication and of relative autonomy. Taxi drivers, or occasionally me-
chanics, were people who understood how modern machinery worked and/
or could control it. This gave them a mobility prohibited to most of their
mates, and was thus in some ways the working-class equivalent of the avia-
tor figure, whose mythic significance was then at its height. Indeed, several
taxi drivers/chauffeurs become involved with, or even (in the comic mode)
themselves become aviators. The taxi driver may simply blunder into flying
by accident (37.17), or he may use his technical skills to learn to fly in order
to impress the aviatrix he adores (33.18). He may indeed be an ex–war pilot
down on his luck who, through the accident of a handbag left in his taxi,
gets a job in films as an aviator, and marries the star (37.5).
But probably the best-known taxi driver is Jean in René Clair’s Qua-
torze juillet (32.116). As in the case of street singers and florists, it is René
Clair who recognizes the mythic significance of the taxi and who serves to
bring it into sharper focus as a narrative tool available to subsequent film-
makers. The climactic moment, when the estranged lovers “meet” in an ac-
cident involving his taxi and her flower cart, brings together a number of
key components of the decade’s filmic repertoire, not least the game-like
public debate in the middle of the street as his and her defenders manifest
the affective volatility and humanity of the people and their love of public
spectacle. In addition, the incident serves to remind us that it is not by ac-
cident that the male role involves a machine, while the female role involves
a natural organism. It is clearly yet one more metamorphosis of the opposi-
 Class | 95
tion between nature and sociality, instinct and reason, stasis and dynamism
that has long dogged Western representations of gender.
Certain connotations of technological sophistication, dynamism, mo-
bility, and autonomy shared by planes, trains, and cars extended to the
canal boat. It is already clear in L’Atalante (34.9) that the master of a canal
boat could be distinguished as a working man who has made good without
having forsaken his class roots. Master of his own relatively autonomous
world, freed from the humiliating stasis of industrial routines, he is privi-
leged not to need the fantasized forms of escape which beset other workers.
At the same time he is not, or is not represented as, implicated in the world
of commerce in the same way as the manager of a small urban enterprise.
Workers who had made good as singers might well return to their roots on
a canal boat and marry the owner’s daughter (33.8)—though, as in L’Ata-
lante, life aboard holds less interest for the wife, who is constantly tempted
by dreams of an existence more intense than the tranquil mobility of the
canal (32.20). On the other hand, wayward women might well find their
match in the quiet authority of a canal-boat captain (32.40). The romance
of the waterways did not survive the early thirties, though the canal-side
streets of Paris retained a picturesque quality in later films (36.27), best re-
membered from Hôtel du Nord (38.50).

3.3 DREAMS OF ESCAPE

In contrast to these relatively rare representations of the working man as
transfigured by contact with a transcendent reality or as calmly in control
of a relatively autonomous (and mobile) world, the more common repre-
sentation of his life is as a trap from which he can only dream of escaping.
The limiting nature of this trap is all the more cruel in that, as the pre-
ceding account indicates, the worker is commonly represented as vital, dy-
namic, affectionate, considerate, and with a limitless but unrealized poten-
tial.
Some of the films in which this trap/escape theme figures have become
widely known. In Hôtel du Nord, most of the characters have sought or are
seeking escape from an intolerable reality, though the form taken by that es-
cape varies considerably—the immigrant child has sought escape in France,
but the French, in turn, are seeking it elsewhere—the young couple in a sui-
cide pact, and the ex-gangster Paolo/Robert in a life as a new person, “Mon-
sieur Edmond.” Most strikingly, Monsieur Edmond glimpses the possibility
of a more hopeful future in a new land with the aptly named Renée. But
Renée realizes her error, and Monsieur Edmond allows the ship to sail for
Port Saïd without him, accepting at the end what the young couple had be-
lieved at the beginning—that the only attainable form of escape is to be
found in death.
 96 |   
Late-thirties films are notoriously marked by the tragic inability of pro-
tagonists such as Monsieur Edmond to escape from the trap of social real-
ity. Often, the metaphoric identity of social reality as a prison from which
the worker/criminal must necessarily seek escape is foregrounded by the
plot. Chéri-Bibi in his prison in Guyana (37.22), Nelly (and indeed the
center’s director) in the rehabilitation center (37.95), and at another level
the boarding-school trio at St. Agil (38.25) all dream of escape to a better
future from their institutional captivity. Quai des brumes (38.84) is the best-
known instance of the worker/criminal, in this case a deserter, seeking to
escape to a new life in a new land—in this case Venezuela. Again, however,
the crucial final scenes are set on the dockside, and the ship sails without
Jean. Clearly, these port settings are important insofar as they mediate be-
tween the social reality of France and a fantasized better life—they mediate,
that is, between the here and the elsewhere, France and a promised land
“over there.” Adults are less likely to reach that promised land than the
younger generation: Babs ensures that her son will “escape” to Canada, even
if she herself never can (39.80), while Kay likewise ensures that her daugh-
ter escapes the chaotic political scene in Shanghai, though she herself is
doomed not to do so, mortally stabbed but carried helplessly along in the
crush of demonstrating workers and foreigners attempting to board the last
boat leaving the stricken city (38.27). Docksides, then, are useful in that
they evoke the seamier aspects of industrial reality in conjunction with
ships and sailors whose comings and goings speak of other, more exotic
possibilities. It would have been interesting to compare the apparently lost
film Le Récif de corail (38.86) with these films in that, as in Quai des brumes,
Gabin and Morgan embody a romantic couple on the run—this time in
the South Seas—seeking to reach the Great Barrier Reef, which has come to
signify for them the transcendence of past sufferings, the plenitude of a de-
finitive escape.
Although all these films date from the late thirties, all the recurrent ele-
ments of the drama had been established long before. Marius, after all, had
from his dockside bar mythologized the tall clipper ships that sail for Brazil
and Madagascar. The bar-keeping routine which represents his tie to a frus-
trating social reality is nowhere near as onerous as that figured later in the
decade, and his dream is an older one—the “call of the sea”—yet the obses-
sion which drives him to explore new worlds has something in common
with later “escapes” (31.81). Perhaps closer to the later films and dating
from the same year was another lost film, Partir (31.99), in which a crimi-
nal on the run joins a circus and embarks with the troupe for a life in a new
land, only to find, at sea off Colombo, that escape is impossible except in
the form of suicide.
Among some fifty other films which echo these themes, it is inevitably
the more naturalistic ones that construct the most convincing argument for
 Class | 97
the necessity to escape. In La Rue sans nom (33.114), Méhoul tells the dying
child of a destitute family stories of far-off lands that he’s visited and prom-
ises that someday he’ll take him there, knowing that he never will. In Jeu-
nesse (34.52), the unemployed poor speak wistfully of leaving for the
colonies to build a better life, and rather surprisingly one of them—the fa-
ther of the illegitimate child—later proves to have done so. In Le Crime de
Monsieur Lange (35.27), Lange’s fantastic tales of Arizona Jim are explicitly
a form of escape to a place in the sun where injustices are righted and the
downtrodden defended by a mythic avenger. America (or the Americas,
since Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and, of course, French Canada figure
prominently) is the most common of these fantasized lands. Toni talks of
taking Josefa with him to a new life under new skies (35.110); Liliom has
dreamed of heading off to America to start a new life over there (as Lang,
the director, was doing at that very moment, with the help of the fee for
this film) (34.55); in a very clumsily inserted episode, the couple in Pour un
sou d’amour (31.107) sing of escape to a new life in a new land, to the ac-
companiment of a montage of coastal and ocean shots; Jacques in La Belle
Équipe (36.17) realizes his dream of a new life in Canada; the protagonist
of L’Homme de nulle part is heading for America until he meets the tramps
and assumes the identity of one of them (36.54); the young boy in Les Dis-
parus de St. Agil (38.25) is thought to have fled to America as he had always
talked of doing; and Eva twice has to watch from shore the departing liner
on which Jean is lieutenant (35.43). The impatient Viviane in Métropoli-
tain, who wants it all now, sees a ticket to America as central to the realiza-
tion of her dream (38.63), while Françoise in Le Jour se lève (39.48) has
postcards of the south, of the Riviera, and of mimosa pinned up in her
room—Valentine had seduced her with just such images—but also with
talk of America. Other protagonists have Egypt (30.82) or Pondicherry
(37.95) as their goal; or, more commonly, they simply repeat the vague
mythic phrases “partir,” “ailleurs,” “là-bas,” “une nouvelle vie,” “Ah qu’il
serait beau de partir, très loin” (“setting sail,” “another world,” “over there,”
“a new life,” “Ah, how wonderful it would be to go far, far away”) (39.88).
A reference to this motif had become almost obligatory in films of the sec-
ond half of the decade.
Three films are worth mentioning in a little more detail, since they pro-
vide interesting metaphors for this omnipresent theme—La Tendre Enne-
mie (35.109), La Route enchantée (38.92), and Monsieur Coccinelle (38.66).
In the first, the daughter loves an aviator and dreams of setting off with him
“far, far away, to a new life” but is prevented by her family, who wish her to
marry sensibly. A chorus of ghosts who are monitoring the family’s activities
because they were involved in an analogous situation with the mother fi-
nally ensures that the younger generation is able to do what the older gener-
ation was not. The mother had loved a sailor and dreamed the same
 98 |   
romantic dream, but had been prevented from leaving with him by her own
mother; now she recognizes the need to end the cycle and lets the daughter
follow her heart. In the second, a musical comedy, Jacques, played by
Trénet, is a composer whose dream is of a treasure hidden in a chateau, to
which an “enchanted road” leads. His music is effectively both the pointer
to this happier world and the means by which he reaches it. Moreover, his
father is an astronomer, and Jacques and his brother spend their evenings
gazing through his telescope at other worlds, where, in imagination at least,
it is possible to believe that people lead finer lives. Jacques hits the road as a
vagabond troubadour and, since this is a musical comedy, finds his chateau.
Unsurprisingly, the countess who lives in it has a charming daughter. In the
last of the three films, the bureaucratic M. Coccinelle sees no possibility of
escape from his drear life and doesn’t take seriously his aunt’s lifelong con-
viction that existence is inherently rich with fantasy. Her own existence
would seem to prove the contrary, since as a young girl she had fallen for a
magician, the Great Illusio, but had been parted from him by the family.
Ever since, she has kept watch at her window, awaiting his return. She is, of
course, ultimately justified when he arrives in grandeur, calms the angry
populace with a shower of magical gold, and whisks the aunt off to a new
life in unimaginable lands.
A number of films, including Le Grand Jeu (33.62) and Pepe le Moko
(36.99), enact a variation of this theme of contemporary France as a trap
from which one dreams of escaping. In them, the protagonist actually is
overseas, usually in North Africa, and dreams of return from his exile to a
France which is the fantasized promised land. Pepe’s Kasbah is at once ref-
uge and trap. As a criminal on the run, he has realized “the impossible
dream” of the oppressed French worker/criminal, only to find that “over
there” is as much a trap as was the land he fled. Although there are certain
inversions in this sort of narrative, the climactic dockside scene in which
the steamer sails without him, as it does in Le Grand Jeu without Pierre, re-
mind us of the continuities.
Occasionally in these North African exile films, however, the dream,
implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, is of escape back to a French childhood
figured as a paradise lost. It is not to a better future in a new land that the
oppressed wish to escape, but rather to a nostalgic past in the old country.
Gilbert, on the run in Algiers from a violent episode, remembers his only
true happiness as being associated with the Breton countryside of his past.
He came to North Africa to forget and to be forgotten, but he dreams of
“going home” (37.103). In La Maison du Maltais, it is again nostalgic
dreams of childhood in the French countryside that the exile feels most
strongly (38.60). More commonly, “home” for these exiles means Paris, and
specifically the working-class suburbs of the Pigalle area. Fernand and his
mates reminisce about La Place Blanche even as his son is thinking of en-
 Class | 99
listing to get away from it all (37.53). Deep in the South American jungle,
the escaped convicts reminisce about Paris and particularly about La Place
Blanche, where it’s always Sunday (37.22), while for Pepe, La Place Blanche
is the symbolic locus of his encounter with Gaby, and (along with America)
the focus of Tania’s reminiscences in the unbearably poignant song she
sings for him (36.99). Of course, one reason for the metonymic selection of
La Place Blanche to bear this metaphoric weight is the paradoxical combi-
nation of whiteness and working-class slum; but its relationship to the
mythic role of the laundress reminds us that it has not just a passive and
ironic role but an active purgative role in raising the lost past to a level of
paradoxical purity never again attainable.
In most of these more “realistic” films, escape can seem possible only by
leaving France or, if that proves impossible, then in death, yet a large num-
ber of films, both realist and escapist, use the simple narrative mechanism
of a lottery win, a gambling win, or an inheritance as a means of fantasizing
about escape from the poverty trap. It is very rare, however, for this abrupt
and unearned wealth to prove an unqualified benefit. Very often, indeed, it
proves precisely the contrary, and the implicit moral relates to the corrupt-
ing nature of all money. As the humble must learn, it is because they are
poor that they are morally superior to the beneficiaries of the system.
While lotteries, inheritances, and gambling wins, not to mention the
finding of lost valuables, all serve certain common purposes linked to an
abrupt crisis in the economic status of a large proportion of the population,
there are important distinctions in the way they function within a narrative.
Lottery wins tend to be totally unexpected, most notably by the owner of
the ticket, who has often forgotten he bought it and has trouble locating it.
In Le Million, the narrative is devoted almost exclusively to this pursuit of a
lost ticket (31.84). If the problem of locating a lost ticket can have a certain
suspense value, the win itself is a total surprise. It usually occurs in the open-
ing sequence, triggering narrative problems or possibilities, as when the
mates in La Belle Équipe explore ways to use their unexpected winnings
(36.17), but it can occasionally come at the end of the narrative, calling an
abrupt halt to it (34.30). In 1931 and 1932, however, it was gambling wins
which had been more likely to call an abrupt halt to the narrative, by solving
financial problems and allowing the hero to marry the heroine (31.116;
32.6; 32.10; 32.86; 32.149). Unexpected inheritances had served a similar
purpose (31.88; 31.137). Guitry tended to rely heavily on one or another of
these mechanisms, as did boulevard comedy in general, because they pro-
vided narrative motivation without the obligation to develop characteriza-
tion. In Bonne Chance (35.13), the characters’ relationship is “lucky,” prov-
ing that they are meant for one another: he wins a lottery, which triggers the
narrative machine, and in the final scene he wins at gambling, thus ensuring
a happy ending. Likewise, the narrative of Le Comte Obligado (34.30) is
 100 |   
triggered by an inheritance, and a happy end is ensured by a lottery win.
Both of the most popular comedies of the early thirties open with a gam-
bling scene—in Le Roi des resquilleurs (30.78) Bouboule backs the wrong
horse by mistake, and it wins; in Théodore et Cie (33.124), on the contrary,
Théodore backs the wrong horse by mistake, and it loses (while the right
one wins).
Gambling tended, however, to be used more commonly for its suspense
value. The need for money was established in an introductory segment,
then the gambling scene, often involving fluctuating fortunes, could be ex-
panded and repeated for dramatic purposes. Such scenes commonly devel-
oped an intensity which the other mechanisms lacked, which made them
of particular value in realistic dramas. Inheritances, on the other hand,
were more common in comedies of the picaresque or vaudeville genres,
leading to comic consequences from which Fernandel, Bach, and Rellys
had great difficulty extricating themselves. Of particular delight to film-
makers and audiences alike were problematic inheritances, which came
with conditions attached. At least seventeen of these were produced in the
thirties. Most commonly, the condition attached to the inheritance was
marriage: the protagonist will inherit only if he marries in a particular way,
perhaps before he comes of age (i.e., tomorrow: 34.20), perhaps within a
year (33.78; 36.107). Usually, he must marry someone not known, or at
least not loved (33.84)—love will, of course, follow—perhaps a widow
(31.112) or someone socially below him (34.106; 38.62). Slight variants
involve the need to conceal a second marriage (33.44) or a twin (36.66).
Occasionally, the condition is more exotic, requiring the potential heir to
undertake tasks for which he is radically unfitted—a prude to manage a
nightclub (33.64), an ineffectual blowhard to undertake a round-the-world
adventure on five sous (39.16), a timid man to become a pilot (39.61) or a
lion-tamer in a circus (38.26). The idea that inheriting money involves
some sort of curse is often directed more at the thematics of the family
than of class, and it is most explicitly thematized in a horror film involving
an inherited Stradivarius that is cursed by its maker (35.107). More gener-
ally, however, all contact with unearned money is seen in this tradition as
corrupting, since it allies the acquirer of such wealth with the corrupt mid-
dle classes of society.
The characters who are most at risk of such corruption are, of course,
the poor and humble. At a time when the depression was demonstrating all
too clearly the desirability of financial stability, those who had never known
it or who had known and lost it are represented as initially rejoicing—
naively, as it turns out—in their sudden acquisition of wealth. Typical pro-
tagonists in such narratives are waiters, tramps, elevator attendants, dish-
washers, postmen, aging soldiers or teachers, valets, and laundresses. La
Belle Équipe adds to the list a travelling salesman, an unemployed worker,
 Class | 101
and an illegal immigrant (36.17). In the early thirties, the feckless young
party-goer could fulfill this function, but from 1932 onward it is more “de-
serving” categories of the poor who benefit.
One standard problem to which the inheritance exposes the heir is false
friends. From being a disregarded and marginalized member of society, the
heir rapidly becomes a social success with milling throngs of parasites and
admiring women. The theme of sincerity, so common in many genres dur-
ing this decade, again comes to the fore, together with the heir’s inflated
sense of self-importance. Hypocrisy and self-delusion are finally defeated
either by the revelation that the protagonist has not after all inherited, or by
his decision to renounce the inheritance and return to a simpler and thus
purer life. In either case, it is with relief that he finds himself no longer en-
cumbered with money and able to marry the humble (and thus sincere)
working girl who has been true to him all along (seventeen films in all). In
one such film, having finally managed to get rid of his inherited wealth, the
protagonist learns in despair that he has won the lottery (34.30).
Inevitably, it is in gambling scenes that the curse of monetary success is
most often apparent. The focus of such wins is the casino or the nightclub,
both normally characterized as sites of violence and chaos. Those who live
after dark have something to hide; their values are the reverse of those who
live by day. Indeed, the gambling den often represents the dark side of the
capitalist system. This may be explicit, as in Macao (39.51), in which the
banker passes through a secret door to the gambling den which he and his
gang of thugs run on the side, but it is often at least implicit: in Le Dernier
Milliardaire (34.35), the capitalist is called in to set Casinario back on an
even keel. To citizens of the mid-thirties, there could seem to be as little dif-
ference between the stock exchange and a casino as between a banker and a
Mafia boss. Owners of nightclubs are invariably sinister, and to fall into
their hands is to be blackmailed into behaving in a way quite foreign to
one’s normal personality. Pretty women fall into the hands of wealthy se-
ducers (31.27; 37.48), honorable soldiers fall into the hands of entrepre-
neurs out to ruin them (34.70), and directors of institutes gamble away
their funds (39.87). At the very least, the gamblers (and often their friends)
are forced onto the street or into prison (seven films). An atypical Guitry
film has the sentimental idyll between rich woman and gentleman crook
terminate in a final gambling fling in Biarritz which fails, leading to separa-
tion and perhaps death (38.2). Undoubtedly the best known of these films
that focus on a casino is Pension Mimosas (34.76), in which the craving for
wealth and for that moment of intensity and uncertainty at the gambling
table is most explicitly aligned with unhealthy passions that destroy the
family. For dramatic effect, those caught up in such corrupt maneuvers are
often contrasted with young women of ineffable purity who survive the un-
derworld of finance unscathed (36.62; 39.51; etc.).
 102 |   
Roulette and baccarat are by far the most favored forms of gambling,
though horse racing figured more commonly in the early thirties—seven
out of the sixteen films identified as using these mechanisms to 1935 in-
volve horse racing (31.57; 32.10; 32.149; 33.41; 33.124; 35.5; 36.2), but
none of the nineteen thereafter. This fall from favor must have been to do
partly with the recognition that horse racing is too public, ebullient, and
open-air a sport to generate the desired intensity, whereas the casino, with
its dramatic lighting, hushed atmosphere, and prevalence of close-ups
proved much more appropriate. It might be more accurate to say that the
connotations of gambling change significantly from 1935 on. But what-
ever the nature of the gamble—indeed, whatever the nature of the mecha-
nism for endowing the protagonists with unearned wealth, or for depriving
them of it, a strong sense of destiny is thereby introduced into these films.
The scenarios strive to suggest that the outcome of the lottery, inheritance,
or gamble involves a certain sense of rightness, even inevitability, which
speaks of the hand of the gods.
Although the two principal forms of escape fantasized by the thirties
French cinema explore geography and the uncertain benevolence of the
gods, there is, of course, a third option which is relatively little explored,
but which is in a sense the obvious and logical one: the socio-political trans-
formation of the conditions of daily existence by local or global political
action, or by revolutionary action. Some of the films which explore this op-
tion are well known—La Marseillaise (37.69) and Le Crime de Monsieur
Lange (35.27), not to mention the political-campaign films La Vie est à nous
(36s2) and Le Temps des cerises (37.109), which insist that “things must
change.” This can give the impression that the political option was strongly
represented and had broad audience recognition and support. Statistically,
however, it was not and did not. The few films which chose to explore these
dimensions, including all of the above, were more or less unsuccessful in
box-office terms—when, that is, they even managed to reach the movie
theaters.
Of the thirty or so films that deal with radical social or political trans-
formations of, or alternatives to, the existing system, most—especially those
from the early thirties—apply routine romantic formulas to dramas which
take place in safely imaginary countries. Bandit chiefs subvert the tyrannical
régime of Ferdinand of Naples (30.41), queens fall unwittingly for revolu-
tionaries (30.55), or female revolutionaries momentarily influence the life
of fellow travelers at the frontiers of imaginary countries (31.101). Sympa-
thy is invariably on the side of the revolutionary, who proves, though lowly,
to be a heroic and even noble individual (31.121). When present, the
French are invariably on the side of these heroic individuals. But if the rev-
olutions do not take place in an imaginary country such as Cucaracha
(38.32), they take place in a distant and often culturally remote region—
 Class | 103
Turkey (39.34), the South Seas (36.87), or Tibet (38.99)—and the revolu-
tion is aimed at subverting not a socio-economic régime recognizably simi-
lar to that of France, let alone Western capitalism, but rather some auto-
cratic, intolerant dictatorship that could not conceivably attract legitimate
support. At best, Russian revolutionaries are supported in their attempt to
overthrow the czarist régime, or Polish revolutionaries are engaged in a sim-
ilar, if earlier, enterprise (36.123; 37.26; 38.54; 39.60); and one apparently
lost film features a league of resistance (“Pax”), represented by a female rev-
olutionary, struggling against a European dictatorship (32.104).
The remaining fifteen or so films can be divided into those which see
innovative workers displace incompetent bosses, cooperatives displace hier-
archical systems, and revolutions transform the whole of society. Among
these are the very few films of the decade which actually mention the de-
pression explicitly (e.g., 36.85). Early in the decade, such themes tend to be
treated in a comic or lighthearted way, but later the tone is more somber. In-
deed, up until 1934, no film can be said to have treated the material seri-
ously. À nous la liberté (31.1) represents the capitalist system as inhuman,
mechanistic, deadening, but all it takes is a reminder from a former cellmate
and the successful entrepreneur hands his factory over to the workers and
returns to the congenial fecklessness of the vagabond. Moreover, it is his in-
dustrial advances based on automation and mass production, which had
initially caused the problems, which finally are represented as solving them,
allowing the workers to devote their time to more leisurely activities—“free-
dom,” defined in terms of fishing, boating, dancing, and the open road.
Even less programmatic is Les Aventures du roi Pausole (33.12), in which
Pausole’s 366 wives initiate a revolution against the black-suited functionar-
ies who bureaucratically maintain his sensual régime. And Cognasse (32.39)
proposes a cynical right-wing thesis: the apostle of socialism, once he finds
himself in charge of the factory, renounces all his principles and runs it as
ruthlessly as any capitalist. In the same vein, a later film has the photograph
of a husband smacking his wife promoted first as a revolutionary image—
the revolt of the downtrodden—then as a reactionary image—the counter-
attack of the forces of order (37.44).
The first of the more thoughtful films to deal with political change is
Si j’étais le patron (34.97), in which an inventive worker develops a muffler
that will revolutionize motoring, but is thwarted by vested interests and
unimaginative management. He is promoted to boss by a new board mem-
ber, an eccentric enlightened investor who sees the need for such creative
individuals if his investment in the firm is to be saved. There is a certain
analogy with the eccentric and absent-minded Mounier in Lange, who
blithely and uncomprehendingly agrees to having a workers’ cooperative
replace Batala (35.27). Descended from the harebrained eccentric million-
aires of tradition, these dei ex machina can scarcely be considered a useful
 104 |   
contribution to revolutionary thought, but they were surprisingly tena-
cious in left-wing films: Hercule (37.59) provides a variant in the gullible
young inheritor of a newspaper, whose naivete is ruthlessly exploited by a
cynical manager, until he recognizes what’s going on, turns the tables, and
hands the newspaper over to a workers’ cooperative. The idea of a cooper-
ative had, of course, been central to Lange: no longer were hierarchical in-
equalities to be the norm, but rather a comradely version of mateship trans-
lated into (necessarily small-scale) industrial production. Roughly the same
mateship/cooperative is the focus of La Belle Équipe (36.17), which is more
ambivalent about the possibility of such practices bringing about effective
social change or improving the lot of the workers, since it had alternative
endings in which the cooperative based on mateship either triumphed or
failed.
To sum up, if the informal socialism of mateship was supported
throughout the thirties, the slightly more formal version of it involved in a
cooperative was less widely promoted or accepted, and the direct presenta-
tion of socialist principles within a political film promoting radical social
change was extremely rare. The only two films to tackle the contemporary
political situation in France overtly and systematically are Le Temps des
cerises and La Vie est à nous. The former (37.109) is an earnest but clumsy
attempt to present the Communist Party’s policies toward the aged in a par-
tially fictional form; it is hard to see it convincing any but the already con-
verted. The latter (36s2), on the contrary, is a brilliant and constantly fasci-
nating technical tour de force, employing dramatic segments, documentary
material, and a wide array of propaganda techniques. The vicious portrayal
of bloated boardroom plutocrats gambling in the casino and grumbling
about the workers’ demands even as they prepare to sack them could hardly
be exceeded in cruelty, unless it is in the following scene, which shows them
gunning down silhouettes of workers in a clay-pigeon shoot. But of course,
this film was never screened commercially. Indeed, it would seem that the
industrial “common sense” of the time decreed that no film could succeed
if it foregrounded a contentious political or social message. Toward the end
of the thirties, the very notion of class as an organizing principle is called
into question, not least by Renoir. One only has to compare La Grande Il-
lusion (37.54) with La Règle du jeu (39.78) to recognize the shift that has
taken place. The former explicitly asserts that class is more important than
nation as a social determinant. The officer class of the French and German
armies have a similar upbringing and experience, not to mention mutual
acquaintances, which bind them in a common appreciation of mutually
held values, while the officers and the men within the French army share no
such common bond. For the officers, Paris means Fouquet’s and Maxim’s,
whereas for the men it means the bistro on the corner. Boieldieu still says
“vous” to his wife, while Maréchal says “tu” to everyone. As Maréchal noto-
 Class | 105
riously says to Boieldieu, “Everything separates us.” Taking this a step fur-
ther, La Marseillaise (37.69) has the men of opposing armies rush to em-
brace one another on hearing word that the conflict is over, only to have the
Royalist guard open fire on them.
Yet one year later, opting for an analogous hierarchical situation, La
Règle du jeu asserts precisely the opposite: despite the radical disparities in
their social standings, it is the similarities between the representatives of
different classes which are the most profound. In very general terms, this
film is based on the conventions of boulevard comedy, and of the many
surviving boulevard comedies that the French cinema had produced or,
more commonly, transcribed in the thirties it is most recognizably allied to
Guitry’s Désiré (37.34) and Mirande’s Sept hommes . . . une femme (36.121).
This genre provided a set of rigidly class-bound conventions: set in high so-
ciety, it figured two categories of character—first, the central characters,
who were rich, occupied powerful positions in society, and were often aris-
tocratic, and second, their servants. These two categories of character al-
lowed for a number of lighthearted interactions and parallels between
events and relationships upstairs and down, and particularly for complici-
ties between master and servant, mistress and maid, whose relationships
were often more intimate and more sincere than the chronically frail mar-
riage relationships. What might seem an extraordinary series of curious
complicities in La Règle du jeu between characters at opposite poles of the
diagram—between Christine and Lisette, of course, but also between Ju-
rieux and Marceau, between the marquis and Jurieux, who discovers an un-
expected sympathy for the rules just when Christine wants him to forget
them, and finally even between Marceau and Schumacher—is therefore
merely an adaptation of generic norms. Likewise, when the film brings the
marquis and Marceau together, partly on the amusing pretext that both
want the rabbits killed, and Marceau is somewhat more efficient at it than
is Schumacher, there may well be underneath this superficial similarity the
trace of a deeper one—the marquis is as much an outsider, indeed as much
a poacher, as is Marceau—but there is also a standard play with generic
norms. It is not possible to ignore the similarities between these antics and
those that structure Guitry’s earlier film, in which conversations and meals
are also intercut with or paralleled by those below-stairs. The bedtime ritu-
als in Désiré likewise evoke those at La Colinière, and the cook’s husband, a
policeman, plays a role analogous to Schumacher’s. In particular, the cen-
tral episode, where the characters depart for a moment of respite in the
country, is reminiscent of the parallel scenes in Renoir’s film. Of course,
such trips into nature were a part of the standard repertory, and occasion-
ally they proved as here anything but restful. In the Mirande film, for in-
stance (36.121), when the widow invites her suitors to her country house
for a hunt, the expedition proves distinctly uncomfortable for them, since
 106 |   
it is the moment when they are tested and found wanting. A hunt is again
the centerpiece of the film, highly edited, but somewhat briefer than in
Renoir’s film; it leads to the countess being surprised in a half-embrace with
one of the suitors, and ends with a round of boisterous bedtime rituals in
the tiled corridors of the chateau.
This film, too, exploits a series of below-stairs scenes that echo and
comment on those above-stairs. Nevertheless, the numerous scenes in La
Règle du jeu showing those above-stairs and those below-stairs conspiring
together or helping one another out have a distinctly different effect from
others in the boulevard comedy genre, in which class is irrevocable and fun-
damental, since here it serves rather to minimize the significance of social
stratification and to imply that all the most important problems are com-
mon to humanity as a whole. Effectively, class has ceased to be the principal
determining factor in Renoir’s films, which are in the process of moving to-
ward a more humanist, or indeed pantheist, thematics.
 FOUR

Gender and the Family:

The Formation and Dissolution of the Couple

4.1 WHAT ARE MEN AND WOMEN LIKE?

T he formation and dissolution of the couple, covering the fields of gen-

der, sexuality, and the family, ranks with class as one of the two major
thematic fields of the day. It has been explored more fully than the others in
part 1 by commentators interested in the social construction and textual
representation of gender and in the implicitly incestuous relationships pro-
posed by many films of the day. Nevertheless, it is well to chronicle the ex-
tent of these and related topics in the films of the thirties, if only to provide
the broader context for the films dealt with by those commentators.
Films that foreground one or another aspect of this broad thematic field
comprise between 38 percent and 61 percent of the films in each year of the
decade, beginning at the lower end, hitting a peak in 1936, and falling back
steadily to 44 percent by 1939. For convenience, we can distinguish films
that focus on gender and gender relations from films that deal with marriage
and the family, though in practice there is inevitably a high degree of over-
lap. The former constitute on average 20 percent of each year’s output, with
a maximum of 27 to 30 percent in 1933, 1936, and 1938, while the latter
constitute on average 24 percent of each year’s output, with a high of 32
percent in 1936. Cumulatively, 1936, with 61 percent, and 1937, with 50
percent, are the years most marked by this theme. As well as these films
which foreground the thematics of the couple, nearly all films of the time
(as is normal in Western culture) incorporate at least a secondary theme re-
lating to couple formation, regardless of their primary thematics. There
must be fewer than thirty which do not do so in any way, notably the more
political films, which minimize narrative and/or individualist characteri-
zation.
The best way to approach this broad topic is by considering what, ac-
cording to the films, men and women are like. The representation of gender
has been the subject of theoretical debate for some years, and much of what
 108 |   
one finds in thirties French films falls readily within conventional categories
recognizable from the production of other media, other cultures, and other
ages. Inevitably, the representation is skewed: as a global text, at least till late
in the decade, French films manifest no doubt as to what men are like and
spend relatively little time on articulating or developing those assumptions.
The otherness of woman is, however, an endless source of mystery, fascina-
tion, and fear. The representation of men, moreover, is largely a function of
métier, and thus of class—they are defined by their role in society and, as a
result, the cinema’s class preferences designate certain forms of maleness
which are represented not so much as inherent as socially determined. Men
may be bankers or factory workers or taxi drivers (etc.), and their function
in the plot is colored by that social role—indeed, generated by it. Lacking
for the most part any such clear social determination, women are seen as
primarily determined by an essential femaleness.
A crucial aspect of that femaleness is the female body—women are pri-
marily physical creatures, defined in large part by their surface appearances.
This is exemplified most obviously in the large numbers of women who
trade in their bodies. Films of the decade take for granted the presence in
the social background of women earning their living by displaying their
bodies in cabarets, nightclubs, and casinos, selling themselves in these ven-
ues and, more formally, in brothels, or exploiting their bodies to prey on the
rich and corrupt. Sometimes, the good-time girls and prostitutes are not
represented in predatory or malevolent ways—the long-standing cliché of
the prostitute with the heart of gold appears throughout the decade. Occa-
sionally, the sensual aspects of the role are even regarded as vivifying, as
when young men, even young husbands, are “cured” of their inhibitions
through the ministrations of a “loose woman” (e.g., 35.101; 36.143). Often,
of course, this good-hearted prostitute is called upon to sacrifice herself to
save the hero. Perhaps the most fascinating and enigmatic of these is Mi-
chèle in Carrefour (38.16), whose sacrifice saves the amnesiac de Vétheuil
from discovering that he may be the gang boss Pelletier. Dostoevsky’s dra-
mas Les Frères Karamazoff (31.60) and Crime et châtiment (35.28) present
similar prostitutes with good hearts, capable of self-sacrifice and, indeed, of
regeneration through love. Even here, however, it is in the nature of woman
to be a prostitute, and thus to need regeneration. In other cases, women
who have previously been respectable are subsequently found to have de-
scended to the level of good-time girls and prostitutes or, in another con-
text, geishas (37.124; 38.27; 39.80). Respectable men may selflessly try to
save such women from their baser selves, but with little hope of success!
Twin sisters were often used to pose the double nature of women, seem-
ingly pure but inwardly corrupt, as in Faubourg Montmartre (31.55; 36.15).
In the extreme, one sister is a vampire and bares her teeth at the other
(31.146). The corruption of woman was often partially socially motivated
 Gender and the Family | 109
by the theme of urbanization, as we saw earlier, with Parisian corruption
gripping the women in contrast to the provincial honor of a landed brother
(36.130). Nearly all films involving the underworld, from L’Opéra de quat’-
sous on, involved a theme of female prostitution, while the pressure of
poverty which forces a woman into prostitution was a common theme of
melodrama (e.g., 36.19; 39.80). Perhaps the grimmest and most unsympa-
thetic representation of prostitution is that in Renoir’s La Chienne, in which
the prostitute systematically cons and deceives the naive Maurice until, dis-
covering the truth, he kills her and allows her pimp to take the blame.
This enormous proliferation of women-seen-in-terms-of-flesh, together
with an uncertainty as to how to represent that fleshliness, speaks of both a
fascination and a fundamental ambivalence. One film deals with this theme
overtly: Le Puritain (37.96) has Jean-Louis Barrault as a man of rigid morals
who stabs a prostitute to death in a fit of righteous rage, only gradually to
recognize that his act was motivated as much by his attraction to her and by
jealousy as by moral outrage. Madness ensues—a madness that indicts the
whole cinema of the time, which is implicitly recognizing that it is itself
“mad” in its construction of women in the terms outlined here.
A parallel strand in the representation of women focuses likewise on
their physicality as fundamental, but approaches it through contemporary
mechanisms for perfecting and glorifying the female body—beauty insti-
tutes, beauty parlors, beauty parades, models, and stars. Contemporary at-
titudes toward beauty salons are articulated with unselfconscious clarity in
the extraordinarily popular film Le Roi des resquilleurs (30.78): the incident
in which the two likable rogues manage to introduce themselves into the
beauty salon where their girlfriends work is no more than a narrative pre-
text for salacious scenes involving almost-naked women. It is not just that
women are the object of such fantasies, but that they are represented as of-
fering themselves willingly as such. Yet attitudes toward this physicality are
necessarily ambivalent: constructed as desirable to men, it is nevertheless
more often condemned as inadequate by comparison with a range of moral
values based on simplicity, humility, sincerity, and spirituality. On the pos-
itive side, a humble working-class girl (inevitably a florist) is rejected by her
man in favor of a star, but wins a beauty competition and herself becomes
a star, thus winning back her man (32.101); and an ugly girl manipulated
by crooks has cosmetic surgery, which transforms her both physically and
morally—she proceeds to save the family she had been planted to rob.
Beauty and glamour can, then, on rare occasions solve problems (33.67).
More often, however, cosmetic surgery creates moral dilemmas (36.138),
and winning beauty competitions implicates honorable women in sordid
situations (37.92). As the director of a beauty institute and nudist center
discovers, the cousin whom he had initially found ugly can be more appeal-
ing than the perfect bodies he has been promoting (30.9). In the extreme,
 110 |   
beauty institutes and fashion houses are indistinguishable from brothels, as
in La Rue sans joie (38.93), where Fréhel manages both and where the cat-
walk is no more than a slightly arty pretext for the display of the female
body. Fashion houses, catwalks, and designers were a standard object of
comic mockery for the gender perversions seen as inherent in them (34.30).
The morality arising from this is most effectively articulated in Prix de
beauté (30.69), largely written and (surely) partially directed by René Clair.
Lucienne enters a beauty competition, partly in the hope of escaping the
squalor and ugliness of working-class life. Having won it, however, she has
her head turned by the attentions of counts and Indian princes and is torn
between the glamorous international lifestyle opening up before her and
her former fiancé, the typesetter André. Reluctantly, she resigns herself to a
married life of ironing and making do, in a constricted flat in a working-
class neighborhood (accompanied by the inevitable metaphor of a caged
bird). The Indian prince discovers her address and urges her to leave André.
She does so, and is offered a generous contract to star in films (a contract
which André, “as chance would have it,” is given to typeset). Humiliated
and outraged, he follows her to the projection room where the rushes for
her film are being screened and shoots her dead, while her image continues
to sing “their song” on the giant screen overhead. Women are often thus
torn between a humble marriage and promotion of the physicality which is
associated with beauty contests and stars, and if they cede (and how could
they not, the thirties cinema asks), the results are always disastrous and
often, as here, fatal.
The idea that heads—especially female heads—can be turned by a
glamorous lifestyle which is incompatible with the simple sincerity of
morally more admirable people is one that we have met before. Heads may
be turned by Hollywood, but true love awaits back in France. Heads may be
turned by the glamorous lifestyle of Paris, when true feeling resides in the
provinces. Heads may be turned by the glamour of wealth, when true feel-
ing resides with the working classes. Models are as subject to such under-
standable delusions as are beauty-contest winners and stars—indeed, the
three categories are largely interchangeable in the cinema of the thirties.
The opposition between glamour and sincerity is acted out over and again,
with a Parisian model and her boyfriend’s provincial family (30.93), an
haute couture model who has to learn that her mechanic boyfriend is worth
more than the elegant twits who court her (31.69), a star who renounces her
dream of Hollywood for her French window-washer (32.142), another star
who can’t bring herself to reject an engagement even to attend her own hon-
eymoon (32.154), and yet another who renounces her glamorous lifestyle
because her astronomer boyfriend is shocked by it (37.25). One star is so
besotted by the limelight that she ignores her soldier boyfriend’s plea to join
him in a colonial life in Algeria (37.74). The allocation of roles is remark-
 Gender and the Family | 111
ably consistent: the humble, honest working-class man, the woman who
has loved him but who becomes a star/beauty queen/fashion model, and her
seduction, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, by a glamorous
lifestyle and the various associated benefits—the adulation of the masses,
say, or the importunings of an aristocrat. A worker may fall for a star and
win her with the help of his friends (36.94), but more typical is the humble
blood donor whose blood saves a star—in recognition, she tries to incorpo-
rate him into her show, but unsuccessfully; he returns wryly to his humble
life (36.55).
The conclusion is fairly obvious: women are creatures of impulse, easily
led; all body, with no more than a semblance of moral rigor, they are happy
to abandon commitments if one of these mythic roles offers itself. The am-
bivalence of the males witnessing this is nicely caught in that fine film Le
Bonheur (35.12), in which the anarchist first attempts to assassinate the star
because she represents all he despises, only to fall in love with her and try—
but fail—to live out with her the mythic euphoria that the notion of “star”
seems to offer.
But it is not just the falsity and (self-)delusion that these females flaunt
which disconcerts men. Unquestionably, their principal crime against
mankind [sic] is to aspire to a form of power which is rightly the male’s pre-
rogative. Feminist critics have discussed the extent to which Marlene Diet-
rich, for example, was subject to the male gaze, objectified by it, or, on the
contrary, was the puppet-mistress, mesmerizing and manipulating the male
viewer with her performance. The rage so often inspired by these “physical”
women of thirties French films suggests the latter—they are simply the
most successful and powerful of that extensive array of women whom the
decade’s films enjoyed condemning for their unnatural craving to dominate
men. It is not only the anarchist of Le Bonheur who wants to murder them.
Film stars are the perfect victims in murder mysteries (32.143; 37.114) be-
cause, for a variety of partially Freudian reasons, every man might well
want to murder them. Extreme instances of this female who embodies all
male desires but uses the power it gives her to dominate or destroy the male
are the queen bees, Antinéa of L’Atlantide (32.12) and Marguerite of La
Tour de Nesle (37.112). The latter takes a different lover every night, only to
have him executed at dawn. The former, whose lethal feminine grace is ex-
ternalized in her pet leopard, and whose majesty is manifest in the giant
sculpted head that we come across in her underworld lair, is the queen/god-
dess of a secret desert civilization. When two French explorers are captured
and taken to her domain, they discover others of their race, besotted by
their adoration for Antinéa, rendered desperate by the casual unconcern
with which she uses and abandons them, drugging themselves with opium
and on the verge of death. When one of the explorers resists her, putting
male friendship above love for her, she has his pal kill him. Nothing must
 112 |   
call into question the dominance of the female principle. Basically, this At-
lantis (which it is rather odd to find buried so deep in the desert) stands for
any imaginary land in which traditional gender values are reversed. To the
male travelers, it is a frightening yet obsessively fascinating world.
At the opposite extreme from the sheer physical ruthlessness of these
women, but sharing with them an equivalent castrating power, are the cold
authoritarian matriarchs who ruthlessly pursue their ends, manipulating all
those around them, not least their menfolk, whom they despise for their
feebleness. Catherine of Russia is sometimes represented thus, but any
number of thirties films evoked lesser matriarchs, closer to home and more
recognizable, coldly imposing their will on the community or on the fam-
ily. Madame Husson, of Le Rosier de Mme Husson (31.118), is one such—
guardian of the town’s morals, embodiment of ruthless propriety. She is
easily mocked, but she has many equally authoritarian, irascible, ruthless,
or ambitious sisters, bullying their husbands and sons, driving them at times
to suicide or to murder. Poil de Carotte’s mother is one such (32.109); play-
ing yet another, Françoise Rosay drives her son to suicide and her daughter-
in-law to a convent (35.73). Strong female actresses such as Rosay reveled
in such roles, while in boulevard comedies, Marguerite Moreno or Elvire
Popescu often played less sinister equivalents (33.115; 37.42; 39.5). Gab-
rielle Dorziat provided a less strong portrait of the same category of woman
in Mollenard (37.75): not only does she reject the swashbuckling husband’s
crudeness as unacceptable, but she sneers triumphantly as she humiliates
him in the name of righteousness. “I am a monster, perhaps,” he agrees,
“but it is because of you and your world.” Such overbearing women are
summed up in La Route enchantée (38.92), in which the operetta that
Jacques is composing transposes his mother into the wicked witch. Titles
such as Ma femme, homme d’affaires (32.77), Ma tante, dictateur (39.50),
and the ironic Le Sexe faible (33.115) are symptomatic of the distrust which
such women incur. At the lower end, these shrews and bigots shade into the
village gossips who appear in so many films of the decade. Occasionally,
they are “taught a well-deserved lesson,” as when the pushy wife, anxious to
acquire the Légion d’Honneur for her husband, pushes him to be kind to
the Beaux Arts director’s wife, with predictable results (39.5). Another, hav-
ing driven her husband into his secretary’s arms, returns repentant only to
find that she has to share his favors. When the village gossips force him to
choose, he chooses the secretary (39.56).
The misogyny that runs through these films is rarely voiced explicitly,
and frequently the confirmed bachelors who do voice it (32.22; 33.6) do so
only so that their subsequent discovery of romance will be all the more dra-
matically satisfying, but a degree of real hatred and fear lies behind the re-
current images of ruthless female power. It is most consistently voiced in
the “comedies” that Sacha Guitry designed to manifest his own masterful
 Gender and the Family | 113
personality. Any female who may pose a threat to his status is put in the
wrong or in a state of inferiority or ignorance. Her subsequent humiliation
may not always be so severe as when one of them has her black male baby
exchanged for a white female baby without her knowledge (30.13), but
there will always be some patronizing decision made for her by men who
understand all too well her feeble nature and can see better than she can
what is best for her. In Le Nouveau Testament (36.91), the initial sequence,
in which the doctor becomes aware that his wife is having an affair with the
son of a friend, guarantees him thereafter superior knowledge, which he ex-
ploits ruthlessly to humiliate the wife (as if she deserved it more than he
himself, given that he has fathered an illegitimate daughter whom he play-
fully passes off as his mistress).
This Guitry-esque conspiracy among men to patronize and humiliate
women is mitigated only in those of his films in which he plays an elderly
gentleman enjoying a relationship with a younger “daughter,” where age
and wealth ensure a certain “superiority.” In Mon père avait raison (36.83),
the moral of male superiority is articulated more explicitly than ever, but
the possible disadvantages of such an attitude are finally acknowledged:
brought up generation after generation by successive fathers to despise
women, to see family and female companionship as an illusion, and to ex-
ploit women merely for sensual pleasure, the males of the family perpetuate
an almost genetic misogyny, which is finally undone when the current male
heir comes to see that marriage may have a role in his life (providing, of
course, that the woman can subdue her baser instincts). The passing on of
male “wisdom” here proves useless, however true the men’s judgment of
women may be; men must simply resign themselves to enduring the tribu-
lations caused by women.
The fear of women implicit in this misogyny is equally apparent in an-
other representation of the female common to Western culture—female
sexuality as beyond the pale of civilized society and frequently aligned with
criminality. This theme is implicit in the insistent presence of the prosti-
tutes, good-time girls, and madams discussed above. Female sexuality may
often be flaunted or offered for sale in bars, nightclubs, and brothels, but it
is present less overtly in the recurrent association between desirable females
and the underworld. Sometimes the female is the villain’s daughter (as in
Bond movies, decades later), but even when there is no direct territorial
battle for her of this somewhat Oedipal sort, she is seen from the beginning
as contaminated and in need of purification by the hero.
Cumulatively, this sort of representation of femaleness is unquestion-
ably present in some two hundred of the thirteen hundred films of the
decade, and probably many more, given the number which I have not been
able to view. Because of its omnipresence, the examples cited below are
drawn primarily from films still available, some of which are widely known.
 114 |   
Among the “taints” attached to the notion of femaleness, perhaps the
mildest is simply that of being, at the moment when the protagonist en-
counters her, aligned with his enemy, the villain, or with other unsavory
characters. In Les Nuits moscovites, Natacha is engaged to the tyrannical
merchant Pierre as a result of her family’s financial indebtedness, as Captain
Ignatieff discovers to his dismay when he meets and falls for her (34.70).
More commonly, women’s association with evil is voluntary, implicating
them in the values of their protectors. Thus, when Pepe meets Gaby she is
the kept woman of a bloated capitalist, and if her final departure with that
same capitalist is due to a misunderstanding fostered by the police chief, it
is nevertheless not entirely unwilling; the life he offers more than compen-
sates for any duties required (36.99). As Madeleine, Mireille Balin plays a
similar role in Gueule d’amour (37.57), again risking compromising her sta-
tus with her protector for Lucien, a character again played by Gabin. But
even more clearly than in Pepe le Moko, a simple life of true love in a
cramped flat is here identified as not enough for a woman whose life has
been lived in casinos, mansions, and Deauville villas. She has no intention
of permanently sacrificing the good life for a passing fancy, however seduc-
tive. In this film, moreover, the convention of the femme fatale who divides
two mates is explicitly foregrounded: Madeleine turns up later as the fi-
ancée of Lucien’s friend, René, and, in the grip of one of those outbursts of
uncontrollable fury that were to become a trademark, Lucien/Gabin stran-
gles her. Of course, in a sense, Lucien is only experiencing poetic justice,
since he is presented at the beginning as a glamour boy and lady-killer, yet
the alignment of the female with high life, wealth, self-interest, and the
scornful manipulation of men is much more forcefully constructed by the
film than is any male counterpart. The latter is a mere game, the former a
matter of life and death. To put it another way, the notional viewer of this
and similar texts is male, and he may fantasize about such games but cannot
accept an equivalent female player within his fantasies.
In the same tradition, Elsa in Baccara (35.5) is the kept woman of the
seedy banker Gouldine, in whose frauds she risks being implicated. The
war hero Leclerc has to win her over to the values of the heart, aided some-
what by the hasty disappearance of the embezzling banker. In a different
genre, René Clair’s early sound films had firmly situated the female as unre-
liably associated with criminality. Pola in Sous les toits de Paris (30.84) is as
ready to take up with the thuggish Fred and his gang as she is to bestow her
favors on Albert and Louis—incidentally generating a divisive quarrel be-
tween the two buddies; in Quatorze juillet (32.116) the same Pola is in ca-
hoots with a gang of pickpockets and robbers, drawing Jean into criminal
ways, until chance redirects him toward Anna, the flower girl. Pola Illery,
who plays these roles, also played Finocle’s daughter Noâ in the sordidly re-
alistic Rue sans nom. In this film, she is again the daughter and associate of
 Gender and the Family | 115
gangsters, and if Cruseo the American is left with her at the end, the audi-
ence’s interpretation of this is somewhat colored by the clumsy coupling
they have witnessed her engaging in with the other gangster’s raffish son on
the kitchen table (33.114).
Polish and Russian women (Pola, Sandra, Natacha) are particularly likely
to have their sexuality linked with criminality. In part, this is an assertion
that females are effectively a foreign race, “alien”—that female sexuality is
“other.” Sandra in Au nom de la loi is Polish, and is mixed up in drug smug-
gling for an Oriental gang. The honorable young policeman, André, falls
for her even as he is investigating her. Seduced from his principles to the
point of helping her escape back to Poland, he is prevented from succeeding
by his chief, leading to Sandra’s poignant suicide (31.11).
If “criminal” females tended to be East European and blonde in the
early thirties, they became more sultry and lethal in the mid-thirties, lead-
ing to the recurrent image of the female spy who appeared in so many films
of the last half of the decade. As we saw in chapter 2, females make perfect
spies because of their “innate” talent for deception and betrayal, their de-
light in manipulating over-confident males, and their callous disregard for
any death and destruction that they might bring about. The female spy’s
powers of deception allow her to con even the French military hero despite
her (inevitable!) attraction to him, and to “escape,” perhaps to her death,
under cover of the German bombing of Salonica that she has arranged
(36.69). But sultry spies were not necessarily foreign: the French also had
their female super-spy in Marthe Richard (37.70), who likewise has an am-
bivalent sexual relationship with the German officer (played by von Stro-
heim) whom she dupes and drives to a magnificent suicide as he watches
the climactic bombing of his base.
These representations from 1937 of the supremely deceptive and de-
structive power of woman had been made possible by a number of more
domestic tales of deception and destruction in the years 1934–37, when
passionate dark-haired women began to dominate the cinematic scene. In
Toni (35.110), Josefa assumes this role, though the documentary realism of
that film does not allow for the generation of a pathological intensity
within the relationship in the way that later psychodramas were to do. Nor
do the stagy sets of L’Escale (35.43), though in that film the implication of
the adored woman in the devious activities of the underworld is spelled out
explicitly, as is the “innate” weakness which leads women to abandon them-
selves to sensual enjoyment even when they realize that it is not in their
long-term interest. In Naples au baiser du feu (37.80), Lolita arrives in Na-
ples on the run, having stowed away on a ship (from the United States?
from Argentina? Which of her stories is one to believe?) and takes delight
in exercising her sultry powers over the naive musician Mario and his
friend Michel, driving a wedge between them and displacing the innocent
 116 |   
girlfriend Assumta. Leaving Assumta waiting at the church, Mario engages
in a passionate affair with Lolita, who unfortunately turns out not to be
able to resist exercising her powers over every other available man as well.
Finally “unmasked” for the treacherous creature she is, she is cast out and
the two mates are friends once more. Viviane Romance, who (as she so often
did) played the vamp in this Tino Rossi musical drama, had played the As-
sumta role in another one the previous year—Au son des guitares (36.11), in
which the besotted singer and his mate leave Corsica to follow a dark for-
eigner to Marseille and thence to Paris. Like the Mireille Balin vamps, this
one is too interested in the good life that financiers can provide, however
fraudulent they may be, to devote herself to a humble Corsican singer, but
in a moment of altruism she says that she will not destroy him—love is not
for her, he should go back to his Corsican girl and forget her.
Such musical dramas are the pale, sentimentalized shadows of dramas
such as Le Dernier Tournant (39.23), a powerful version of The Postman Al-
ways Rings Twice, in which Cora enlists the aid of a vagabond to do away
with her husband. Again, a key relationship is the strange (and strangely
persistent) friendship between the vagabond and the husband, which the
vamp’s sensuality and treacherous passion must destroy. Another, better-
known instance of Viviane Romance in this vamp role is as the wife of
Charles (Vanel) in La Belle Équipe (36.17), tempting Jean (Gabin) into acts
that will—at least in the filmmakers’ preferred version—definitively destroy
their bond of friendship and, indeed, destroy the entire (male) cooperative
venture. Ginette Leclerc plays a more earthy version as the vamp (not sur-
prisingly named Viviane) in Métropolitain (38.63). When the dock worker,
Pierre, witnesses from the overhead métro what seems to be a murder, he
gets involved with her and her sinister associate, the magician Zoltini. It is
a relationship that clearly foreshadows that of the female lead and the sinis-
ter dog trainer played by Jules Berry in Le Jour se lève (39.48). For Pierre,
meeting Viviane opens doors onto a world of deadly intensity where noth-
ing is what it seems; such women can drive a man to any extreme. A little to
our surprise, at the end of the film the magician kills her in reality, as he had
seemed to kill her in the opening sequence, allowing Pierre to return to his
wife. But, of course, his attitude toward his wife has now been significantly
transformed. The lesson of all these films is not that there are two kinds of
women—on the one hand quiet wives, innocent country girls, and on the
other femmes fatales who draw men into a vortex of intensity—but that
woman is double: female sexuality is inherently destructive, and only by re-
sisting, subduing, or constraining it within the bonds of domesticity and
marriage can it be made tolerable to a civilized society.
This double nature of women leads to the creation of a number of fe-
male characters whose official maternal persona is undermined by the reve-
lation of a sensual darker side to their personality, manifested, for instance,
 Gender and the Family | 117
in a job as a chanteuse or good-time girl in a nightclub, for which they show
a talent unsuspected by their husbands, friends, and children (38.27;
39.80). This “taint” inherent in female sexuality can easily prove the death
of the woman, however honorable a mother she may be. It will certainly
lead to her being categorized as outside the bounds of civilized society, fit
only to live among brutes and thugs, and will doom any attempt that she
may make to better herself (31.34; 35.43).
This tradition of male suspicion and distrust of female sexuality pro-
poses a rather unusual context for the Michèle Morgan personality which
emerges from films of the late thirties. Like the Naples stowaway men-
tioned above, the Morgan persona is a mystery which every male character
is irresistibly induced to try to solve. She is the “mysterious stranger,” a po-
eticized and kindlier version of female “otherness” represented elsewhere
and earlier as foreign, treacherous, deadly, solipsistic. In the Michèle Mor-
gan films, the “mystery of female sexuality” still needs to be investigated,
but it is a gentler mystery than in its other representations—no less fasci-
nating, and ultimately no less deadly, but lacking the calculation, self-inter-
est, and ruthlessness that had earlier been seen as intrinsic to it. In this
version, it is no longer male friendships that the female threatens, but the
family. In Gribouille (37.55), she is still a foreigner, a Russian immigrant
called Nathalie, and still implicated obliquely in criminality, since it is at
her trial that we actually meet her, but her quiet and rather abstracted air al-
ready foreshadows her performance in Orage (37.87) and Quai des brumes
(38.84). Rather than a passionate intensity, it is an intense inwardness that
draws the juror father and his son to her and threatens to disrupt the family
as she comes between husband and wife, father and son. We never do find
out basic facts about her past or the extent of her guilt.
In subsequent films, this mystery deepens further; in Remorques, she is
a waif, born out of the violence of a metaphoric storm, which she brings
with her into the hero’s life, and which destroys the family (39.79). And in
Quai des brumes she is the “ward” of Michel Simon’s twisted Zabel. Both in
Gribouille, where at the trial she is said to have had many previous lovers,
and in Orage, where the number of her previous affairs is left open, there is
an implication of amorality, of sexual license, of sensual self-indulgence
which is at odds with the contained surfaces of the persona that her perfor-
mance constructs, and it is this paradox which is so fascinating: what
storms seethe beneath the still surface, what has she experienced with the
twisted and violent men with whom she has consorted? A final “softening”
effect on the persona that she presents is her own awareness of the destruc-
tive effect she produces, and her despair at the unhappiness that spreads out
from her every attempt to seek happiness. The one seems to be incompati-
ble with the other: like the good-hearted prostitute, she may have to com-
mit suicide to free her man from the destructiveness that she generates, or
 118 |   
at least she may try to send him away; certainly, she does not embody the
malevolent, implacable, and ultimately destructive will of some instinctual
female force that her predecessors so frequently embodied.
The double nature of women outlined so far has the “inevitable” conse-
quence of rendering them inherently duplicitous, treacherous. When men
betray one another, it is usually represented as a matter of great psychologi-
cal consequence: they experience anguish, remorse, and regret because they
are not being true to a unitary self (33.114). Most often, the nature of their
treachery is having an affair with their friend’s woman or wife. In such cases,
the treachery occurs only after a considerable struggle, and the viewer is po-
sitioned to understand and sympathize with that anguish. Such dramas are
often played out on a noble level, involving honor, integrity, and renuncia-
tion. Often, the setting is military. In L’Équipage (35.42) and Le Roman de
Werther (38.91), the act of falling in love with a friend’s woman is “excused”
because the protagonist is unaware of the relationship. In neither case does
the woman, typically deceptive, tell about her other relationship. In the lat-
ter film, when Werther finally learns the truth, he commits suicide, of
course. In L’Équipage, when Jean learns that the woman he loves is his part-
ner’s wife, he is distraught: “But your husband and I are more than brothers,
we’re a team.” The rest of the film is organized around his attempts to cope
with his distress, and with Hélène’s duplicity. The film’s conclusion is that
the only way out for him is to die nobly on a dangerous mission. In Légions
d’honneur (38.57), when the hero falls for his comrade’s wife, he renounces
her and accepts dishonor rather than betray a friend.
This high-minded nobility so “typical” of the male is not, alas, evident
in the case of female treachery, which is represented, instead, as the natural
consequence of being a woman. When the treachery is sexual, it is because
women—whether vamp or coquette—are changeable, fickle, and cannot
help trying to seduce any man who comes along. Instances of such betrayal
are numerous in films of the thirties (e.g., 34.100; 35.14; 36.114; 38.48),
but in the first half of the decade they tend to have more serious conse-
quences, involving the imprisonment or death of the man betrayed. Be-
trayed by a woman, Roger la Honte is accused of a crime committed by his
enemy and imprisoned for life with hard labor (32.122), though he subse-
quently escapes to exact vengeance. Jealousy leads the smuggler’s mistress
and the banker’s mistress to betray them to the police (34.56; 36.8), though
the latter is waiting at the prison gate on the banker’s release. Perhaps the
best known of these betrayals is that of Pepe le Moko by Inès, which results
in his capture and suicide (36.99), but an equally telling betrayal is that of
Ralph by his woman in Tumultes (31.134). During Ralph’s stay in prison,
Ania has set up house with Gustave; when Ralph is released and duly kills
Gustave, she sets up house with Ralph’s mate, Willy, and betrays Ralph to
the fatherly commissioner, which much offends Willy’s finely honed male
 Gender and the Family | 119
sense of propriety. Ralph, in turn, stabs Willy, only to have Ania sprawl
over the prostrate Willy and call him “my love.” These cumulative sexual
and legal betrayals sicken Ralph to the point where he turns to the commis-
sioner and says, “It’s enough to make you want to be back in jail. What are
human beings made of, I ask you?” Male protagonists may be criminals,
but they have high standards and finer feelings. The women they encounter
and on whom they come to depend have no such scruples, until the arrival
of Michèle Morgan in the late thirties.
This account is a little lopsided insofar as a male equivalent of the
heartless deceiver did exist—what might be called the lady-killer. The fig-
ures of the lady-killer are not deceptive, however—they do not pretend to
be anything except cavalier figures, enjoying the admiration of women and
passing from flower to flower. Moreover, especially in the first half of the
decade, they often feature in lighthearted romps rather than psychological
dramas. They are clearly male fantasy figures, briefly living out a life of
multiple uncomplicated conquests before acquiring “wisdom” and recog-
nizing the virtues of the quiet country girl who was their first love (32.9;
32.84; 33.75). The “disavowal” of these fantasized lady-killers is evident in
Cavalier Lafleur (34.23), in which the protagonist has the same name as the
lady-killer and has to cope with the undeserved reputation and conse-
quences of his namesake’s actions. Insofar as this figure survives into the
second half of the decade, it is in a form closer to the female deceiver—a
tragic figure who receives the punishment due to such actions. Gabin’s em-
bodiment of him at the beginning of Gueule d’amour has already been
mentioned, and in Gance’s Voleur de femmes he comes to a different, if no
less somber, end—the traditional “charming young thing” whom the lady-
killer was accustomed to fall back on at the end of his suave conquests is
here all too well aware of his past and refuses him; he has to flee and later
finds her married and happy. Out of spite, he tries to ruin the husband but
fails and is left desolate (37.123). Finally, another handsome young lady-
killer enters a typical community of thirties apartment dwellers and sows
discord and distress; only with his departure can any semblance of har-
mony return and the young woman whom he has seduced and abandoned
be taken in by the honest young worker (39.84).

4.2 INCESTUOUS IMPLICATIONS

If many of these representations of men, women, and the relationships be-
tween them seem all too familiar—seem, in fact, the sort of representations
that might be considered typical of Western patriarchal culture—there are
some, nevertheless, which are so distinctive as to be quite astonishing, even
shocking. Perhaps the most striking of these is the recurrent representation
of a sexual relationship, real or potential, between an aging man and a
 120 |   
young woman who is, who may be, or who could be his daughter. At least
eighty films were made during the thirties exploring such a relationship.
They are spread evenly over the decade, though they are slightly more
numerous in the first five years, with maximums of ten to thirteen films
(about 8 percent of production) in 1931, 1933, and 1937. Often, the rela-
tionship is between a twenty-year-old girl and a fifty- or sixty-year-old man,
though elsewhere the age difference may be not much more than twenty
years. What is crucial is that these films all treat the age difference, however
great or small, as the central narrative problem.
An interesting, if perhaps predictable, shift occurs in the social status of
the “old” man in the course of the decade. Early on, in line with the pre-
dominance of boulevard comedies in the years 1930–33, the older man
is often a count (31.104), baron (30.17; 30.39; 31s8), duke (30.57), or
colonel (33.98). Parallel to these social roles, however, are others which cat-
egorize the older man as belonging to one of the “desiccated” professions—
antiquary (32.63), philatelist (31.129; 32s5), notary (32.95), or public ser-
vant (31.103). These characters often serve the same narrative function as
the dry-as-dust professors in zany American comedies of the thirties, who
are clearly destined to be revitalized by a dynamic younger woman or to
transform themselves into more dynamic characters in order to rescue that
younger woman. In France, these characters become particularly common
in the middle of the decade, when, after a slow start, no fewer than eight
films feature older male professors who become besotted with one of their
students. To some extent, this can be attributed to the scriptwriters’ defen-
sive preference for intellectuals as protagonists—and particularly for intel-
lectuals who win the attractive young heroine. In this sense, it represents a
mild form of reflexivity, such as is more apparent in the decade’s almost un-
qualified enthusiasm for artists (see chapter 6). A third category of older
men predominate in the later years of the decade, namely “bosses”—mag-
nates and industrialists, bankers, or simply employers. Except for one am-
biguous instance earlier in the decade (33.6), eight of the nine identified
bosses appear in the years 1937–39.
There are three interesting lines of textual inquiry to follow up if we
are to understand the significance of these relationships between older men
and younger women. One is implicit in the social roles of the older men
and involves the nature of the social relationship between certain of them
and the young woman with whom they establish or desire to establish a re-
lationship. In the case of professors, it is almost invariably a female student
who attracts their attention (seven instances), though occasionally “profes-
sor” stands simply for crusty old man (31.8), and “student” stands simply
for independent-minded young woman (31.9). In the case of bosses, the
relationship is sometimes with an employee, as when the boss ultimately
prefers his young secretary to his wife (39.56), or with a male employee’s
 Gender and the Family | 121
sister (38.118), though in that case it is much more normal for the role
simply to stand for “a position of power,” signifying a man who is used to
getting his way (37.103) or who has a social standing that renders him vul-
nerable to blackmail (38.83). Certainly, a factor common to all these nar-
ratives is an unequal power relationship between male and female, since the
traditional gender inequalities are exacerbated by differences in social stand-
ing and influence, and by the ability of bosses or professors (and, indeed,
counts, colonels, and captains) to determine the future of the young wom-
en whom they come to desire.
Regardless of the specific social positions attributed to the older man
and the younger woman, there is good reason to see the fascination exer-
cised over the decade by these discrepant relationships as a fascination with
incest. In some sense, most, if not all, of them are speaking of a fascination
with father-daughter relationships. It is amusing to see the knots into which
the films tie themselves in order to deny this incestuous relationship, while
at the same time evoking it as a possibility. Often, the relationship is that of
father to adopted daughter. The older man has rescued a young girl who had
been done wrong and made pregnant and, as time passed, he has begun to
be attracted to her for less compassionate reasons. Thus, a philatelist takes
in a pregnant girl (31.129), or a professor his abandoned and pregnant stu-
dent (36.52). Of course, there is the well-known instance of Panisse taking
in Fanny in similar circumstances (32.58). Circus films abound with
foundling stories that have the same effect: a lion-tamer has brought up a
foundling girl for whom he develops other affections (35.105); two clowns
have brought up the daughter of a dead trapeze artist (39.92), and they end
up like the old clown in Les Saltimbanques, who had fallen for the young
dancer (30s14). But an aging picador can do the same (32.106), as can La-
gardère in Le Bossu (34.17), a middle-aged man who has rescued Aurore,
the daughter of his slain comrade, Philippe de Nevers, and brought her up
in secrecy. Aurore is a mere babe in swaddling clothes when he carries her
off to safety, only to marry her twenty years later. Again, Dernière Jeunesse
(39.24) relates the story of a colonist who rescues a young woman from
poverty only to fall for her; when he realizes that her affections lie else-
where, he strangles her. The female categories of actress and circus girl recur
in the role of “attractive but available young women” (e.g., 33.26; 37.97).
At other times, it is not an adopted daughter but a daughter-in-law
who attracts the attention of the father figure: a father may fall for the son’s
girlfriend (31.104), an actress whom he has forbidden his son to marry and
whom he meets without realizing who she is; or the baron may visit his
prospective son-in-law, only to find that son-in-law’s very attractive mis-
tress in residence (31s8); or the son’s mistress (a seamstress, of course) offers
her friend, another young seamstress, to his father (36.83). In the extreme,
the father may try to marry his daughter off to some young man with an
 122 |   
attractive mistress whom he can appropriate (37.15). The strained efforts
of such narratives to disguise the father-daughter relationship show even
further in the tale of a widower who marries his former son-in-law’s former
wife (33.120). Appropriately entitled Les Surprises du divorce, the film par-
allels this story with that of the son-in-law, who had divorced in order to
escape an oppressive mother-in-law and now finds that his ex-wife is his
mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law whom he had sought to escape is
now (if I have understood aright) his mother-in-law’s mother-in-law.
Quite common is the introduction of an uncle/niece relationship, as
when an uncle tries to help his niece and her husband, who is neglecting
her, only to get too involved (35.104), as well-intentioned older men are all
too inclined to in this decade (36.5), though ultimately they usually come
to realize the error of their ways, stand aside, and reunite the young couple.
Again, there is a contorted version of this narrative, in which an uncle due
to meet his niece sends his (male) secretary in his place. The niece has also
sent a substitute—her young friend; the uncle comes to fall for his sup-
posed niece, only to find out to his relief that there is no family bond after
all (35.60). But by far the most intense of the surviving films featuring
these uncle/niece stories is Sarati le terrible (37.103). Sarati, played by Harry
Baur, is a powerful dock boss in Algiers who has brought up his niece as his
own daughter since childhood. He is intensely possessive and jealous of any
young rival. For a while his niece/daughter seems to respond to his insistent
physical advances, until, in a moment of revulsion, she rushes out. Sarati
pursues her, tells her that he has loved her since birth and wants to marry
her. When she marries someone else, Sarati gets drunk at the wedding and
screams that his niece has been stolen from him; after a night of progres-
sively more drunken raging, he storms up to the marriage bedchamber
where she is languorously half asleep, opens his clasp knife, and stabs . . .
himself.
Still closer to home are stories of young women who need to marry ur-
gently for some formal reason, and therefore contract a mariage blanc (mar-
riage in name only) with an older man (37.67), perhaps a godfather
(33.78). Or a girl must acquire a father if she is to marry the man she loves;
she does so, only to get involved in a relationship with the pseudo-father
which ends up in an engagement. At this point, she finds out—just in time,
and to everyone’s surprise, of course—that the pseudo-father whom she is
about to marry is in fact her real father, and thus (of course!) out of bounds
(33.49). Such father-daughter relationships are very common in the sort of
boulevard comedy in which Guitry specialized. As Guitry aged and his
leading ladies (often played by his own current wife) got younger, the con-
trast in age was often foregrounded thematically. In Le Nouveau Testament
(36.91), to get revenge on his wife he engages a young secretary and pro-
ceeds to play with his wife’s doubts as to whether she is his daughter or his
 Gender and the Family | 123
mistress, or indeed both. In Bonne Chance (35.13), he is an artist who wins
the lottery and proposes a trip with a young laundress as “brother and sis-
ter.” In the course of the trip he admires an older man and a younger
woman dining together in a restaurant, dismissing young couples as with-
out interest. Their trip together (to the Riviera) is so successful that they
begin to feel they are playing with fire, because of which (or despite which)
he proposes to adopt her as his daughter. Very soon, however, their rela-
tionship becomes a sexual one, and the marriage ceremony that she had or-
ganized with a younger man is appropriated for their own use. Their
relationship, then, has passed from brother and sister to father and daugh-
ter to man and mistress, and finally to man and wife.
Many of the titles of these films deliberately evoke such titillating rela-
tionships: Mon gosse de père, Le Fils de l’autre, Le Fils improvisé, Ève cherche
un père, Les Surprises du divorce, Mademoiselle Josette ma femme, Mademoi-
selle ma mère. But, after all the narrative circumlocutions that they engage
in, it is quite a relief to find two films overtly dealing with father/daughter
affections of a forbidden kind. In both cases, widowers are taken back
twenty years to their early married life by the sudden reappearance of a
daughter who resembles the wife they loved. In La Nuit de décembre (39.64),
the musician protagonist falls for such a young woman, not realizing that
she is actually his own daughter; when he discovers the truth, he steps aside,
seeking consolation in his music. In Le Simoun as in Sarati le terrible, how-
ever, the colonist (such things are more thinkable “over there,” where isola-
tion preys on the mind and the wild desert wind of the title can evoke the
primitive passions of a more barbaric time and place) summons to his side
the daughter he has not known since childhood and, in full knowledge of
their relationship, tries to induce her to substitute for her dead mother
(33.116). She flees, distraught. Alongside these two films we should remem-
ber La Bête humaine, in which it is in part the implication that the “godfa-
ther” whom Roubaud’s wife has been visiting rather too often is in fact her
father that triggers the determination to murder him.
The weight of evidence in these films—both the quantity of them and
the intensity of several of those that survive—leaves no room to doubt the
source of the fascination. It is clear, however, that agency in initiating the
relationships most often lies with the older male “partner,” as one would ex-
pect given the power relationships. There is little sign of the younger female
actively seeking an older man, though when circumstances match her up
with one she is often represented as finding that it is just what she had un-
consciously been needing.
Unfortunately for the older man, these narratives do not often turn out
so positively. Indeed, the third major feature of interest is the rivalry that
frequently develops between the older man and one or more younger rivals.
Again, one can read this rivalry in Oedipal terms as being between the old
 124 |   
man and his offspring for control of the women of the “herd.” The young
rival may take many different forms: a dashing lieutenant, a neighbor, a pic-
ador/circus performer, or an assistant to the older professor or doctor. It is
rare to present the young couple formed by this rivalry as committed in an
uncomplicated way to one another, but threatened by a sinister older man.
One of the few couples of this sort appears in Mireille (33.91), in which
they have to cope with a jealous guardian. In Fanny and César, Marius and
Fanny have established a relationship in a previous film which complicates
the rivalry between younger and older man. Again, in Feyder’s Les Gens du
voyage, the lion-tamer’s son has an affair with the circus owner’s daughter,
and is accused by the owner of an Oedipal desire to wrest the circus from
his control (37.53). Throughout this subplot, the viewer is positioned with
the young couple. A similar Oedipal struggle for control occurs in L’Em-
buscade (39.29), in which the militant worker inciting his mates to strike
finds out, to his surprise, that he is the boss’s (step-) son. More commonly,
however, such films position the viewer with, or closer to, the older man for
whom the young rival is a threat, or at least they present the relationship be-
tween old man and younger woman as an established fact. Quite often this
established fact is an “unbalanced” marriage, and the problem proposed by
the film is the young wife’s adultery with a “son” (30.87; 31.8; 31.24). Such
narratives are more common at the beginning of the decade, though La
Femme du boulanger (38.34) is a well-known example from later on.
In most of these (often quasi-incestuous) situations, the “son” is pre-
sented as unaware of the existing relationship between his father figure and
the woman he has come to love, so not really guilty, even of simple disloy-
alty. The student at a naval school where his father is a professor falls un-
awares for the woman to whom his father is engaged (36.105). The woman
whom Frantz has met and fallen in love with turns out to be his comman-
dant’s mistress. How could he have known (37.71)? As mentioned earlier,
in the extremely popular L’Équipage (35.42) a young aviator falls for an at-
tractive young woman whom he later discovers, to his horror, to be the wife
of his much-admired captain. Similarly, a young wife on a cruise has an af-
fair with a young man who turns out to be her husband’s son by an earlier
marriage (31.58; see also 31.104 and 31.122). Just as frequently, however,
the rivalry between father and son for the young woman is overt—she is the
son’s mistress, whom the father appropriates (31s8), or the father’s forth-
coming mistress, whom the son appropriates (33.47), or the father’s wife in
a mariage blanc for whom the son falls (37.67). In Toine (32.133), the fa-
ther unmasks a woman who has already caused his ruin and is about to
cause his son’s. In Boissière (37.16), the son comes upon the woman who
has been the father’s mistress and has ruined him but discovers a strange fas-
cination for her. Such overt rivalry between father and son for the same
woman, or elaboration of a situation in which father and son have the same
 Gender and the Family | 125
mistress, was a stock in trade of thirties films: two lion-tamers, father and
son, both have Rosita as their mistress (30.92); Dmitri Karamazoff falls for
the woman who is already his father’s mistress (31.60). Occasionally, as
when the father/daughter relationship is disguised as uncle/niece, the fa-
ther/son relationship is softened into uncle/nephew (30.17; 38.68; 39.9).
These overtly Oedipal relationships seldom end with the literal death of
the father. By far the preferred ending, throughout the decade, is for the fa-
ther to “come to his senses,” to realize that his day is past and that he must
step aside in favor of young love. He may have thoughts of suicide, may
even try it (39.9), but is more likely simply to retire into a solitary old age,
consoled, if not by his music, then by some childhood friend who he now
realizes will make a more fitting partner (38.68). As in Gribouille (37.55),
however, the Oedipal conflict is often presented as threatening to tear the
family apart before it is finally resolved, usually in favor of the young cou-
ple. The old man’s final decision to step aside is usually characterized as the
proper moral ending to such a tale, and indeed the proper Oedipal ending,
if somewhat diluted, involving the victory of the son and of “young love.”
It occurs in roughly three-fifths of the narratives that have a clear resolu-
tion. At times the stepping aside of the older man takes dramatic forms, as
when the old lion-tamer allows himself, in his despair, to be eaten by his
lion (35.105) or the old picador allows himself to be torn apart by a bull
(32.106).
A more modest but better-known instance of Oedipal rivalry occurs in
Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier (33.59), in which Poirier has married his
daughter off to a feckless aristocrat, whom he despises, in the desire to ac-
quire a title. When the marriage seems to collapse, his delight edges toward
the suspect, since he takes his daughter on his knee and kisses and cuddles
her—she is “all his” once again. His hopes are foiled, however, by a recon-
ciliation between daughter and son-in-law. The overt rivalry between father
and son-in-law was a stock situation to draw on in boulevard comedies,
though it was seldom so explicit as in the extremely popular drama La
Ronde des heures (30.80), in which the wealthy father openly despises the as-
piring young singer whom his daughter has married and tries (for money
reasons) to replace him with one of his own friends. In Louise (39.49), the
eponymous heroine’s father is outraged by his daughter’s relationship with
the composer Charpentier—another artist, alas. At the sight of them to-
gether he has some sort of indefinable fit, takes to his bed, and begins to
pine away. Emotional pressure forces her to return to the family, where,
while her mother looks on suspiciously, Louise’s father takes her on his lap
and sings to her. He tries to prevent her from returning to her now success-
ful composer with cries of “What about me?!” Finally, overwrought, sickly,
and furious with jealousy, he collapses and curses Paris and the world at
large for depriving him of what he loves most.
 126 |   
If the threat is to an existing family relationship, it might, on the con-
trary, be the young man who “steps aside,” perhaps dying in the process.
Such narratives appear in the remaining two-fifths of the films—those in
which the existence of a relationship, often with a wide discrepancy in age,
is considered viable or even desirable. The austere public servant benefits
from his shaking up at the hands of a young woman and marries her
(31.103); the old professor, shaken by his young wife’s adultery, is touched
by her tender care during his consequent illness, and they come to accept
their real affection for one another (30.87); the philatelist realizes in time
that he is not paying enough attention to his young wife and sends her
young admirers packing (32s5); the provincial notary’s young wife engages
in a flirtation with a count who turns out to be a crook, so she is delighted
to be saved from his clutches by her husband’s legal expertise (32.95); trans-
formed by a visit to Paris, the dry-as-dust provincial teacher is suddenly
wildly attractive to the student who has made his life a misery (33.109).
Like Lagardère and Pagnol’s baker, many old men find that, problematic
though they may be, such relationships are at least viable, and may indeed
be the most fulfilling. In the extreme, when one aging lover tries to step
aside in favor of his “son,” the girl he loves comes to her senses and pursues
him (37.10).
So common were these narratives in the thirties that certain middle-
aged male actors risked being typecast in the role of “the older man.” Al-
cover, Gabrio, Vanel, Pierre Renoir, Guitry, and Murat all tried their hand
at it, while Francen played it at least five times, but several of the key em-
bodiments of it went to Harry Baur and Raimu. Baur was (among others)
an old lighthouse keeper whose young wife is seduced first by his assistant,
then by an escaped convict (31.24), and most notably the ferocious Sarati
(37.103). In Cette vieille canaille, he plays an aging surgeon who rescues a
young circus waif who has been in a fight and takes her home. A curiously
ambivalent relationship develops between them. While his jealousy of
other men is always explicit, the nearest the film comes to asserting that his
attraction to her has been consummated is when his young fairground rival
rounds on him and says, “She was my mistress before she was yours.” Ulti-
mately she chooses the younger man, the circus, and a life on the road, but
the surgeon maintains the upper hand by operating on the younger man
when he falls from the flies, thus altruistically saving his life (33.26). Raimu
played this sort of role even more often than Baur: he was (among others)
the austere public servant (31.103), the juror who is responsible for freeing
the young woman whom he then takes into his household (37.55), the vil-
lage baker who lets his fire go out when his young wife deserts him (38.34),
the colonist who saves then strangles an impoverished young woman
(39.24), and M. Brotonneau, who triumphs over his wife and opts for a
permanent relationship with his young secretary (39.56). Inevitably, there
 Gender and the Family | 127
is a less clearly defined list of actors for the other roles in this narrative set,
since the young woman and (where present) her younger lover could be
played by any young leading man and woman. To list the most common
actresses—Darfeuil, Chantal, Field, and Gaël, with occasional help from
Florelle, Annabella, Romance, St. Cyr, Darrieux, and Morgan—is not very
revealing. This is even truer of the actors who played the male role, a list in
which Roanne, Aumont, and Gil figure twice.
These eighty or more films are closely related to numerous others, also
implicitly Freudian, where the assistant/employee steals the boss’s/head-
master’s wife/woman, but in which there is not always so dramatic an age
gap between the two males (e.g., 35.62; 36.50; 37.72). Alongside these, we
find some twenty which explore the reverse situation—an intense and at
least implicitly incestuous relationship between mother and son. These are
spread fairly evenly across the decade, though there is a cluster of five in
1934. Several of them overlap with others already mentioned insofar as
the rivalry between “father” and “son” is occasionally for an older woman
(36.50). Sometimes, surviving accounts make it difficult to identify the na-
ture of the relationship, if only because the age difference is not made clear.
In most cases, however, it is clear that, with genders interchanged, the plots
parallel the more common plots involving older men. Some plots leave im-
plicit the mother/son relationship, developing fantasies about older women
who prove irresistibly attractive to, or are irresistibly attracted to, younger
men. These older women are most commonly allocated a status which “ex-
plains” their somewhat unconventional relationship(s). They are singers or
actresses (31.124; 34.6), or at least they have the mixed blood of a Creole
(30.30). They fall for young men their son’s age, and perhaps abandon
their husband (36.91; 37.68), only (of course) to realize the error of their
ways. In Fauteuil 47 (37.42), Françoise Rosay plays an actress worshiped by
a young playwright admirer, who, but for an exchange of seats with a
baron, would have become her lover. Later, there is a scene typical of such
films, in which, at cross purposes, she sounds him out as a worthy match
for her daughter while he believes he’s to become her own lover. There is an
implicit rivalry throughout between daughter and mother in which the
mother is always the stronger, though the young man never realizes his de-
sires. One who does is Gérard in Le Rosaire (34.91), in which an older wom-
an nobly renounces a young lover only to have him go blind (!). She nurses
him incognito, and when he discovers that his “nurse” is his former love,
“he opens his arms to her.”
Just as often, the mother–son relationship is figured in terms of an aunt–
nephew relationship, as when a retired singer begins a relationship with her
niece’s boyfriend (34.6) or a nephew accepts blame for an aunt’s thefts be-
cause he is madly in love with her (33s7). Alternatively it may be figured in
terms of a pseudo-son, as when the antiquary’s mistress is discovered with a
 128 |   
young man and hastily invents a story in which he is a son to whom she gave
birth at a piteously young age (32.63), or when an actress and her son-in-
law experience an illicit attraction (37.42), or when the older mistress and
her young love start a beauty parlor, using as their advertising ploy the
amazing rejuvenating effects of their products on his “mother” (i.e., his mis-
tress) (32.126). Some of these have the wonderfully contorted narratives
that were found in the films with older men, as in Compartiment de dames
seules (34.29), which Chirat summarizes as follows: “On the day of his mar-
riage, Robert confesses to his father-in-law that twenty years previously he
had improperly exploited the opportunity of finding himself alone with a
lady in a train compartment. His mother-in-law overhears, and convinces
her husband that it was her in the train, so her daughter is actually her son-
in-law’s daughter.” He has made love to the mother and married his own
daughter. Her claims, of course, are ultimately disproved. A similarly con-
torted narrative has Arlette’s mother convincing her filleul de guerre (her
“son” acquired via the adopt-a-soldier program) that he is Arlette’s father.
When Arlette grows up, he marries her for pragmatic reasons (“to save her
from ruin”) presumably in a mariage blanc, and inevitably begins to fall in
love with her. Again, she turns out not to be his daughter, but again the re-
lationship is with both mother and daughter—his own daughter. Occa-
sionally, the relationship (actual or at least implicit) is between a son and his
actual mother. Certainly, it is common to find mothers moved by a passion
for their sons which is rather more than maternal. When a Breton sailor falls
for an outsider to their village and leaves mother and fiancée for her, his jeal-
ous mother murders the seductress (38.44).
Few of the relationships involving an older woman are benign. Most
involve intense anxiety and a jealous rivalry which culminates in violence or
in the melancholy self-effacement which characterizes so many of this dec-
ade’s films. Perhaps the best-known of the surviving films with this narra-
tive form are Carné’s Jenny (36.62) and Feyder’s Pension Mimosas (34.76).
In the former, Françoise Rosay plays the middle-aged owner-manager of a
nightclub with a doubtful reputation. Her relationship with the young Lu-
cien is disrupted when her pure young daughter, Danielle, turns up and
learns with dismay of her mother’s occupation but is not above attempting
to convert Lucien to the path of righteousness. Confronted with the rivalry
of her daughter, Jenny first tries to have Lucien disposed of, then considers
suicide, but finally reconciles herself to her loss and devotes herself once
again to her nightclub, “the gayest place in town.” Lucien fluctuates, then,
between being Jenny’s lover (and therefore Danielle’s “father”) and Dan-
ielle’s lover (and therefore Jenny’s “son”). The mother/daughter rivalry ends
in victory for the younger generation and the retirement of the older. In
Pension Mimosas, Rosay again plays the obsessive mother—Louise, this
time—managing not a nightclub but a guest-house. Her stepson, Pierre,
 Gender and the Family | 129
becomes the object of an obsessive devotion on her part, which leads her to
worry about his doubtful morals and criminal associates, but even more
about the young casino worker, Nelly, with whom he is living. Torn with
jealousy, alternately raging at Pierre and rocking him in her arms like a
baby, Louise becomes “more than a mother” to him, as Nelly complains.
The narrative has Louise trying more and more desperately to save her step-
son from his own feckless behavior, ultimately ending up at his bedside
cradling his dying body in her arms and kissing him passionately. The film
is astonishingly explicit in its representation of an older woman’s passion
for a younger man who is, at least in effect, her son.
This plethora of incestuous or quasi-incestuous narratives, supple-
mented by a smaller number that play with incestuous brother–sister rela-
tionships (34.115; 38.107), amounting to at least 8 percent of the total
output of the decade, often produces neurotic images that would have de-
lighted Freud himself. The young lover’s “blindness” mentioned above is
one such, but impotence figuring as blindness or as paralysis occurs in nu-
merous films of the decade (34.87; 36.65; 37.75; 37.100; 38.49). “Crimi-
nals” seize and abduct the wife on her wedding night (30s11), and fiendish
seducers die of snakebite (35.54). The protagonist of Lac aux dames, after
dallying with a naked Elvire Popescu, suffers a textually obscure wound to
the arm which festers for the rest of the film. He also rolls in a heap of grain
with Simone Simon, who buries him in it as she buried her dolls in it when
she was a child (34.54)! This underlay of Freudian imagery and incident
comes to the surface again in a narrative about a young couple leaving for
their honeymoon on a train, but interrupted in their lovemaking by the
ticket inspector. The timid young man is rendered impotent by this inter-
ruption and seeks the counsel of his father, who advises a night with a
woman of easy virtue. Unfortunately, the father becomes interested in the
same courtesan (36.143). The film is entitled Vous n’avez rien à déclarer !
The impression that Freud’s ideas were becoming broadly accepted, or
at least widely recognized, at this time and that filmmakers could assume
some familiarity with them on the part of their audiences is proven not
only by the omnipresence of related themes but by the number of films in
which his name or his theories are explicitly mentioned. A brief indication
of a few of these will bear out this claim. Although it doesn’t mention
Freud himself, a film made in 1937 seems to expect the audience to recog-
nize key references. Jacqueline has broken fourteen engagements and fi-
nally, to spite her father, marries, somewhat at random, an elderly balding
gentleman, who, as she remarks pointedly, “is the same age as you, Father.”
She refuses him entry to her bedroom, however, and when she meets his
son by an earlier marriage rapidly becomes emotionally entangled. In the
middle of a (rather drunken) embrace she and the stepson discuss how they
got to this point. He likens himself to Oedipus, her to Phaedra. When the
 130 |   
stepson finally realizes that his “parents’” marriage has been unconsum-
mated, he abducts his “mother.” They leave a message for his father signed
“your two children” (37.67).
In Noix de coco (38.69), we learn early on that there is some sort of
furtive relationship between Antoine and his stepmother which she is try-
ing to get him to acknowledge. This is the film in which the father comes to
realize that his (second) wife is the floozy with whom he had a fling in
Saigon years ago. Antoine admits to loving his stepmother and indeed to
having written her several love letters, and wryly acknowledges the Freu-
dian nature of their relationship. His sister is cheating on her husband with
a dentist who regularly sneaks into her bedroom, leading Antoine to remark
that she, too, seems to have her Freudian tendencies. The network of rela-
tionships is even more complex than this, however, and when the mother
finally can’t stand it any longer and leaves home, the father throws up his
hands in despair and rushes after her, exclaiming, “What a family!” The
closing shots are of his catching the train on which she is leaving, which,
like so many other trains, proceeds to plunge into a tunnel.
Noix de coco was the filmed version of an Achard boulevard comedy. In
1937, Guitry had also filmed one of his boulevard comedies, Désiré (37.34).
Guitry himself plays the eponymous butler who, as it turns out, has devel-
oped an overwhelming erotic desire for the lady of each of the houses in
which he has served, and they for him. This displaced mother fixation is
played out yet again in the present instance, in which both he and the mis-
tress of the house experience erotic dreams about one another. Horrified,
she rushes out to buy The Interpretation of Dreams, only to find when she
comes to read it that the butler has got in before her and cut out the erotic
section. She has been reading it in bed; laying it aside to sleep, she doesn’t
notice that it rests on the bell that summons the butler. . . .

4.3 OTHER DYSFUNCTIONAL MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES

When this obsessive fascination with sexuality and incest is related to the
extensive debate about sexuality conducted under the heading of vamps,
criminality, doubles, half-castes and other interracial liaisons, the cinema of
the thirties can easily seem like the extended nightmare of a sick society. It
is useful to bear this background static in mind when considering the wide-
spread but more “normal” aspects of dysfunctional family relationships to
be found in these films. They include the absence of either father or mother
from the family—especially the latter—the problematic nature of maleness
within the patriarchal family, the commonness of orphan figures, and espe-
cially the presence of vulnerable young women who are seduced then aban-
doned to look after their illegitimate children. Admittedly, a number of
these phenomena are readily recognizable as conventions of the melo-
 Gender and the Family | 131
drama, but it is precisely the recurrent presence and popularity of the con-
ventions of the melodrama and the boulevard comedy that need to be ex-
plained. They interlock with more “realistic” representations of bourgeois
family life as deadening or as frightening, often concealing beneath a suave
surface secret shame and guilt.
Perhaps a good place to begin consideration of this topic is with fami-
lies which are dysfunctional because of the absence of one or both parents,
since this is both a commonplace in films of the period and a frequent “ex-
planation” for the protagonist’s problems. At least thirty-five films make a
point of the fact that the protagonist is an orphan and/or a foundling. In
the later years of the decade, this trope developed, particularly in Prévert’s
hands, into a signifier of a dysfunctional socio-economic system from
which the orphan is alienated, but it had existed (and continued to coexist)
as the signifier of a dysfunctional family environment. The fact that nearly
all such orphaned children are girls is sufficient indication of the sentimen-
talism that came to surround their struggle to survive. The details of their
grand narrative are too well known to need much elaboration. Their par-
ents die when they are young, or at least are believed to have died; unable to
fend for themselves, they fall prey to unscrupulous exploitation of various
kinds, often of a sexual nature. Seduced and abandoned, they are forced
into prostitution. Perhaps there are two foundling sisters, and one must
look after the other, cost what it may (32.50; 36.48). At the height of their
suffering, they are saved by the kindly intervention of a savior figure—early
on, a doctor (32.50; 33.86); later on, one or, preferably, two amiable older
men (34.115; 35.91; 35.105; 39.92) with quaint names—le père Mélé, le
père Ballot, le père Exquis, le père la Frite. If he is young enough, the sav-
ior—if not, his son—will fall for the piteous but pure creature (31.39;
37.73). In the early years of the decade, the orphan commonly discovers
late in the narrative that her mother or father is still alive after all and, re-
united with her or him, she can face the future with confidence. This was in
the half of the decade when cynicism about the family had not yet set in
and it was still conceivable that the orphan might want to be reunited with
the family. By 1932, however, Poil de Carotte is already regretting the fact
that he is not an orphan, and by the last half of the decade, films about or-
phans are becoming more reflexive, ironizing about the orphaned state. Le
Roman d’un tricheur, of course, has the protagonist satisfactorily orphaned
precisely because (as a punishment) he is forbidden by his family from eat-
ing the mushrooms that kill the rest of them (36.115). In Abus de confiance
(37.2), the female protagonist, who is orphaned at the beginning of the
film, systematically exploits the sentiment attached to that state and the
consequent search for a father. In Battement de cœur, orphans are proposed
as ideal pupils in a school for thieves (39.2). On the side of socio-economic
orphans, the nearest to this wry commentary on the orphaned state is Le
 132 |   
Jour se lève (39.48), in which the significantly named François and Fran-
çoise discuss their common fate, which by then has practically become the
archetypal state for a French man or woman.
Quite apart from their insistent presence in this melodramatic tradi-
tion, however, vulnerable young women who were seduced, abandoned,
and left with an illegitimate child were a particular preoccupation of the
decade. A film often claimed to be the very first “French” sound film—Les
Trois Masques (29s3)—has a Corsican girl, seduced and pregnant, avenged
by her two brothers. Thereafter, at least fifty films focus on the problem of
illegitimacy. About thirty of these—melodramatic in their sentimental-
ity—deal with the problems of the mother (and occasionally others) at the
time of the illegitimate child’s birth. The rest deal with the consequences of
the illegitimate birth twenty years later, often taking the form of a revenge
narrative in which the illegitimate child, now a young man, comes into
conflict with his father and seeks to punish him and/or claim his rightful
heritage (e.g., 30.33; 36.21; 37.122; 39.29). An interesting variation has a
number of illegitimate sons of the same English lord ganging up to test
their father to see if he is worthy of them (30.64). Often, such father–
illegitimate son relationships are figured in terms of criminality—either the
father is a criminal, whose return generates social tensions, or the son is a
criminal, whose return generates guilty recognition (by the father) of his
own “criminal” behavior in begetting the son. For even more contrast, two
of these latter films have the father as a judge trying a young man who, as
he finally comes to realize, is his own illegitimate son (34.14; 36.27). In a
sense, a sociological explanation of the son’s criminality is provided by the
absence of any fatherly guidance in childhood, but in poetic terms “crimi-
nality” stands as a metaphor for the son’s illegitimate extra-social status and
the father’s “criminal” behavior. In the surviving example, Bernard’s Le
Coupable, the father comes to recognize and proclaim publicly to the jury
that it is not his son who is the criminal, but himself; he had taken a wrong
turn in life, accepting paternal pressure to enter law when his real interest
had always been in music. He has wasted thirty-three years, but the en-
counter with his son has brought him to his senses.
Two crucial patterns are apparent here—one a set of opposed meta-
phors, the other a set of opposed representations of masculinity. Both are
jointly present throughout the decade, but particularly in the years 1935–39.
Cumulatively, they introduce a debate about masculinity which may be pe-
culiar to the French cinema of the day. If the representations of femaleness
in that cinema are often forceful, they are nevertheless relatively conven-
tional and add little to Western civilization’s repertoire of mostly pejorative
judgments regarding women and their sexuality. It is, however, fascinating
to find masculinity being regarded as equally problematic and the patri-
archy itself being reflected upon critically.
 Gender and the Family | 133
The two primary representations of masculinity in Le Coupable might
be characterized schematically as the gentle and the authoritarian. Music
and the law stand in for these opposing values. The father, Jérôme, had ex-
pected to make a career in the former but is pushed by his own father into
the latter. He falls for Thérèse, who is (perhaps inevitably) an assistant in a
flower shop. His own father, he says, hates flowers, birds, and love, as he
had despised the proposed musical career of his son. Their affair leaves
Thérèse pregnant, and he is prevented from putting things right by the war
and conscription. She marries her cousin, the jingoistic Édouard, who
trains her and Jérôme’s son in military ways, and Thérèse’s death removes
the “maternal” values that might have saved him. Graduating from institu-
tional care to criminality, the son comes before Jérôme, now a judge, who
recognizes his own guilt and pleads for the man whom he now realizes is his
own son. The consequent reconciliation is a common narrative ending for
such films, re-creating the harmonious family environment which had been
disrupted by the initial illegitimacy. The father gives up the law, and the son
devotes himself to agriculture, since all he has ever really loved is flowers,
fields, and animals. “For generations,” says Jérôme, “we Lécuyers have been
magistrates from father to son. Now we will try to be men.” True mascu-
linity lies not in aggressive activities or in successful public careers, but in
feeling, sensitivity, caring—in the values of the heart, which spontaneously
come to the fore on contact with nature and are often expressed through
artistic activity.
Of course, the nature imagery apparent in this film was to echo
through the poetic realist films of the following years, and its associated
artistic values were no less positively represented throughout the decade, as
chapter 6 will show. But the focus on “what it means to be a man” is a topic
that needs further exploration here, since it determines the narrative form
of many family dramas of the thirties. Fatherhood and the patriarchy are
the problematic source of many of the disruptions in films exploring the
family late in this decade (and, indeed, throughout the following one). In
most cases, the disruption is caused by the traditional masculine drive to-
ward domination, which is represented as breeding a toughness, if not a
brutality, that renders the male insensitive to the needs of others. An early
instance is embodied in Duvivier’s 1932 remake of his silent film Poil de
Carotte (32.109), but in that case the insensitivity of the boy’s father is
caused primarily by a retreat from his wife’s shrewish ways. That the resul-
tant withdrawal and insensitivity to his son’s needs should bring the boy
close to suicide is, however, typical of such narratives. Essentially, it is an ac-
count of the breakdown in the relationship between father and son, of the
last-minute recognition by the father of the “tragic” outcome of such a
breakdown, and of his consequent return to the ways of the heart (as op-
posed, say, to the ways of the law, of property, or of moral rectitude). In
 134 |   
general, unlike German films of the time, French films of the thirties were
not at all preoccupied with the young (i.e., those younger than eighteen, by
which time they might be played by a jeune premier in a standard dramatic
or romantic role). The one partial exception is this example of intergenera-
tional misunderstanding focusing on the breakdown of family relation-
ships. Several siblings of Poil de Carotte’s felt themselves neglected and
abandoned by their father in the course of the decade (e.g., 33.119; 38.18).
Many others suffered from tyrannical and authoritarian fathers—at least
two more of them judges (32.64; 39.74) and one a bishop (30.75). One
does not dare to tell his father that he has married (32.64), another that he
has a son (39.74). Often such men are driven, as was Poil de Carotte, by the
father’s unfeeling attitude to attempt suicide, with the usual effect of soft-
ening and humanizing the father in extremis and thus effecting a reconcili-
ation. Of the many such narratives, only the first (30.75) has a tragic
outcome, the reconciliation coming too late to save the son’s unsuitable love
(she is a foundling and thus, of course, not a worthy match for him), who
collapses and dies as she emerges from church on their wedding day. More
typical is Le Tunnel (33.134), in which the engineer learns that his own es-
tranged son is working on the transatlantic tunnel which he is constructing.
When it is in danger of collapsing, he risks his life to save his son and fellow
workers, and there are the usual touching scenes of reconciliation.
Parallel to such tales of brutal, violent, or simply inhumanly rigorous
fathers who must learn to be “true” fathers, the thirties produced a number
of stories of brutal and violent husbands. As in Toni (35.110), a standard
pattern is for the wife to be driven to desperate lengths to escape the daily
persecution of these beasts, often leading to murder (34.36; 37.4). If the
husband is not killed by his wife, he is killed by her mother (38.96), or by
men moved by her situation (37.43), or else he meets an appropriately vio-
lent end, which releases the unfortunate woman. One dies of congestion in
a moment of jealous passion, shooting what turns out to be only the hero’s
reflection in a mirror (35.123); another dies in a trident duel (!) (37.47).
Raimu’s Sarati le terrible, who dies by his own violent hand, is a classic in-
stance, combining the jealous rage of a pseudo-husband with the ruthless-
ness of an authoritarian pseudo-father. Finally, in Pagnol’s well-known film
Angèle (34.5), Angèle’s father, overcome with shame at his daughter’s giving
birth to an illegitimate child, retreats into an inhuman and destructive atti-
tude, which extends to sequestering his daughter and her baby in the dark
cellar of the family house. This inhuman attitude, atypical in a meridional,
is inspired by traditional proprieties which are here represented as destruc-
tive. It is ultimately qualified by the more compassionate attitude of the
younger generation of males, notably in the form of Albin.
A classic instance of such an “unfeeling father” is that portrayed by
Michel Simon in La Chaleur du sein (38.18). It is the more striking in that
 Gender and the Family | 135
his remoteness from his son Gilbert is contrasted with the close affection be-
tween Gilbert and his three successive step-mothers, all of whom prefer him
to his Egyptologist father. His problem is generalized when a friend visits
him in hospital, where he is recuperating from an attempted suicide. Gil-
bert tells him that he misses his real mother, and the friend tells him that his
own real parents had always squabbled. It had been a passionate and violent
household, and his father had finally killed his mother then committed sui-
cide. “There must be lots of us in this sort of situation,” he says. “How dif-
ficult family life has become.” That Gilbert’s problems and those of all these
other families are primarily due to the fathers becomes apparent when the
Egyptologist returns home, is accused of parental inadequacies, and finally
admits that he ought to have been more interested in the present and the fu-
ture than in the past. There follow the expected scenes of father–son recon-
ciliation. The next time the father goes on a trip he will take Gilbert with
him, and the film ends on Gilbert’s exclamation “Papa, I’ve wanted to get to
know you all my life.” Cumulatively, these narratives about callous and un-
feeling males whose lack of human warmth and compassion proves de-
structive to the family constitute an ongoing inquiry into the validity of
traditional male values. They are, to some extent, balanced by films which
advocate the firm masculine hand as a necessary and proper corrective to the
moral laxness of contemporary life, but these latter are fewer in number and
were not nearly as popular as those which evoke masculine authoritarianism
only to call it into question. Russians and Asians provided stock instances of
brutal and ruthless husbands, though they tend to figure problematic male
sexuality rather than problematic fatherhood.
Given the marked anxiety which these films manifest concerning rela-
tions between husband and wife, father and son, and father and daughter,
it would seem logical to expect that the means by which marriage relation-
ships are established would also be the subject of considerable attention. It
is true that a very large number of films focus on the topic, but they are
primarily romantic comedies which do not explore the topic as a problem
requiring solution. Nevertheless, the narrative patterns which regularly
structure these reflections on marriage clearly embody common under-
standings of the nature of that institution and, in their turn, no doubt af-
fected the expectations of audiences commonly exposed to them. Two of
these narrative patterns are quite striking, and both were not only common
but popular. They might be termed the “arranged marriage” and the “pre-
destined marriage.”
The arranged marriage involves a son or daughter who is pressured by
his or her mother and/or father into a loveless marriage out of worldly con-
siderations, most commonly rank and money. The son, often of fallen aris-
tocracy, is to marry a rich heiress/duchess to restore the family fortunes,
or the daughter is to marry a duke/baron/financier/banker. The standard
 136 |   
opposition that arises is between these worldly calculations and the sponta-
neous impulses of the heart. Naturally, the latter are more positively repre-
sented and ultimately prevail. The arranged marriage usually founders, and
true love wins out. Very often, this results in a match which is “socially im-
proper” as it involves an alliance with a social inferior—an actress rather
than the intended heiress (31.104; 34.83), a secretary rather than the aris-
tocrat for whom she was intended (36.26), the foreman’s daughter rather
than the rival industrialist’s daughter who would have united their business
empires (36.39; 36.74). Normally, a marginal family member—grand-
mother, aunt, or uncle—proves more understanding, and intervenes to en-
sure that true love prevails.
Among the better known of these narratives condemning arranged
marriages are Le Malade imaginaire (34s2) and Mayerling (36.77). They
frequently provide an opportunity to mobilize archetypal figures already
discussed—the banker/financier, the brutal husband (e.g., 37.4), the fasci-
nating Oriental (e.g., 37.30). Only four out of thirty-five such stories iden-
tified have a less than happy ending. In those, love itself proves deceptive,
and the girl resigns herself to the loveless arranged marriage (35.47), or mis-
understandings lead to the lover marrying someone else (36.97; 36.140).
Yamilé sous les cèdres is particularly interesting in introducing a religious
conflict into this narrative: the Maronite Christian girl rejects the young
man whom her family has destined for her in favor of a Muslim youth,
with whom she elopes. Caught, she refuses to repent and accepts death at
her family’s hands (39.93).
Even the few melancholic or tragic narratives in this group nevertheless
mostly defend the values of the heart as superior to calculation, wealth,
family, or religion. As a whole, the group overlaps with those constituting
the second narrative class, films which imply obliquely that forced or acci-
dental associations resulting in marriage may exemplify the working out of
a mysterious destiny which understands the human heart better even than
those directly involved. In this narrative category, two young people are
brought together involuntarily—occasionally by an arranged marriage, but
more frequently by some “accident.” The situation is given piquancy by
their refusal to accept their fate: instant antagonisms delay their recognition
that they are meant for one another; filial disobedience leads them to reject
the intended spouse, only to find that it is the very person they had inde-
pendently come to love; tricked into seduction or marriage, they are out-
raged at such devious behavior, and only reluctantly come to acknowledge
that true love has displaced calculation. The arranged marriage with a con-
vent girl is extremely inconvenient when the lieutenant falls for a saucy ac-
tress, but of course she turns out to be one and the same person (31.77).
The arranged marriage between M Poirier’s daughter and the aristocrat is a
bore for that aristocrat, until he begins to realize that she is worthy of his
 Gender and the Family | 137
love (33.59). A benevolent providence has overseen these improbable unions,
after all.
Such piquant narratives are often the pretext for introducing mildly
salacious situations: wrongly believed to be a couple, the young man and
woman are urged, resisting, into the same bedroom (32.19); in a last fling
before an arranged marriage, he finds he has ended up locked in a bedroom
with his friend’s fiancée (31.88); visiting a former servant, the impoverished
aristocratic woman is offered the bed of the absent count, who, of course,
returns unexpectedly (32.90); for commercial reasons, a man offers his wife
to her former husband, only to find that they have taken the proposal fur-
ther than he intended (33.44). The mariage blanc was a particular favorite
situation in such narratives, as at least ten films exploited it: childhood
friends marry largely to outrage their parents; going their separate ways,
they are accidentally reunited in the bedroom of a remote alpine hotel
(35.40); or a reporter “marries” the accused girl to save her, only to find he
is really coming to love her (36.46); or misunderstandings lead two people
who each love someone else into a mariage blanc, but the honeymoon night
undermines their chaste intentions (33.38). Arlette accepts a mariage blanc
to the man she believes is her father to save them from financial ruin (34.8).
In one of the more dramatic of these narratives, the well-known Maître de
forges, the amorous industrialist finds he has been trapped unawares in a
mariage blanc, because his wife is still in love with a despicable aristocrat.
Gradually, she comes to see the worth of her husband, and the fake mar-
riage becomes a genuine marriage (33.80).
The fatality which oversees these accidental or involuntary marriages
can take many forms. Particular favorites were the car breaking down
(36.106) or an encounter in a train, though a bet (35.7) or a joint lottery
win (35.13) could suffice. Equally, the gloom of a movie theater could trick
a man into embracing one woman, believing her to be another (35.82). It is
interesting, however, that so many of these “fated” relationships should
begin as commercial and exploitative relationships, only to develop a depth
of unexpected sincerity. Of the many that turn out thus, Baccara (35.5) is
typical: the returned war hero, short of cash, agrees to marry (for a price) to
save the woman from becoming involved in the crash of a fraudulent
banker who has been keeping her, only to develop a genuine desire to win
her love. Such transformations of the commercial into the sincere are par-
ticularly common in the immediate prewar years, when individuals paid to
marry or to pretend to be married rapidly develop sincere feelings for their
wife or husband (e.g., 37.1; 37.23; 37.118).
In Cavalcade d’amour (39.11), Jean Anouilh scripted for Raymond Ber-
nard a veritable compendium of such narratives. The film is in three epi-
sodes, set in three different ages, and involving three different generations of
the same family. The first two episodes exploit the “arranged marriage” plot,
 138 |   
in which an aristocrat’s son or daughter, who is due to marry lovelessly for
pragmatic purposes, falls for someone below himself or herself in station—
a travelling player, their intended’s seamstress—with tragic consequences
for the latter. The third episode exploits something closer to the “predes-
tined marriage” plot. Two young people, intended for one another by their
parents, discuss the earlier incidents and wish they had been free to choose
one another rather than being matched by their parents for grossly prag-
matic purposes—namely, to ally finance with aristocratic birth. Their al-
liance can be joyfully consummated only when her father loses his money in
a crash—though in an epilogue he recoups it with interest and wonders
how to break the bad news to the children. Like many late-thirties plots,
this one shows a reflexive awareness of the patterns that had been set up in
the course of the decade and a conscious foregrounding of them, often with
variations and often to ironic effect.
One of the most important of these patterns was the set of characteris-
tic gender relationships established by the boulevard comedy, which saw
marriage not just as dysfunctional but as a mere game to be played out
between cynical exploiters of both sexes. Casual sexual dalliance is central
to the plot of such comedies. The faithful wife is a figure of fun, who serves
as a challenge to young rakes and suave men-about-town. The husband
caught in adultery, others caught or nearly caught as they hide behind cur-
tains or bushes, and doors opening and shutting hastily to allow nervous
lovers or enraged husbands to escape or to burst in, just in time or just too
late—these were the stock in trade of the genre; they figure prominently in
many thirties films, and notably in La Règle du jeu. Christine, like her ac-
knowledged model Marianne, but also like the countess in Sept hommes
. . . une femme (36.121), has been a faithful wife, resisting all attempts at se-
duction until she learns of her husband’s indiscretions, whereupon she
abandons herself to the rules of a new generic game—a typically French
game, as Octave notes, which as a foreigner she had at first found alien.
Her husband has been playing it for years with Geneviève, and even his
sudden determination to renounce her and be worthy of his wife is a typi-
cally flippant treatment of gender relations. In Sept hommes, the countess,
on learning of her late husband’s adultery, had shattered his bust (!) and set
out to entertain her seven suitors. On learning of her husband’s adultery,
Christine dallies with only three such suitors. The effect in both films,
however, is to put a fascinating woman at the center of a network of desire,
with each male maneuvering for her favors. The same set of relationships
surrounds Lisette downstairs, with Octave linking the two sets, devoted to
Christine (who bears a tenuous relationship to many incestuous heroines in
being Octave’s “sister”) but skittishly affectionate toward Lisette.
The riotous chases, dissemblings, and discoveries that result from these
capricious relationships, together with the commentaries upon them by
 Gender and the Family | 139
those involved, constitute a comprehensive meditation on the generic pat-
terns relating to family, marriage, and sexuality provided by the boulevard
comedy. The conditions or possibility of love and of friendship between the
sexes, the desirability or possibility of fidelity and of adultery, of trust and
of betrayal, of passion, of rules, and of happiness, are all explored in ways
reminiscent of the conventions underlying the film’s generic predecessors,
and yet sufficiently reflexive and self-aware as to constitute a commentary
upon them. If there is one thing, however, which an audience acquainted
with these conventions might not have expected, it is the abrupt death of
the aviator at the end. However well prepared in earlier scenes, it had few
precursors in the decade, and none of the films which incorporated such an
ending were successful with audiences.
 FIVE

Education, the Media, and the Law:

The Training of a Citizen

5.1 CRIMINALS AND INVESTIGATORS

T his discussion of the family has led to a consideration of the ways in

which the young were socialized, often problematically and with dis-
astrous effect, into contemporary French society. The present chapter is the
first of two to be devoted to a discussion of the ways in which a number of
more or less formal institutions for the socialization of the citizen—ideo-
logical apparatuses, and in some cases ideological state apparatuses—were
represented in the French cinema of the thirties. These institutions—edu-
cation, the church, and the law, together with the no less powerful, if less
formalized, institutions of the media, entertainment, and art—have in
common the function of ideological regulation. Among their main, if
sometimes unofficial, tasks, they are expected to train citizens in the social
and moral values considered normal and desirable within a society, to mon-
itor their performance within this ideological framework, to judge and
punish those found wanting, and on occasion to rehabilitate or “save”
them.
Of all these ideological apparatuses, the law is the most frequently rep-
resented in the French cinema of the thirties, as is apparent from the wide-
spread recognition accorded the murder mystery throughout that decade.
The status of the criminal investigation as the contemporary form of a fun-
damental narrative type has been widely debated in recent decades. But in
addition to this, some of the reasons for the contemporary popularity of
this thematic have been noted earlier: criminality acted as a metaphor both
for the corruption represented as endemic among the rich and the power-
ful, and for the disenfranchised and marginal status of the worker. In both
cases, it thus stood for the injustices at the heart of the social system. It also
acted as a metaphor for female sexuality, represented as being beyond the
pale. It is not surprising, then, to find that at least 317 films (i.e., about 24
percent) deal explicitly with illegal activities and the attempts of the legal
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 141
system, or of people acting on behalf of it, to bring “criminals” of one sort
or another to justice.
Nor is it surprising that in a large majority of those films in which “the
law” has connotations that are primarily sociological, it is not viewed favor-
ably. The point of view adopted by the narration is often that of the out-
sider, the rough diamond, the folk hero, the tough with a heart of gold, and
there is sympathy for the criminal; or else the law is seen as corrupt and in
collusion with the rich and powerful. The law, that is, is at best an ass and at
worst the embodiment of some malevolent and implacable fatality. Early in
the decade, it may be seen as amiably corrupt and in the pay of the crooks,
as in L’Opéra de quat’sous (30.61); later, it is seen as merely incompetent. In
the extreme, master criminals hold their own “anti-trials,” mirror images of
official trials, but more likely to bring about truth and ensure justice. In Jim
la Houlette, we are introduced to two interconnected narratives, both com-
ic, the one involving the establishment conning, preying upon, trying, and
ultimately condemning to death a humble and talented young man (played
by Fernandel), the other involving an anti-establishment run by a gentle-
man thief which rights these wrongs and prosecutes the persecutors in an
anti-trial which is the embodiment of “true” justice (35.62).
It would be inaccurate, however, to see the decade’s films as proposing
any single monolithic representation of the law and its activities. To some
extent, this is because there are so many different categories of “lawmen,”
ranging from law students through aspiring young lawyers (three of whom
are female) and solicitors to attorneys-general, judges, and chief justices.
Generally, the younger and the less implicated in “the system” they are the
more sympathetic and affectionate the representation. Once they become
powerful authority figures, they are frequently subject to the same distrust
accorded politicians, bankers, and entrepreneurs. Essentially, at that point
in their careers, their only hope is to be (re)humanized by one of the recog-
nized “marginal” agencies—attractive women, criminals, or the poor (or,
preferably, a combination of all three). As a second generalization, the law
in its younger and more romantic form is more common at the beginning
of the decade, while the more austere and implacable magistrates appear in
the latter half of the decade.
Thus, earlier in the decade, Garat could play the law student as roman-
tic lead, railing at the boredom of cramming for exams, which he duly fails
(31.68); Murat could play an unemployed young lawyer who gets caught
up in a romantic adventure (30.91); and the lawyer played by Richard-
Willm could be the love interest and savior of a successful singer (30.88).
These were three of the principal young lead actors of the decade. Young
lawyers of the type they embodied in these films frequently figured in
boulevard comedies, where as professionals they provided an acceptable al-
ternative to counts and dukes (e.g., 31.102). Gravey and Garat could
 142 |   
reprise their young-lawyer roles in 1936 and 1938, but by this time they
were dated (36.82; 38.35): the law was much more commonly embodied in
a problematic older, paternalistic figure who has been dehumanized by his
practice of the law.
The first such austere and tyrannical figure I have been able to identify
appears (briefly) in Cœur de Lilas (31.34), in which a particularly nasty
judge presides over the eponymous protagonist’s trial, but another one ap-
pears the following year in a comic film (32.64), and aging comic lawyers
are not uncommon in the years 1932–35 (see 34.47; 35.44). However, the
tone becomes steadily more somber as the years pass. In the latter half of the
decade, they are at best unwelcome figures, bearers of bad news, and at
worst sinister, greedy, vulture-like creatures in the service of wealthy exploi-
ters of the poor, particularly farmers (36.127). Lawyers’ fees, for instance
(admittedly in a comedy), ultimately reduce an inheritance of two hundred
thousand francs to thirty thousand francs (34.30). It’s not surprising that
lawyers should be yet another category of humanity to prove irresistible to
assassins (32.45; 32.75). Pride, arrogance, and unyielding self-righteousness
are their prime characteristics (35.19; 39.74), and the narratives take delight
in undermining this sanctimoniousness in ways already mentioned. Judges
who have ranted against the lax morals of the age are forced to recognize
their complicity with the accused (34.14; 36.27), while lawyers and magis-
trates imprisoned or forced by circumstances to meet those whom they reg-
ularly imprison are overwhelmed by their humanity and converted on the
spot to the values of the heart (34.34; 39.17; 39.74).
Because it is represented so unsympathetically, the law is regularly
contrasted with some preferable and more humane set of values. A char-
acteristic example is Il est charmant (31.68), in which the delights of the
Folies-Bergère prove infinitely more attractive for young law students.
Youth, love, and life itself are intrinsically opposed to the law, as the young
solicitor demonstrates by transforming the provincial legal office bought
for him by his uncle into a cross between a nightclub and a brothel. As we
shall see, to be a law student was to be irrevocably schizophrenic, since the
connotations associated with the law were incompatible with those associ-
ated with being a French student. In the later years of the decade, when the
debilitation caused by the law had reached tragic dimensions and Jouvet
could play a disreputable lawyer with thugs to do his bidding, living off
blackmail and racketeering (37.117), the law came to be contrasted with
more weighty humanist values—the fine arts, classical music, and nature at
its most refined and ennobling (36.27). By this time, the earlier representa-
tion of the law looks almost idyllic, and when Jouvet’s crooked lawyer is
momentarily softened by nostalgia for his less corrupt past, it will probably
prove the end of him. This cynical attitude toward the law can be summed
up by two films at the end of the decade, one a drama and one a comedy.
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 143
In the comedy (39.17), a magistrate falls in with some amiable, if slightly
criminal, representatives of the people, and begins to rethink his view of
them:

“Ah, ‘the people’—we don’t really understand them.”

“That didn’t stop you from passing judgment on them. In your time, you’ve
passed judgment on a good number of them without understanding them.”
“Indeed. If we understood people better, we’d create a more humane justice
system.”
“The word ‘humane’ coming out of your mouth! You must be really
drunk.”

In the drama, after a criminal investigation in an apartment building in

which everyone in any position of power or authority, including the chief
justice of the Court of Appeal, has been shown to be hiding some guilty se-
cret, an epilogue has one of the tenants hold forth on his lack of respect for
the law, then hand the loot over to the young “bank thief ” who had initially
confessed to stealing it in order to help a poor girl and her father (39.25).
As an aside, it is interesting to note three films involving female lawyers,
appearing at the transition between lighthearted sentimental lawyers and
somber-to-the-point-of-corrupt lawyers. In general, these three echo the
transformation. The first seems to have been wholeheartedly feminist, since
her husband is initially extremely upset by her career and turns to more
“feminine” women, until he is taught his lesson and begs his wife to return
to the bar, even becoming her secretary (34.57). The second is less favor-
able: Danielle Darrieux plays a female lawyer who refuses her family’s
arranged marriage only to find that the scoundrel she has saved and fallen in
love with is none other than that same man, “planted” by her all-seeing fam-
ily (36.136). She comes across as an amiable but gullible innocent whose
humiliation is well deserved, though rather because she’s a bumptious
woman than because she’s a lawyer. The last of the three is the most famous:
Danielle Darrieux again plays a young and, this time, impoverished law stu-
dent who, in desperate straits, foists herself on a family as the father’s long-
lost daughter. At once relieved by her newfound comfort and ashamed by
the confidence trick she is playing on her “father,” she uses her first appear-
ance at the bar to plead the cause of underprivileged children who go
wrong—her own cause, in effect. Moved by the plea, her “mother,” who has
long suspected the truth and has recently acquired proof of the law stu-
dent’s deceit, is reconciled to the role her “daughter” has come to play in
their newly restored family (37.2).
This progressively more somber view of the workings of the justice
system leads, not unnaturally, to a marked preoccupation with narratives
involving miscarriages of justice. Thirty-eight of the films involving trial
 144 |   
scenes focus on innocent people wrongly prosecuted, convicted, and im-
prisoned. A large number of these belong to the melodramatic traditions
either of persecuted innocence or of the tension between love and duty.
Should the lawyer break his professional code of secrecy and have the
woman he loves sent to jail for murder, or allow her son to be wrongfully
imprisoned (30.28)? Should the sister save her fiancé by telling the terrible
truth about her brother (31.36)? Should the poor workman turn over the
real killer or take the blame himself, in which case the killer has agreed to
fund his son’s education (34.78)? Numerous noble but misguided inno-
cents allow themselves to be wrongfully accused and jailed to save a mem-
ber of the family who is the real killer, or whom they believe to be the real
killer (e.g., 30.66; 31.113; 32.27; 35.35). Most such plots allow for high-
minded posturing in the melodramatic tradition, which takes particular
pleasure in the wrongful persecution and imprisonment of the innocent
(34.92), and the bulk of these films appear in the first half of the decade. In
the years 1935-39, the two people allowing themselves to be jailed wrongly
are, respectively, a reporter trying to get inside information (36.1) and a
failure trying to get publicity (36.85), and their subsequent inability to
prove their innocence is ironic rather than melodramatic.
Narratives of wrongful imprisonment often derive from the false testi-
mony of a malicious enemy or a treacherous friend (notably that old fa-
vorite, the treacherous female). All but three of these narratives end well for
the person wrongfully imprisoned (30.66; 33.112; 37.22), though rarely as
a result of the effective functioning of the justice system, and the three that
end grimly include two of the most powerful films of the decade—Grémi-
llon’s La Petite Lise and Mathot’s Chéri-Bibi. When things end well, rather
than the official legal system, it is various members of the family, notably
the accused’s son (34.78), daughter (32.45; 33.149; 35.35), or wife (35.122),
who solve the mystery and identify the real criminal. Frequently, the ac-
cused or imprisoned man has to escape from prison in order to try to clear
his own name. This narrative trope is well known from The Count of Monte
Cristo, of which three film versions were to be made between 1942 and
1961, but the saga of Roger la Honte, on which another three films were to
be based between 1945 and 1963, provides another instance (32.122).
Often there is considerable emphasis on the innocent victim’s period in jail,
which lasts for only one year in Roger’s case, but elsewhere lasts for five
(38.113), seven (37.40), ten (31.23; 36.103), or even twenty years (34.80;
35.35; 37.22), and is often described in poignant detail. The penal colony
in French Guyana is mythologized in two of these films as the obverse of
civilization (30.66; 37.22). The narrative of Chéri Bibi is constructed along
the lines of Heart of Darkness, with the prisoners’ progressive exile first from
Paris, then from France and Europe, to end up finally in the tangled fast-
nesses of the South American jungle.
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 145
Insofar as prison served as one of the principal metaphors for the op-
pression of the “little people,” prisoners stood for the mass of ordinary peo-
ple whose lives were iniquitously circumscribed by financial hardship. They
were doomed by society, long before being condemned by it. Both Tumultes
(31.134) and À nous la liberté (31.1) are explicit about the close relationship
between jail and factory life under capitalism. Prison life is quite commonly
represented as offering opportunities for mateship, altruistic gestures, com-
munal support, and noble self-sacrifice found elsewhere in the society only
among the working classes. Early sound films, notably the extremely popu-
lar Big House (30.12), favored the recognition of the condemned man’s no-
bility by the authorities, who consequently commute the prisoner’s sentence
and release him. If, on the other hand, the prisoners are forced to escape in
order to find the guilty man themselves, their vengeance often becomes
more global, aimed not just at individuals but at the system as a whole or,
Robin Hood–like, at the establishment. Indeed, Robin Hood figures are a
popular fantasy throughout the decade, whether in the form of Fra Diavolo
(30.41), Lopez the bandit (30.49), or Gaspard de Besse (a great admirer of
Mandrin) (35.51). Judex was, however, the most renowned righter of wrongs
and protector of those persecuted by authority, and Feuillade’s 1917 film
was remade by Champreux as Judex 34 (33.73). Slightly more sophisticated,
if less altruistic, the gentleman thief, who is fastidiously polite, very English,
and never steals from pretty women, was also admired in the literature and
the films of the decade. Jim la Houlette (35.62) and Monsieur Personne
(36.84) inherit this role from the enigmatic Mr. Parkes (30.34) and less cer-
tainly from the Joker (30.46). Henri Garat was considered well suited to
this role (38.2); as early as 1930, his character, though in reality merely a
(boring, of course) man of letters, “acted out” the role of gentleman thief in
order to win the woman he loved (30.39), just as Bretonneau’s secretary, the
true author of Bretonneau’s novels, has to disguise himself as the suave in-
ternational brigand Jim la Houlette in order to make himself attractive to
Madame Bretonneau. Clearly, the tradition of the romantic criminal, gen-
erous and fascinating to women, was well established by the beginning of
the decade and constituted yet another implicit critique of the law. A ro-
mantic aura clung to brilliant crooks such as Vidocq (38.116), and stories
about them always emphasized the facility with which they triumphed over
the bumbling lawmen.
A more “proper” view of the law and its tireless struggle against the
forces of disorder can be found in those films adhering more closely to the
conventions of the crime story. There are two extremes of this genre in the
thirties—those in which master detectives battle master criminals whose
infinite evil threatens the very foundations of society, here considered
worth saving, and those in which the justice system, or its representatives,
engages in combat with whole bands, groups, and gangs of thieves, thugs,
 146 |   
and miscreants. Between these two extremes, stolid, implacable police in-
spectors track down anonymous murderers. Perhaps the best known of
these is Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, who led three murder investigations
in films of the thirties. Admittedly, the following decade was to see many
more of Simenon’s novels made into films, but the three Maigret films
made during the war were all to feature Albert Préjean as a distinctly light-
weight and even frivolous Maigret. In the thirties, all three films to focus
on Maigret were produced in 1932, when Pierre Renoir (32.97), Abel Tar-
ride (32.33), and Harry Baur (32.132) give Maigret a bulkier and more
somber presence. There is, however, no sensationalism in these plots of the
sort that would arise from the pitting of such a figure against a master
criminal. On the contrary, the sordid environment in which they conduct
their investigations, further depressed by nighttime settings and incessant
drizzle, implies that criminality is no more than the inevitable emanation
of a generalized social malaise.
Among master criminals, the sneering, arrogant Fantômas and his
nemesis, the brilliant police inspector Juve, were firm favorites. Much like
Holmes and Moriarty, the two were engaged in a lifelong duel in which the
law always triumphed, though, true to his name, Fantômas himself always
managed to elude Juve’s clutches at the last moment (32.60). Numerous
other arch-villains inhabit the films of the first half of the decade (30.59;
30.62; 32.135), notably in the French version of Lang’s Le Testament du
docteur Mabuse (33.123). This film acts as a reminder of the connection be-
tween sinister super-criminals who are masters of disguise and the para-
noiac anxieties of German expressionism. Certainly, films of this sub-genre
made in France borrowed heavily from the technical effects associated with
expressionism. Both settings and lighting are characteristic, with ruined cas-
tles, trapdoors, secret passages, and most of the action taking place at night.
Less-spectacular criminals engage in more routine forms of criminal-
ity—cheating at gambling (33.46; 36.1; 38.51), forgery (38.25; 39.59) and
no fewer than five insurance crimes. A quite different category is the crime
of passion, present throughout the decade, not least in Renoir’s films—La
Chienne (31.31), Toni (35.110), and La Bête humaine (38.12)—and about
a dozen others, including, of course, the Carné-Gabin films, in which out-
bursts of passionate rage typically result in the killing of the woman’s seedy
associates (38.84; 39.48). Normally, these films are constructed around tri-
angular relationships in which the husband/lover kills a (sometimes wrong-
ly) suspected rival; alternatively, in a fit of jealous rage he may kill the
woman he believes has betrayed him. A variant has the husband merely sus-
pected of killing the rival, when in reality it is the wife who did so (33.149);
alternatively, the girl’s father may murder his daughter’s seducer/lover
(30.14; 32.69). It is rare for crimes of passion to be represented as occur-
ring within respectable middle-class families. Animal passions are more
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 147
commonly conceived of as overwhelming the frailer national and social
types inhabiting the Mediterranean regions—Spain and Italy, in particu-
lar—or the squalid underside of society, the poor and criminal classes. Pas-
sion may also overwhelm artists (33.149; 38.100), Gypsies (32.69), or
circus folk (30.1), but not the middle classes—or, rather, tales of such jeal-
ous passion are distanced by being embodied in their more animal others,
“out there.”
Related to crimes of passion by their intensely personal nature and the
frequent focus on sexual infidelity are crimes involving blackmail. In-
evitably, a constant feature of such crimes is the presence in the blackmailed
person’s past of indiscretions, sexual liaisons, or, less commonly, violence
and criminality. In the part of the narrative recounted in the present tense,
the blackmailed person has to have achieved a significant social standing for
the threatened revelation about this past (or this secret double life) to regis-
ter as dangerous. He may be a politician (30.33; 36.9), a businessman
(37.40; 38.16), a baron (30.18), or a count (34.115); she may be the wife
of a colonel (33.98), a police chief (39.86), or another dignitary. Indeed, all
wives are fair game for blackmailers, and there is a particular emphasis in
the more dramatic films of this sort on the rather suspect pleasure that men
experience through the power they gain by blackmailing women.
Blackmail obviously involves secret knowledge of a sort available to cer-
tain categories of people—former lovers, private detectives (38.60), lawyers
(37.117), or press magnates who threaten to publish “or else” (32.134;
36.129; 38.14). They can be divided roughly into people who are already in
positions of power and whose corrupt nature is shown by their willingness
to use that power ruthlessly, and—perhaps more interesting—“little peo-
ple” whose frustrations at life’s injustices find expression in acts of blackmail
in order to exercise a power that has always hitherto eluded them. In differ-
ent registers, a mechanic may blackmail a count whose supposed exploits he
himself has, in fact, performed (34.115), or the impoverished illegitimate
son of a politician’s early liaison may blackmail his father (30.33). In the
comic mode, tales of blackmail often result in a turning of the tables, which
sees the blackmailed blackmailing the blackmailer (32.134; 36.129), or two
amiable blackmailers falling in love (36.96), while in the dramatic mode
they often result in murder (37.40), suicide, or attempted suicide (33.98;
36.102; 37.60; 38.16; 38.46). In only two of the many films of this sort
does blackmail ultimately lead to a confession which clears the air and re-
unites the couple.
One of the most interesting blackmail films is Carrefour (38.14), de-
scribed earlier. In it, a slimy Jules Berry blackmails an honorable industrialist
who has suffered amnesia during the war and just might once have been a
criminal, who has since unwittingly assumed the identity of the (dead) in-
dustrialist. On his return from war, the industrialist’s wife has accepted him
 148 |   
as her husband, “regardless of what he was before,” but the evidence of for-
mer associates gradually raises doubts in his own mind. Having testified at
the trial that the amnesiac is indeed the industrialist in order to maintain
him in a state of dependency, the blackmailer presents him privately with
fairly conclusive evidence that he is not. The industrialist’s son learns “the
truth” and attempts suicide; the industrialist himself tries to trap and mur-
der the blackmailer during a pay-off; finally, he is saved by a nightclub girl
who may have known him in his possible criminal past, who shoots the
blackmailer and sacrifices herself for the man she (still?) loves. The real in-
terest of the film lies in the protagonist’s progressively more agitated inves-
tigation into his own past, and the consequent fluctuating superimposition
of the double identities—squalid criminal/honorable industrialist—which
is never entirely resolved either to the viewer’s satisfaction or to the sup-
posed industrialist’s. The film also constructs a curiously ambivalent view
of “the family” as perilously based on truths better suppressed. The sacrifice
of a nightclub girl to save a wife and family is as interesting as the necessary
suppression of the criminal to save the industrialist. Blackmail had threat-
ened to expose the foundations of the disreputable edifice of middle-class
respectability and of capitalist industrialism.
Nearly all the films mentioned so far involve “urban” crimes, repre-
sented as being generated by sociological or psychological causes (and, in
La Bête humaine, by genetic causes). A more exotic category of crime was
committed by bandits and brigands at sea, on the highway, or in gothic cir-
cumstances. Over twenty films deal with such bands of brigands, and one
of their favorite crimes was kidnapping. Early in the decade, bandits kid-
nap primarily women—an actress (30s10), a newly married wife (30s11),
the chieftain’s daughter (30.71), a pretty woman held for ransom (who in
one case falls for her abductor) (34.108; 38.10). But later the kidnappings
are more often of men, and mainly for financial gain (34.18; 36.124;
37.94). More general acts of piracy clearly belong to the exotic genre of the
adventure story, as witness the locations—Canada, Morocco and Arabia,
Russia, the South Pacific, and China. If they occur in France, it could only
be in Brittany (37.60) or in the sufficiently distant past (34.21; 37.3).
These more exotic and adventurous acts of criminality mostly involve
gun running or drug smuggling, though three involve white slavery. South
American cabarets and brothels could not get enough French women down
on their luck (33.48; 36.23; 37.49). A constant trickle of smuggling films
produces a total of fourteen in the course of the decade, but nearly all of the
twelve gun-running films occur in the last years of the decade, as anxieties
about war and national territorial integrity become more acute. Frontiers
figure prominently in drug-smuggling films, primarily the Franco-Belgian
frontier, with customs officers, Inspector Maigret, or a pair of policewomen
finally getting the better of the villains. Cocaine is the principal threat, and
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 149
the Chinese are invariably behind attempts to bring it in, particularly in
cases where it comes through ports. Drug smugglers are an evil lot, and they
target women in particular: in Escale (35.43), they cynically undermine the
last desperate attempts of a fallen woman to make a new life for herself,
while in Stupéfiants (32.130) the hero’s sister, a young actress, collapses into
dependency at the hands of a drug ring masterminded by Peter Lorre, no
less. At the end of the decade, Lavarède crosses the path of an opium baron
in San Francisco (39.16), whose coffin proves an apt hiding place for drugs.
Earlier, Justin had hidden cocaine smuggled from China to Marseille in a
similar coffin (34.53) while, at the beginning of the decade, the most inter-
esting of all drug-smuggling films, Au nom de la loi, had firmly established
the coordinates for the sub-genre—cocaine, Chinese suppliers, and foreign
adventurers, a spectacular police siege that exactly prefigures Gabin’s in Le
Jour se lève, and a sensuous vamp who turns the policeman planted to spy on
them, is cornered, and commits suicide at the end. The European adven-
turers in East Asia recall Malraux a little, just as the sentiments expressed by
the vamp prefigure in a way the theme of intoxication in La Condition hu-
maine: she tempts the policeman with talk of freedom from moral con-
straints and praises cocaine as a way of forgetting the limitations of the
human condition (31.11).
Arms smuggling is more likely to take place in French colonial territo-
ries, where it threatens the stability of empire. Rebels receive illicit arms
with which to foment independence struggles, and noble French comman-
ders strive to stifle the trade, even when their ship is sunk under them (36.89;
37.45; 38.8). In Alerte en Méditerranée, the arms smugglers imperil the
world as we know it by accidentally triggering a gigantic cloud of poison
gas which threatens to engulf the whole of southern Europe, and inimical
navies are drawn nervously into a common plan to overcome the threat. In
such cases, gun running is seen as a despicable and ignoble activity. Else-
where, it can be almost respectable, since the protagonist himself—a North
African poet—has been engaged in it (38.60), while the earliest film to
mention it, Ces messieurs de la Santé (33.23), is, as mentioned earlier, noto-
riously hard to read: the escaped prisoner, a banker, in his rise to renewed
commercial stardom, transforms the humble corset factory in which he gets
a job as accountant into a giant multinational which subsequently proves,
among its many astonishing activities, to be providing machine guns to for-
eign revolutionaries. Wherever there’s money to be made, morality goes out
the window; he’s just “doing business,” and the film is largely admiring of
his inexhaustible talent and initiative. Gun smuggling appears in the film al-
most incidentally as one of the gleefully mentioned sidelines of his corset
business.
The most outspoken “defense” of a gun runner can be found, however,
in Mollenard (37.75). Mollenard is a captain in the service of the Société
 150 |   
des Armements Militaires, and with their implicit accord he has been en-
gaging in a sideline of gun running which has proved immensely profitable
for them, as well as for him and his crew. Now they find it convenient to
dump him. He is constructed as an independent-minded, disrespectful, no-
nonsense man of the world who has earned the total respect of his crew. He
is full of heart beneath a deliberately gruff exterior. By contrast, behind a
facade of respectability, the firm he works for is hypocritical, greedy, cyni-
cal, and ruthless, and to make matters worse for him his wife and family
represent all the worst aspects of middle-class propriety, prudery, and prissi-
ness. If he is a monster, he says, it is because she and her world have made
him one. Worn down, humiliated, and reduced almost to suicide by the
combined malice of the company and his wife, he is reinstated by his crew
in a quasi-piratical fashion and dies at their head, at sea. The critique of so-
cial and commercial respectability is incessant; and gun running in these
circumstances comes to stand for a total disregard for official procedures
and the establishment, for a brutal realism that contrasts with the firm’s
hypocrisy, and ultimately for a desire to circumvent and even subvert the
existing social order.
Ranged against these malefactors of one sort or another, we find, aside
from the official law-enforcement agencies, various unofficial representa-
tives of the law. Two of them are worthy of specific mention—the private
detective and the reporter. The private detective comes trailing residual as-
pects of his English origins, but in the thirties he is never given a serious
cerebral mystery to unravel in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. All nine ex-
amples identified are comedies, intended as vehicles for Bach, Berry,
Baroux, Fernandel, and Duvallès, or at least sentimental comedies in which
Préjean or Roanne are the private detectives (30.46; 32s5; 37.1). Their
standard task is the surveillance of a wife or mistress for a jealous husband
or lover but, as the decade advances, their “investigations” become more
and more parodic, more and more hysterical. In a hilarious sequence from
Mademoiselle, ma mère (37.67), the stepson has a private detective trail his
disturbingly attractive stepmother, who turns out to have been having a ri-
otous time, while in Arsène Lupin, detective (37.11) Berry plays the gentle-
man thief who is running a slightly grotesque detective agency as a front for
his nefarious activities. Its promotional campaign parodies both the current
“excesses” of advertising and the detective agency as an institution. As a pri-
vate detective investigating a murder, Arsène Lupin is on the best of terms
with the police; unmasked as the notorious criminal, he still manages to es-
cape in the company of a murderer’s mistress.
Tricoche et Cacolet (38.103) is less parodic but even more frenetic. Fer-
nandel and Duvallès at first seem to be those sports-mad “men of the peo-
ple,” knowing and inventive, familiar from many working-class films earlier
in the decade. Revealed as private detectives, they become more like trick-
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 151
ster figures, with an eye for the main chance, out to con the world and, if
possible, one another. Their detective agency has a revolving bookcase hid-
ing a wardrobe full of disguises, which they exploit with increasing rapidity,
one or both appearing as an Arab, a fire chief, a valet and maidservant, a
military officer in bearskin, and their client’s mistress’s mother and lawyer.
While the rest of the cast seem to be trying to act out a routine boulevard
comedy, the two private detectives subvert it with vaudeville and farce, fi-
nally combining to extort and enrich themselves (and run off with the mis-
tress). This representation of the private detective couldn’t be further from
that of the British original or from that of the American cinema in the en-
suing decade.
The reporter figure as an alternative investigator in criminal matters is
interesting both in itself and as the most obvious representative of the mass
media in films of the thirties. This character constituted the positive aspect
of an institution which otherwise was regarded with marked suspicion
throughout the decade. The negative connotations associated with the
media had a double origin: press magnates, as members of the establish-
ment, were assumed to be inherently criminal, as corrupt and duplicitous as
all other persons in authority (38.14), while the media in general were seen
as a principal instrument in the ideological enslavement of the gullible
poor. The latter attitude was particularly prevalent in the first half of the
decade, when the occasional film echoes Georges Altman’s scathing indict-
ment of all capitalist institutions, but particularly the media. In several
films, the mass media are specifically blamed for cultivating a false glamour
around the figure of the star. Humble working girls are seduced by dreams
of fame to betray their origins and those that love them (30.69; 35.12) and
are, in their turn, betrayed and destroyed. The anarchist in Le Bonheur is
particularly incensed at the sentimentality of popular culture, which pur-
veys cheap dreams of a fulfillment which people can never attain in real life
but which prevent their ever calling into question the system which enslaves
them. It is interesting to compare this process of mythologization, which
panders to, even as it produces, “human folly,” with Lange’s overtly political
and “healthy” fictions about Arizona Jim and his fight against the fascists
(35.27). Lange’s world also, of course, has been corrupted by the media boss,
played by Berry. A fascinating Fernandel film which seems not to have sur-
vived has a naive provincial following in Lange’s footsteps—inheriting a
Parisian daily, discovering the duplicity of those running it, firing them, and
handing management of the paper over to a workers’ cooperative (37.59).
Yet, despite their recognition of the negative effects of the press as a cap-
italist institution, and of its need for reconstruction, the films of this decade
cannot refrain at times from glamorizing it, even as they critique it, as one of
the symbols of a technological age. Like the futurist theorists, with their
reverence for all forms of modern dynamism, the filmmakers of this decade
 152 |   
represent the machinery of the press in a way analogous to their representa-
tion of the railroads and airways, as vital, exhilarating, and urgent. The
most obvious form that this takes is a transitional montage sequence which
signals some newsworthy event in the narrative. Whenever a murder is
committed, an arrest is made, a trial takes a sensational new twist, a train
crashes, a singer triumphs, or an enemy warship is sunk, such a montage se-
quence is inserted, and I have identified about forty of them in surviving
films. They rapidly became something of a cliché, acquiring a readily recog-
nizable form which involved superimpositions and cross-dissolves linking
some or all of the following: presses turning, editions rolling off the presses,
headlines flashing past, paper boys cycling the streets, a flurry of newspaper
stands, and crowds of eager buyers. As well as corresponding in their intrin-
sic vigor to the sensationalism of the revelations, such sequences gave a mo-
mentary dynamism to the narrative, causally connecting what was often a
relatively private narrative to its wider public effects.
This mythologization of the production of the daily paper goes hand in
hand with mythologization of the reporter. The hero of at least twenty
films in the decade, the reporter is typically young, athletic, enterprising,
inventive, perceptive, and persistent. Gaston Leroux’s Rouletabille, espe-
cially as played by Roland Toutain, has all the youthful dynamism and ath-
leticism which the myth requires. He refuses to be excluded from the scene
of the crime, takes the investigation over from the police (who are usually
corrupt or incompetent, anyway), assembles and interprets the relevant
clues, presents them to an amazed gathering, and wins the commissioner’s
daughter (30.59; 30.62; 31.13). The charismatic nature of the reporter can
be appreciated from the fact that Murat, Garat, Préjean, and Larquey all as-
sumed the role at one time or another.
Normally, the young reporter as investigator, like the young law stu-
dent, appeared in the standard murder mystery in the first half of the
decade, displacing the police as locus of knowledge and power. Indeed, a
crucial element in the reporter’s role was his ability to outwit both the crim-
inal and the police. Later on, however, it was in the more exotic genre of the
adventure film that the reporter starred. His job and investigations might
take him to all parts of the globe—to Hungary (31.13), to India (36.88), to
Rio (36.23), or via the Orient Express (37.14) to China (38.27) and Macao
(39.51). In these climes, he may have to deal with bandits, white slavers,
enemy agents, or Oriental assassins rather than the standard French crimi-
nal, but his activities always serve to further the interests and repute of the
French nation.
Nearly all reporters are young, French, and male. They are modern
knights, and their task is most commonly to rescue attractive young fe-
males who are being persecuted by criminals or who have been wrongly
charged with a crime (38.93). But a few are foreign, and two are female.
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 153
Any American reporter benefited from a distinctive prestige, as witness the
readiness of the devious Mademoiselle Docteur to adopt the persona of an
American reporter in order to further her sinister plots (36.69). The other
woman reporter appears in a comic 1939 film in which the protagonist’s
girlfriend is obsessed with the mythic role of the reporter and seizes upon
his race around the world against the clock to realize her dream of an inter-
national scoop (39.16). One other 1939 film that attests to the status of
the reporter is Macao, l’enfer du jeu (39.51) in which Toutain reprises his
role as the go-getting athletic journalist to rescue Jasmine from the squalid
criminal activities of her father, the gang boss of Macao. The status of the
reporter’s role can be said to be mythic insofar as, although nominally in-
vestigating gun-running for a newspaper, Toutain is very much a freelance
agent and has no direct contact with a newspaper at any stage of the story.
It is therefore to some extent an arbitrary attribution. Of course, the no-
tion of “investigation” allies the reporter to detectives and police and acts as
a pretext to involve the character in any contemporary newsworthy event
or activity. Both these latter films, particularly Les Cinq Sous de Lavarède,
constitute further instances of the tendency of films produced late in the
thirties to recognize, foreground, and comment on the mythic status of
their own material.

5.2 CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND THE REFORMATORY

On the whole, the media receive relatively little attention in the films of the
thirties, and the same is true of education. Indeed, childhood as a whole is a
thematic field that the thirties left relatively unexplored. Certain well-
known exceptions will spring to mind—Poil de Carotte (32.109), Ménilmon-
tant (36.78), Les Disparus de St. Agil (38.25), and a number of melodramas
in which the suffering and deprivations of innocent children are recounted
in poignant detail—yet even if one includes stories about students and
about young people’s growth to maturity, the proportion of films dealing
even marginally with the young is remarkably small. By contrast with the
war years, when nearly one in three films dealt with this category of charac-
ter, the thirties dealt with it in only about one in twelve. After a total lack of
interest in the initial years of sound film, when the level was nearer one in a
hundred, between 1932 and 1939 there is a steady stream of about ten to
twelve films a year that feature young people, though often fairly marginally,
with peaks of interest in 1936 and 1938. Overall, one could justifiably talk
of an irregular increase in the proportion of stories about childhood and ed-
ucation throughout the decade, followed by a wartime period in which they
constitute one of the dominant preoccupations.
In general terms, the most common stories told about the young range
from tales of their trials and tribulations in unhappy families, to their turn-
 154 |   
ing to crime and the need to re-educate or rehabilitate them, their life away
from home in boarding schools and student digs, their sexual and romantic
initiation, and various climactic experiences which occasion a growth to
“maturity.” They deal, that is, with the formal and informal socialization of
the young, its inadequacies in the contemporary social order, and ways of
remedying these inadequacies.
In certain films of the period, there is an implicit acceptance of the
myth of childhood as a time of innocence and purity, which can only be
corrupted by entry into social life. The life of adults undergoing severe tri-
als can be totally transformed by the appearance of a child (33.39; 35.14),
or it can be destroyed by the death of a child, seen as the ultimate cosmic in-
justice. Fathers can be driven mute and mad by it (32.152) or be appropri-
ately chastened for their hubris (34.88). More commonly, the trials and
tribulations of an unhappy childhood are exploited for their sentimental
potential in melodramas. Children are abandoned or stolen, adopted by
wandering singers (34.92), or maltreated by their supposed families (35.84);
they endure penury and exploitation or are used as counters in domestic war
games (36.34). Boys turn to crime and girls to prostitution, or at least are in
danger of doing so, only to find ultimate salvation and happiness in new
families or be restored to their true families. The titles of many of these
films, notably those featuring two waifs, are sufficient indication of the
most common representation of childhood of the time—Sans famille
(34.92), Les Deux Gamines (36.33), Les Deux Gosses (36.34), Jacques et Jacotte
(36.60), Le Petit Chose (38.76), Un Gosse en or (38.111), L’Enfer des anges
(39.32), and Jeunes Filles en détresse (39.47). Josette, Lucette, Cosette, and
Colette are favored names, the diminutives appealing to easy sentiment.
The recurrent setting of Parisian working-class suburbs emphasizes the role
of urbanization and its attendant social inequalities in the “cosmic” injus-
tice affecting children of the decade, and this is frequently explicit in the
narratives (e.g., 36.78; 36.112; 36.60; 39.63).
Occasionally, the education system is seen as contributing to this un-
happy state of affairs; less often, it is seen as a means of combating it. The
total number of films in which teachers and education are central is not suf-
ficiently great to justify any generalizations, or indeed to justify seeing edu-
cation as an important institution in the imaginary life of the decade. Most
frequently, the label “professor” or “academician” is interchangeable with a
number of other labels establishing the holder as having a position of au-
thority which renders him at once suspect of corruption behind the scenes
and prey to mockery and ridicule. Boulevard comedies used the austere or
dry-as-dust professor as a point of comic orientation in their adulterous
games (30.3; 32.60; 33.93; 37.21) or, in more dramatic mode, as an aging
lover uncertain how to cope with a sensuous and/or adulterous young
woman (30.87; 31.8; 37.10). Pagnol, of course, capitalized on the rather
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 155
unworldly and gauche stereotype to engineer a more positive image for
teachers in his Topaze, which, at least in its 1932 film version, was very pop-
ular. Sacked for not pandering to an aristocratic parent, Topaze is taken on
as a front man by a corrupt businessman, but gradually comes to realize
how he is being exploited and turns the tables on the businessman so effec-
tively that he ends up complacently making money hand over fist through
illegal operations. The teacher who began by inculcating precepts such as
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” and “Ill-gotten gains never benefited any-
one” ends up explaining to his bewildered colleague that money is the force
that governs the world (32.134). So successful was this film that not only
was it remade (less successfully) by Pagnol himself in 1936 (36.129), but
the general theme was imitated in 1933 in Professeur Cupidon (33.109). In
that case, it was a trip to Paris which effected the worldly transformation of
a foolish and gullible teacher.
Other, usually younger, teachers are positively represented in the late
thirties, including another by Pagnol (35.79), but if they may occasionally
triumph as individuals, the context of institutional life to which they are
condemned is mostly represented as rigid, hierarchical, and antagonistic to
human values. The Pensionnat Muche—the boarding school, where To-
paze works—is ruled over in tyrannical and manipulative fashion by the di-
rector and his daughter. The Pensionnat of St. Agil is a place of distrust and
sinister mysteries in which, in typical expressionist fashion, the director
turns out to be in league with a gang of forgers. Both teachers and students
dream of escape, the latter through secret clubs, writing fiction, or a Gabin-
like transatlantic fugue to a new life “over there” (38.25). In fact, boarding
schools are regularly seen as a form of exile from family life (30s17; 33.119)
or a convenient depository for the children of broken families (39.47). For
the female teacher in La Dame de Malacca, institutional life is so grim and
forbidding that any alternative must be preferable, even marriage to an
unloved and unlovely civil servant (37.30). Like many of these teachers,
“trapped” in prison-like institutions (even von Stroheim), she feels an in-
stinctive affection for and sympathy with the children (and, later, natives;
and, no doubt, animals) because they are, like her, fellow victims of a harsh
system. Zéro de conduite (33s8) is therefore not atypical in its representation
of the school as a grotesquely oppressive institution, which strives to elimi-
nate all humanity and joy from the lives of its charges. The film is distinct
only for the use of surrealist techniques to represent the oppressive educa-
tional regime of the day, rather than the more commonly used expressionist
techniques—for emphasizing, that is, a possible liberated future rather than
a depressingly regulated present.
There is therefore little distinction in the films of the decade between
the boarding school and the reformatory or prison into which children and
adolescents are thrust when they inevitably go wrong. Indeed, there is little
 156 |   
distinction between all these and the women’s prisons and rehabilitation
centers for adults that come to the fore in the latter half of the decade (e.g.,
38.83). In a film that seems in some respects to have foreshadowed Les 400
Coups, a boy is sent to a reformatory for a minor crime and finds life there
intolerable. He flees, and on the point of being recaptured tries to commit
suicide (33.14). Other young people caught up in the justice system can be
found in Abus de confiance (37.2), in which the young lawyer who knows
herself to be as guilty as them hears people of her own age being tried for
minor crimes—petty theft, vagrancy, occasional prostitution—and being
sent off to a rehabilitation center. She pleads for one as for herself, noting
that it is primarily social factors that have induced these crimes, not inher-
ent evil. All have been brought up in poverty, one has a drunkard as a father,
another has a mother who has run off with a plumber, and so on. All are
“unfortunates” rather than criminals.
The idea that women, and young women in particular, were vulnerable
to such social pressures and needed refuges and retreats where they could
be safe from temptation was a theme of increasing interest in films in the
second half of the decade. Whether on a lighthearted note (35.87) or a
more somber one (36.24), films show women finding a moment of respite
and communal support in “homes” and “refuges.” When such protection is
lacking, the films plead more and more insistently for the sociological
origin of criminality to be taken into account. Prisons de femmes (38.83)
makes a powerful appeal for compassion rather than rigor in the treatment
of such women. Institutionalized for trying to escape from a brutish family
who use her as a household slave and plan to sell her off in an undesirable
marriage, Juliette is condemned to three years’ hard labor. We witness her
induction into prison routines, her experience of solitary confinement, and
her friendship with other women whose tales are even more unjust than
her own. Many years later, married respectably and even elegantly, she is
threatened by a blackmailer, and her sorry past emerges. The message of
the film is that the fault is not in her but in society, and her older husband,
whose strict morality had been offended by her past conduct, must learn to
be compassionate.
Among these films dealing with the socialization or rehabilitation of
the young, there is one—Prison sans barreaux (37.95)—that is of particular
interest in that it is structured around precisely this conflict of paradigms.
On the one hand, there is the old order, which is harsh, doctrinaire, dis-
trustful of the inmates, and imposes on them an unyielding routine; on the
other, a more humane and understanding administration that works
through consideration, trust, and even affection. Rather than being seen as
rascals or criminals and inherently corrupt, the inmates are seen as “unfor-
tunates,” who should be ruled not through fear and brutality but through
understanding and compassion. The terms in which the argument is put
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 157
are somewhat similar to those outlined in St. Agil, and guarantee the ulti-
mate victory of the more humane order. Interestingly, the arrival of the
new, more humane order is consequent on the state assuming control of
the rehabilitation center, and the final reminder of “liberté, égalité, frater-
nité” implies that the new order represents the natural extension of the
rights of all citizens to inmates of prisons. A similar claim for French re-
publicanism as being based on a more humanitarian order can be found the
following year in Éducation de prince (38.29), in which the young prince of
a fictional foreign land (“Sylvestrie”) learns to appreciate the humane and
considerate treatment accorded to French students, by contrast with the
rigid and authoritarian structures which governed his upbringing at home.
In general, although the number of films is not large enough to justify
any major thesis concerning paradigm changes, it is probably valid to see
the progressive increase in films concerning youths, teachers, and education
as a sign of a progressive dissatisfaction with schools, reformatories, and
prisons based on rigid discipline, punishment, fear, and repression, and a
recognition of the need to transform the system.
Within the old order, the well-being, and even salvation, of the young
is seen as dependent on either the saintly devotion of altruistic individuals
or the random patronage of the rich. A standard element in the melodra-
matic narrative of abandoned children was the good-hearted but impover-
ished individual who provided a momentary respite in their tribulations,
and this spilled over into other genres as well, notably the social realist doc-
ument. These acts of individual goodness in a morass of social evil might
be committed by a neighbor (36.64), a seedy shopkeeper (35.91), a young
man (39.31), or, more improbably, a lawyer (36.33). On occasion, it is
someone officially charged with looking after children—a teacher (33.86),
a policewoman (36.20), a man of religion (39.63), or a scout mistress
(35s1)—but there is little sense at the best of times that the children’s good
fortune is anything other than an isolated event. Expelled from school,
Babs’s son is saved from the debilitating environment in which she now
moves only by the chance encounter with a Canadian “uncle” (39.80). Any
optimistic resolution that such films might have is due not to any system-
atic social action that would allow it to be generalized to most or all such
cases, but rather to the standard narrative ploys of the decade: the chance
encounter, the inheritance (35.91), the rich man’s gratitude (36.64), or the
aristocrat’s benevolent gesture (38.47).
One film to explore these problems in a little more depth is Ménil-
montant (36.78), which deals with poor children in a working-class Paris
suburb. Their educational facilities are grossly inadequate, but the narrative
solution to their woes is the finding of a valuable ring by two workers asso-
ciated with the school. When they return it to its wealthy owner, she is over-
whelmed by their honesty, their altruism, their unaffected charm, and their
 158 |   
refusal of a reward. She is astonished to hear that there are poor kids not get-
ting a proper education—if only she had known earlier. . . . She provides
funds to build a residence designed especially for kids. But as the project
evolves, it gets taken over by entrepreneurs and politicians, whose arrogance
and self-importance threaten to subvert the whole project. The workers are
no longer central to it, but have come to seem just obstructive squatters
whose rough shacks are in the way of the development, and at the inaugu-
ration of the residence they are sidelined and forgotten. The ambivalence of
the film is fundamental. The kids’ problems are social, and class is at the
root of their suffering; the workers manifest solidarity and integrity,
whereas the rich and powerful are in general ruthless and self-seeking—as
one character says, “How can you expect people who have everything to be
human?” Yet the only solution is a random act of gratitude by one of the
wealthy, who simply hadn’t realized that the problem existed. Understand-
ably, the workers are themselves ambivalent at the end, having lost their
“squat” to the development they initiated. “Still, what matters is that the
residence exists,” says one, but the other is cynical about the future of any
development run by the wealthy and by politicians for ends that are primar-
ily self-promotional.
Although there were relatively few films dealing with children of pri-
mary- or high-school age, there are considerably more dealing with univer-
sity students, art students, and young intellectuals. Indeed, one in three of
the films of the decade dealing with young people has a university student
as protagonist. This has little to do with the importance of university edu-
cation or even student life, however, and more to do with what students are
represented as having in common with artists, Gypsies, and circus folk—a
freer attitude toward middle-class morality and a spontaneous joie de vivre.
They combine this joyous gaiety and the irresponsibility of marginal folk
with a degree of intellectual substance which, perhaps fortunately, they sel-
dom have to demonstrate in the course of the narrative. They therefore
make attractive romantic protagonists, are given to easy sexual relation-
ships, and can prove to be unproblematic lovers and mistresses. They have
a sense of fun which might lead them into “student pranks” of a licentious
kind (34.71), but are basically good-natured and genuine. When these
characteristics are combined with the well-documented moral laxity of the
artist, those studying art, drama, or music have all these qualities to excess.
Consequently, although there are a number of films organized around
such characters, few of them—only six in all—deal with student life as a
milieu in its own right, and when they do so the focus is on the Latin
Quarter, bars, shared rooms, sentimental rivalries, and jealousies little con-
nected to the academic or social function of student life. The communal
life typical of student days does lead, however, to communal affections.
Male students tend to travel in threes, all of whom fall for the same woman
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 159
(31.68; 33.32; 36.131; 38.22). Both male and female students are attrac-
tive to older members of the opposite sex—sometimes, but not always,
their teachers (31.9; 34.45; 36.52; 37.20). Perhaps most important, they
are represented as not in the least interested in politics or in social move-
ments of any sort. In this, they are quite unlike their Russian and Serb
counterparts, who seduce generals to save their husbands from political
persecution (30.72), plot to blow up trains (37.14), harbor then betray rev-
olutionary friends (36.123), or, in the adaptation of Crime et Châtiment
(35.28), engage in cat-and-mouse games with the police prosecutor and
with God. The nearest a French student will get to philosophical, social,
political, or other principled activity is a (very rare) protest demonstration,
and even then it is less a political act than a protest against politics. Thus,
foreign princes (in the student prince tradition) can demonstrate their hu-
manity—that is, their basic antipathy to the formal and pompous public
role for which they are destined—by engaging in public protests (38.29),
or perhaps even being arrested by their own police (36.77). In sum, stu-
denthood in France had little to do with any representation of the edu-
cation system and more to do with the representation of a momentary
glimpse of liberty between the oppression of childhood and the oppression
of a working life.

5.3 THE SUPPRESSION AND RESURGENCE

OF A SHAMEFUL PAST
Aside from the frivolous, even feckless gaiety of French student life, the pe-
riod of adolescence as seen in the films of the thirties is not something to
look back on with affection. Except in the few cases of exiles regretting
their French childhood, nostalgia for an idyllic childhood is almost un-
known in the thirteen hundred films that were made in these ten years. Two
films tell distinctly fantastic stories of drugs that ensure eternal youth, but
these are not motivated by nostalgia for an idyllic youth that might ideally
be prolonged; rather, they are no more than pretexts for scabrous tales of
sexual excess or pseudo-incest (32.107; 32.126). Far more common are the
tales of a misspent youth or a shameful past which threatens to catch up
with the protagonists in later life, and which has been or, if possible, has to
be suppressed. Again, the number of films relating such stories increases
dramatically in the second half of the decade, and the intensity of the an-
guish generated by this inconvenient past foreshadows the importance of
this theme in wartime films. Effectively, childhood and early adulthood
may in theory be a time of innocence, but social and sexual pressures in-
evitably lead to a corruption of that innocence and to forms of criminal or
licentious behavior which expose the protagonists to blackmail or scandal
in later life.
 160 |   
I have identified twenty-one films whose primary focus is the need to
suppress the truth about one’s youthful past. Most date from 1936 to 1939,
and the increasing intensity of the distress that they embody can be mea-
sured by the increasing complexity of their narration, involving not just
reminiscences and multiple flashbacks but, in the case of the most complex
of them, a mix of past and pluperfect tenses and a personalized narrator
who intervenes in and finally resolves the story (38.83). Most of the earlier
stories, on the contrary, present in a straightforwardly linear fashion firstly
the youthful indiscretions of the protagonist then the complications they
cause in later life—a narrative form which doesn’t lend itself so easily to the
generation of that intense air of mystery, anxiety, and distress that was to
characterize wartime embodiments of the theme. Indeed, the first of the
films to propose a deprived and distressed childhood as the cause of later
criminality has the reminiscences of an unhappy youth which explain the
character’s later criminality appended as a mere afterthought to the narra-
tion of that criminality: at his trial, his mother hopes to mitigate her son’s
involvement with a crime gang by invoking his fatherless state, which has
exacerbated their poverty and the social pressures of working-class life
(33.41). Similar last-minute sociological explanations lend a certain poig-
nancy to the death of the murderer in La Tradition de minuit (39.88).
The more interesting films, however, are those which present youthful
errors as central thematic material rather than last-minute afterthoughts.
When this happens, there is a clear gender differentiation: male protago-
nists are haunted by criminal acts in their youth, while females are haunted
by sexual indiscretions. Thus a male tennis champion can’t shed his past as-
sociation with a band of wastrels who have turned to robbery, is wounded
while resisting their attempt to rob his mistress, and consequently loses his
crucial tennis match (33.42); a male political leader is blackmailed over a
theft he committed as a young man (36.9); and, despite redeeming himself
in the colonies, the nephew of an industrialist cannot escape the youthful
indiscretions which led to his exile (34.12). Such stories presuppose an anx-
iety about some fundamental violence underlying the male personality,
which success in later life can never entirely redeem or cancel out.
As one might expect, this more public and aggressive orientation of the
young male’s past criminality contrasts with the more private and affective
nature of the young female’s past sexual misdemeanors, though “lady-
killer” stories such as Liebelei (33.76), in which a rake’s past affairs re-
emerge to doom a present “true love,” imply an anxiety about male sexual
misdemeanors. Aside from these, Le Coupable (36.27) is the only film I
have recorded in which a young man’s past sexual behavior catches up on
him in his later respectable life, when as a judge he is called upon to try his
own illegitimate son. But this film is also narrated in linear fashion, setting
out cause and effect in a way which does not allow the construction of an
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 161
atmosphere of uncertainty, secrecy, and apprehension. And although at the
end the judge beats his breast and proclaims his guilt for past sins, the spec-
tator who has followed the chain of events as they happened has always
been aware that it was not fundamentally his fault but that of the old
grandfather, who, through his class prejudice and lies, had been responsible
for the involuntary sexual betrayal by his son and the descent into criminal-
ity of his grandson. Happily, the grandfather ultimately dies of shock at the
outcome of his actions.
But this film is exceptional—normally, it is women who turn out to
have a shady past; or, rather, the negative connotations which seem always
in Western culture of recent centuries to have attached to female sexuality
are represented in these films as doubts about the purity of the woman cho-
sen as wife—doubts which all too often, alas, turn out to be substantiated.
This contrast between apparent purity and hidden perversity is all the more
powerful when associated with the opposition between puritanical provin-
cial male and sexually adventurous Parisian female. Thus, a young provin-
cial man may meet an attractive girl at a masked ball and come to love her,
only to discover that she has led a dissolute life in her youth. He leaves her,
returns, forgives . . . but finally departs for America without her (34.93).
Another provincial falls for a Parisian girl only to learn she has not been as
pure as he thought. Though engaged, he refuses to marry her and returns to
his country chateau with his sister, who has been more fortunate (36.31).
Marie Bell, who played this role, also played the apparently prudish wife of
Loulou (Raimu) who, as he eventually comes to realize, is none other than
the chanteuse who was his mistress in Saigon many years ago (38.69). This
film develops its sense of apprehension in a game-like way, having the hap-
pily married wife suddenly faced with the prospect of her palm being read
by a friend of her husband’s who claims to be able to uncover a person’s hid-
den past. Not realizing that he is just a con artist demonstrating his favorite
technique for getting to know women, she suffers a hysterical crisis which
unlocks her husband’s memories of their past encounter in Saigon. “Aargh!
I slept with my wife!” exclaims the husband, for whom it has admittedly be-
come an atypical experience, and he proceeds to become comically jealous
of the idiot he was at that time.
Most films treat the suppressed and resurgent past more somberly. In
that same year, in a film pointedly entitled J’étais une aventurière, Edwige
Feuillère plays a respectable married woman whose shady past erupts when
she is blackmailed by a former lover. She is forced to admit her past to her
husband, who (as in the previous instance) magnanimously pardons her
and helps her put the memory of her dissolute youth behind her (38.53).
The respectable woman who turns out to have been a high-class tart in her
youth was a standard character type in the late thirties. Nina Petrovna proves
unable to escape her past and is reduced to suicide in despair (37.71), while
 162 |   
in Nitchevo (36.89) Thérèse is now married to a commandant, but the hec-
tic excesses of her youth emerge (again through the threats of a former
lover). The outcome is more fortunate this time, again allowing an oppor-
tunity for male magnanimity to be manifested.
If these later films show an intensification of the theme of a dissolute
youth it is because each one initially presents a “present tense” in which
middle-class respectability and rectitude prevail. Into this apparently idyllic
family life intrude progressive hints of the wife’s more sordid and dissolute
past, which she struggles desperately to keep secret from her unsuspecting
husband. A classic instance is Prisons de femmes (38.83), in which Juliette
has married a strictly moral industrialist without telling him of her past
(and admittedly somewhat unjust) incarceration for attempted murder.
Blackmail, confidants, incipient suspicions, and anxieties about “basing her
whole life on a lie” construct an atmosphere of intense emotion which ends
when her husband finally learns the awful truth and is coaxed into forgive-
ness: “At last the nightmare is over.” This is the film in which multiple tenses
and narrators are mobilized (ambitiously, but not always successfully) to en-
gender an impression of nightmarish mental evasions.
Feyder’s Les Gens du voyage (37.53), made the year before, is remarkable
for being organized around no fewer than three stories of youthful indiscre-
tions which threatened present happiness. Two of these focus on females
whose sexual indiscretions manifest themselves in illegitimate offspring,
and one on a male whose criminal past catches up with him despite his at-
tempts to go straight. Madame Flora is an animal-tamer in a circus, and un-
married. Her son, Marcel, loves the boss’s daughter, but his illegitimate
origins are held against him by the boss, who tells Flora, “You don’t even
know who his father is.” But she does, all too well, and so do we very soon:
Fernand, who is on the run, takes refuge in the circus to see Flora and their
son, and worms his way into the boss’s good graces without, of course, re-
vealing his criminal past. Meanwhile, the boss’s daughter has been packed
off to Paris, but too late to prevent a pregnancy. The gradual presentation of
information about these three sets of youthful indiscretion, both to other
characters and to the spectator, provides an effective narrative form. The re-
sult, however, is to construct adolescence as a time of reckless inconse-
quence, engendering secrets which threaten to undermine and destroy any
hope of happiness in later life. Indeed, they do destroy it in Fernand’s case,
since he is shot by police as he flees across the rooftops and falls to his death.
The most effective of these films generate intensity through curiosity
about the past which leads to an investigative narrative structure. The ex-
treme instance of this is provided by Carrefour (38.14), described earlier, in
which, in Freudian fashion, amnesia has suppressed an unacceptable past,
and the protagonist is led to investigate his own past self. Such narratives
make it apparent that it is not just the repressed indiscretions of youth that
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 163
are in question, nor even simply gender stereotypes, but once again the
question of bourgeois respectability seen as nothing but a hypocritical fa-
cade. It is a facade which crumbles easily, since such stories tend to involve
patterns of repetition or circularity, as the respectable adult is gradually
driven to repeat the criminal or sexual acts which he or she had tried to
suppress. In Carrefour, the character played by Vanel finds himself contem-
plating the murder of his blackmailer, in order to suppress the implication
that he was once a murderer. Even La Fin du jour (38.37) manifests this
sort of repetitive narrative pattern, as St. Clair’s rivalry with Marny over
Juliette threatens to replicate the tragedy of his past seduction of Marny’s
“one true love.” This largely unspoken past rivalry is only gradually re-
vealed to the spectator, as its significance is only gradually revealed to St.
Clair himself. Such self-knowledge is more than he can bear—his eyes
glaze, and he moves toward suicide.
Two final instances of this suppression of youthful indiscretions are
worth mentioning, again from the final years of the decade, and again or-
ganized into a narrative format which generates an atmosphere of anxi-
ety—Sans lendemain (39.80) and Le Drame de Shanghaï (38.27). Initially,
the first of these seems to be quite the contrary of a story about youthful in-
discretions undermining present respectability, since it introduces us to a
high-class tart, good-time girl, and risqué nightclub performer who meets
her “one true love” of yesteryear and has to strive desperately to construct a
respectable present for herself so as not to disillusion him. But we gradually
come to understand that the reason she left him without explanation all
those years ago was that even then she had had a shady past, as the wife of a
criminal, which she had desperately sought to conceal from him. Narrated
in linear fashion, there would be three successive suppressions of the past—
her husband suppressed his criminality, which she finds out about too late;
she in turn suppresses her marriage to the criminal, but cannot therefore
marry her suitor and true love, and disappears mysteriously; and years later
when she meets him again she suppresses all of this, together with the de-
scent into seedy sexual encounters to which she has subsequently been re-
duced. Only the last of these is told in the present tense; the others are
related in oblique references or in flashbacks. The result is a psychodrama in
which this (and by implication any) woman’s life is revealed as a series of
deceits, and in which her facade of respectability in the present tense is rep-
resented as merely the latest of a series of hastily contrived paperings-over
of an association with criminality and illicit sexuality. Like all women, she
is two-faced—Eveline on the surface, but Babs underneath, and she has to
pay for it with the loss of the man she loves, the loss of the son she adores,
and ultimately the loss of her own life.
Le Drame de Shanghaï replicates this narrative form to the extent that
it presents us with a mother who has been reduced to the life of a
 164 |   
chanteuse/good-time girl in a nightclub because she needs the money to
support her daughter, Vera, at boarding school. Vera feels this is no longer
the mother of old, but doesn’t realize why until she overhears the sardonic
yet moving reminiscences of her mother and a man she comes to feel must
be her father. Their mutual slide into degradation surfaces at last, and
through the agency of photos which reveal to Vera a very different past
from an even earlier age—her family’s aristocratic ease and elegance in
czarist Russia. As in so many of these stories, it is members of the older
generation who have become morally or criminally corrupt, and when this
corruption surfaces they must pay heavily, while the appalled younger gen-
eration is offered the possibility of that new start in a new land that proved
inaccessible to their parent’s generation—but with the older generation’s
awful example as a warning. This is also the import of La Tendre Ennemie
(35.109), in which each of the ghosts recounts his role in the mother’s life,
gradually working back to the initial disaster which blighted her life and
that of so many others. They then proceed to manipulate the living so as to
ensure that the daughter doesn’t make the same (deadly) mistakes as her
mother and her mother’s mother. This is just one of several such “genera-
tional” films in which the sins of one generation of a family are replicated
in the next, destroying the happiness of successive sets of offspring until a
final intervention breaks the cycle and opens up the possibility of future
happiness. These were dealt with more fully in chapter 4.
In this reading, the “suppressed past” films of the last years of the dec-
ade construct adolescence as a time of tragic errors, when the unacceptable
realities of male violence and female licentiousness (not to mention family
tyranny) most readily find their regrettable expression. A mature adult may,
in exceptional cases and through the magnanimity of stronger personali-
ties, manage to transcend all this and put it behind him or her, though in all
justice he or she should pay the supreme penalty for it, and often does. This
set of propositions, which was to be taken to extremes during the war years,
reinforces the decade’s global view of childhood as a time of innocence
tested and readily corrupted by social pressures, of education as inadequate
to the needs of the young, of the boarding school as an institution analo-
gous to and as ineffectual as the reformatories of the penal system, and of
the law as flawed by innumerable miscarriages of justice. Lawyers, judges,
teachers, and the police are, or soon become, corrupted by power and self-
interest, just as were those most directly responsible for the trials of the
working people of the decade—bankers, financiers, and bosses. Only in a
few films of the final years of the decade are there signs of a paradigm
change which might see the rigid inhumanities of these “ideological appa-
ratuses” softened by compassion and understanding.
While it would be excessive to see any of the material in this chapter as
central to the concerns of La Règle du jeu, it is interesting to hear such a sar-
 Education, the Media, and the Law | 165
donic view of contemporary social institutions being voiced by Octave at
the point when Christine talks of her life having for three years been based
on a lie. “Listen, Christine,” he says, “that’s a sign of the times too. This is
an age when everyone lies—ads for drugs, the radio, the newspapers, the
government, the cinema. . . . Not one of them tells the truth. . . . Why
should you expect individuals to be any different?”
 SIX

Art and Transcendence:

Spirituality and Reflexivity

6.1 ARTISTS AND THEIR LIVES

S everal chapters have noted the tendency toward the end of the decade
for filmmakers to become aware of the sets of conventions underlying
the structure of their films and to comment, often ironically, on the mean-
ings thus produced. Inevitably, this reflexivity was most apparent when the
film was overtly reflecting on its own existence as a film and on the func-
tions of those involved in its production. Since those involved—especially
the scriptwriters and directors, but usually the entire technical team and the
producer as well—commonly represented film as an art form and them-
selves as aesthetically motivated, it is not at all surprising that art and the
artist should figure so prominently in films of the time. At least 297 out of
some 1,300 films produced during the decade (about 23 percent), and
probably many more, contain some representation of the artist as a fore-
grounded element. These 297 films are spread fairly evenly throughout the
decade, at a rate of about 30 films each year, though there are peaks in 1931
and 1938, separated by a trough in 1934.
At one level, it is of interest to note what forms of artistic activity film-
makers saw as most worthy of representation. At another, it is more inter-
esting to note what view of art and the artist is mobilized, regardless of the
art form involved. With respect to the first of these, perhaps because cin-
ema is a demotic art form, but also because of the favorable light in which
“the people” were viewed throughout the decade, the types of artistic activ-
ity represented were spread very broadly across both middle-class forms
of high art and working-class forms of popular culture. Throughout the
decade, there was a tendency toward the more popular cultural forms, in a
proportion of about three to two. In addition to the cinema itself, those
popular forms included circus performers and occasional jazz musicians or
orchestras, but by far the greatest number were popular singers and dancers.
Anyone conversant with the cinema of the time will recall numerous in-
 Art and Transcendence | 167
stances of street singers, music-hall performers, and nightclub and cabaret
acts. Radio appears several times as a popular medium, and television once
(31.76).
Among the more classical arts, various forms of musical expression are
the most frequently identified (56 films), followed by the theater (33), the
visual arts (19), and literature (13). This relatively low number might seem
surprising, given the literary background of so many of the scriptwriters,
but compared to the performance arts the act of writing is inherently less
cinematic. Indeed, in all these artistic activities, for that very reason, there is
a tendency to focus on the performance aspect of creativity rather than on
the conceptual—on actor and musician rather than on composer, play-
wright, or novelist. Composers, whether Beethoven or Trénet, had to be
performers as well (or romantically linked to performers) to achieve a place
in the cinematic pantheon. Writers are noticeably absent, and the cinema
establishes early in the decade that they are a drab lot, unlikely to interest
the public or the opposite sex in their own right, but needing to be dis-
guised as a gentleman thief (30.39; 35.62) or to pretend to be assassinated
if they are to inspire a romantic attachment (31.51). Dramatists are consid-
ered particularly risible, because of their inevitable lack of contact with
“real life” (35.98), which leads them to produce grotesque works such as the
“mutist” play in Fauteuil 47 (37.42).
Although the act of painting could be seen as accumulating both cre-
ative and performative elements, there is a reasonable explanation for film-
makers’ reluctance to tackle it: the absence of color for much of the period.
When they do introduce a painter, thirties films carefully present him only
while drawing, leaving his painterly skills to be extrapolated (35.13;
37.124), and even his drawing skills are suggested rather than demon-
strated. Thus, it is the performative aspect of the musical and theatrical arts
which is the principal focus of “art.” For the same reasons, circuses, street
singers, musicians, and dramatic acts are most common popular art forms.
Certain generalizations can be made about each of these popular forms
of cultural activity, before we move on to a consideration of their common
functions. Among the “low culture” forms, the circus had long been cele-
brated in France, and the thirties was perhaps the last decade in which this
could be stated without qualification. In an age of sedentary populations,
the circus travelling from town to town brought to each community a mo-
ment of exhilaration, adventure, and the extraordinary, though precisely
because they were forever on the move, circus personnel shared that envi-
able but slightly suspect privilege of the Gypsy, a certain “shiftiness” which
went with the open road. Their arrival brought excitement and intensity,
and their departure inspired dreams of the great unknown, out there, into
which they disappeared. But anything or anyone might disappear with
them. In Germany, of course, circuses and fairgrounds had a quite different
 168 |   
set of connotations deriving from their place in expressionist representa-
tion as a site of disorder, even chaos. To some extent, this built on a more
general Western tradition of carnival, in which festivities associated with
fairgrounds, processions, and masked celebrations allowed populations to
participate in forms of expression that were normally illicit, broke with
propriety, or totally inverted social norms and structures.
The circus of thirties French films draws on both these traditions. In
general, films whose principal location is the circus are concentrated in the
first half of the decade and benefit from a romantic representation. One
pragmatic reason there are so many is that they allowed the narrative to pre-
sent a number of circus acts, often by renowned performers, as an “inci-
dental” background to the main narrative. Such films tend toward the
episodic, or at least are organized around a series of performances often
marginal to the central narrative. This is a circus of outsiders, constantly on
the move, rejecting society and being rejected by it, sometimes momentar-
ily tempted to settle down, but ultimately hitting the road again (39.4). In
the final years of the decade, the circus or circus personnel are usually in-
volved in an isolated narrative incident, in which they stand for some well-
consecrated value—adventure, disorder, melancholy, and so on. Indeed,
they tend toward the fairground more than the circus, and thus create ap-
prehension more often than exhilaration. Les Gens du voyage (37.53) is the
one full-scale circus story from the last half of the decade. It exploits the ro-
mance of a footloose life, the routines of erecting and dismantling the big
top, the performances, and the back-stage conspiracies, but in keeping with
the more somber mood of these later years it conceals a hotbed of sexuality
and of painful memories from a suppressed past.
Three categories of circus personnel were favored by the thirties cin-
ema—trapeze artists/acrobats, animal-tamers, and clowns. Each category
had its recurrent qualities and narratives, though the principal division is
between the dynamic, dangerous, and potentially lethal professions of
trapeze artist and lion-tamer, and the “safe” but more emotionally unstable
profession of clown. The former are a passionate and violent lot, harboring
bitter grievances against one another and flying into jealous rages which
often result in the death of their rival or partner (30.1; 30.92; 35.121).
They allow one another “accidentally” to crash to the ground or be eaten by
wild beasts, or at least they contemplate doing so. Typical of these stories is
one already mentioned, in which an animal-tamer has brought up a young
girl; as she grows up, he comes to love her and marries her; but she, alas,
loves a trapeze artist and, in despair, the animal-tamer allows himself to be
devoured by his beasts (35.105). There are another two such films in 1935:
in La Tendre Ennemie (35.109) one of the ghosts was in his lifetime a lion-
tamer, “Rodrigo le Vainqueur.” The errant wife had fallen for him but self-
ishly ignored his medical condition, and when she insists that he live it up
 Art and Transcendence | 169
in the bright lights of the Côte d’Azur rather than retiring to the mountain
sanatorium for the medical treatment he so urgently needs, he becomes so
debilitated that his tigers kill him. In Les Gens du voyage, Françoise Rosay, in
her role as female lion-tamer, is lucky to escape the same fate when mauled
by her lions (37.53).
Clowns are a more melancholy and passive category of character. As is
well known, their impassive masked faces conceal untold depths of feeling,
but the unspoken admiration that they feel for some attractive female—
usually a dancer or performer’s assistant—counts for little beside the wealth
of an aristocrat or the passion and drama of a trapeze artist or an animal-
tamer. Sadly, the clown stands aside and returns to his task of spreading a
joy which he himself can never experience (30s14; 31.66). In other narra-
tives, a woman comes to appreciate the inherent nobility of the melancholy
clown and learns to love him (32.79; 33.5; 35.21). One of the most popu-
lar films of the decade foregrounded clown figures: in La Ronde des heures
(30.80), the melancholy singer who has lost his voice and abandoned his
family develops a second career as half of a clown duo which proves im-
mensely successful. Since he is working under an assumed name and is
always heavily made up his real identity is unknown, and he is invited to
perform at the second marriage of his own wife. Fortunately, his voice
returns and his daughter recognizes him, with easily imaginable conse-
quences. His wife, of course, has never ceased to love him, deep down.
Clowns were the most sentimentalized of thirties characters.
Although there were different stereotypes among the circus characters,
the general air of suspicion that surrounded circus performers of all sorts
can best be appreciated from the number of times that they are roped in as
suspects in some criminal investigation (31.49; 36.38; 37.121), proving
guilty if they are acrobats, innocent if clowns. When they appear, the own-
ers of these circuses, like theater managers (32.130) and all representatives
of authority, are treated badly in thirties films, and will also prove to be
guilty of whatever crime has been committed (39.4; 39.69). Their main in-
terest, at least until Grémillon’s Les Gens du voyage, is in power, money, or
the graceful body of one of their young female employees. They are thus
often at the origin of the narrative conflict, inspiring jealous hatred or
melancholy resignation.
As the decade progresses and the focus shifts from narratives about cir-
cus life to those in which circuses and fairgrounds appear episodically, loca-
tions tend toward the urban and connotations more emphatically toward
the negative. The fairground is now set up in an urban wasteland and has
acquired a distinctly sinister array of sideshows—shooting alleys, fortune-
tellers, grotesque waxworks, and reenacted assassinations. It is a raucous,
bustling place, always visited at night by people driven to desperate mea-
sures. It is also a working-class location, and the criminal element so often
 170 |   
associated with the working class in thirties films is here seen at its seediest
and most sinister: Jacques, the ne’er-do-well apache brother in Dans les rues
(33.41), frequents such a sideshow alley with its fence dealing in stolen
goods; the young couple’s hopes of a happy marriage in Jeunesse (34.52) are
mocked even as they are articulated by a penny-a-throw ball knocking over
a bride and groom; and the eponymous hero of Liliom (34.55) is a fair-
ground barker, allied in some suspect way both with the female boss and
with criminals. This film systematically builds up a contrast between the
humble but drab prospects of a respectable but impoverished marriage and
the intense, risky, but glamorous pleasures associated with sexuality, crimi-
nality, and the fairground. It is always night in fairgrounds, so bustling
crowds, looming shadows, shafts of light, and frightening physical mon-
strosities make of it a place to avoid or escape. It is from a stall in such a fair-
ground that the respectable Dr Vautier picks up the waif who has been
injured in a squabble and for whom he will develop such an ambivalent af-
fection (33.26).
In a quite different genre, but serving the same purpose, the fairground
in Mayerling (36.77) is the place where, masked and seeking some form of
escape from his stifling, loveless bourgeois marriage, amid the bustling noc-
turnal crowds, Archduke Rudolph finds and rescues Marie Vetsera. At the
end of the decade, La Tradition de minuit (39.88) contains an analogous
scene and, in Abus de confiance (37.2), it is a place of confusion where moral
norms do not hold; here, the female protagonist is almost seduced but man-
ages to resist. It is notable that in this environment even the street singer’s
mythic appeal is undercut, since the romantic love of which he sings turns
out to be a seductive but delusory trap. Such films serve to provide a useful
context for the weird fairground in Quai des brumes (38.84), where both
love and the revenge that will lead to the death of love come to the fore.
Normally, of course, the street singer was a romantic, even revered, fig-
ure in thirties cinema. From 1930 on, when Sous les toits de Paris (30.84) es-
tablished him as the archetypal working-class wise guy (débrouillard ), the
street singer benefited from broadly positive representation (31.59; 32.110).
His ability to sing is at once a talent with broad popular appeal and an ex-
ternal signifier of the vitality which characterizes the working class in such
films. The focus of a circle of appreciative people who join in choruses and
buy the sheet music at the end, street singers are also a signifier of “commu-
nity.” One of the most negative representations of circus life is Chansons de
Paris, which relates the exploitation of a young street singer and his accom-
panist friend—the former has to pretend to lose his voice to escape from
the circus (34.26).
More generally, singers were common in thirties films because musical
comedy and operetta were among the most prolific of genres of the decade,
and many of those focused on the rise of a protagonist whose singing talent
 Art and Transcendence | 171
distinguished him as someone out of the ordinary, a worthy protagonist
and natural object of romantic love. Nearly all the early-thirties stars had
initially been singers. At the very least, the ability to carry a tune was an es-
sential career requirement. Jean Gabin, Fernandel, Tino Rossi, and Maurice
Chevalier all came from the music hall, as did Arletty, Josephine Baker,
Garat, André Beaugé, and Florelle, and all could and did play the role of a
singer. The films of the decade are scattered with somber moments in
which Mistinguett, Edith Piaf, Fréhel, Damia, or Yvette Guibert comment
on the action via a cabaret song. To sing was to be a folk hero at the time (as
it still is). But rather than being, as it is now, a signifier of youthfulness and
trendiness, it spoke of profound emotional integrity and intuitive access to
the fundamental truths of existence.
Some of these female singers, notably Josephine Baker and Florelle, are
accorded affectionate roles in which they attract audience sympathy and
identification. Florelle’s songs in Faubourg Montmartre (31.55) and Le Crime
de Monsieur Lange (35.27) are cases in point. For the most part, however,
female singers are implicated in negative aspects of society, such as crime,
sexual misdemeanors, and suicide. Fréhel, for instance, is most likely to
turn up as a gangster’s moll or a brothel manager (36.99; 38.60; 38.93),
and the nightclubs in which she and her colleagues sing will always be the
sleazy haunt of criminals and of drug peddlers.
Indeed, as a gross generalization, there is a gender divide in singers,
dancers, and actors/actresses: narratives organized around males are of the
romantic-comedy genre, relating their professional and sentimental suc-
cesses, while those organized around females are more somber dramas, re-
lating not only their own downfall but the implication of other, worthier
people in that downfall. To some extent, this was due to the gendered dif-
ferentiation within popular song itself: the earthier type of song (chanson
réaliste) was a female genre, and its proponents are integrated into “realistic”
narratives of a doom-laden nature. It was also partly due to the standard
gender representations of the age. The cabaret singer operated within an
urban nighttime environment in which alcohol, sexuality, and popular en-
thusiasm spoke of instinctual forces unleashed. Such sites readily allow the
chanteuse to overlap with the femme fatale (32.133; 38.18). She is regularly
involved in ephemeral sexual relationships (31.106; 32.118), often trails il-
legitimate children behind her (34.44; 36.22; 36.44), and is a natural sus-
pect in adultery, or in any criminal investigation (30.2), because (like all
popular figures) she associates with criminals and lives on the fringes of
their illicit activity (30.4; 36.112). Often she herself commits crimes such
as blackmail (30.33; 36.12) or incites others to commit them (35.57), and,
if not herself involved in assassinations, quite commonly drives others to
murder third parties or to suicide. Even the more benign ones are trapped
and compromised by their involvement in this nocturnal world (35.34)
 172 |   
and, treated badly by life, will be found singing of their despair and abjec-
tion in the more squalid dives of Saigon, Singapore, or Shanghai (31.124;
38.27).
Although the theatrical actress could also be implicated in the seedier
aspects of the performance industry, such as drug peddling (32.130), there
is a slight distinction to be made between her and the chanteuse. While
both participate in that well-known disposition of the female performer to
be women of easy virtue, the actress has none of the singer’s tendency to-
ward the sleazy, the squalid, and the criminal. She is often, rather, a frivo-
lous, superficial figure, mobilized more often in comedies than in dramas as
an appropriate “professional” with whom a central figure can have, or can
be discovered to be having, an adulterous affair. She is the pretty young
thing whom the bourgeois husband has set up in a flat. While this might
seem an unpromising role, it has its serious side. The actress serves to punc-
ture the hypocritical facade of respectability with which authority figures
seek to surround themselves. In the course of the thirties, at least twenty
films featured actresses serving this function with respect to such authority
figures as a colonel (32.18), a press magnate (37.97), a count (34.102), a
prince (34.83), and a politician (31.43). More generally, boxers, directors,
producers—anyone admired or respected by the public—might find them-
selves distracted by the naive charms of an actress. A fiancé (31.80) or a dis-
approving father may find himself in danger of reproducing his profligate
son’s improprieties (31.104), or a provincial gentleman may squander his
fortune on a Parisian actress (35.87). In thus deflating the pretentious and
the self-righteous, the actress shares, if in an attenuated form, that funda-
mental characteristic of all artists, the rejection of the social and moral con-
ventions of the day. Somewhat less often, the (successful) actress figure can
be mobilized in boulevard comedies as a member of the establishment who
herself needs to be deflated and brought down to earth (37.42). In Désiré,
it is a man of the people, namely the butler, who does this, by way of mu-
tually satisfying erotic fantasies (37.34). Such actresses, now mistresses of a
house, partake of the dubious status of star, and are treated with the same
distrust.
The great bulk of these narratives appear in the first half of the decade,
in filmed versions of the boulevard comedies and vaudevilles that thrived in
those years. While the same is true of the chanteuse, she was able to survive
and flourish even in the more somber and bitter narratives of the second
half of the decade. But it is the male popular singer who most commonly
assumes the responsibility for representing the naively sentimental view of
art and the artist. One means that many filmmakers of the day adopt to lib-
erate him from the dubious connotations of the nocturnal urban popular
culture which taints his female counterpart is to attribute to him rural ori-
gins, or to remove him for key segments of the story to the countryside.
 Art and Transcendence | 173
This was almost essential in the case of Tino Rossi, whose Corsican origins
were so apparent in his accent, and whose narratives are as a consequence
often set in southern locations. In his first starring role, he plays a Corsican;
though he is seduced away from that island by a femme fatale, he is ever
nostalgic for it—the essential simplicity of the country lad never deserts
him (36.11). The following year, again as a singer, he tries to realize his
dream of peace and happiness by the sea, only to be betrayed yet again by
the feckless ways of a femme fatale (37.80); while a year later, again a fash-
ionable singer, he flees the sycophantic city crowd to find peace in the coun-
tryside, this time discovering true love with a country girl whom he courts
incognito (38.58).
In his thirties films, Trénet followed the same pattern. In his first film,
he returns to the country chateau, now being run by his uncle as a boarding
school for girls, and saves both uncle and institution with his songs (38.52).
In the next, he again heads off into the country in search of the chateau he
has dreamed of; when he finds it, it is (unsurprisingly) inhabited by an at-
tractive young woman, whom he is able to marry on the basis of his singing
successes (38.92). In short, a principal strategy for distinguishing the male
singer as a romantic hero is to integrate him into the Paris/provinces and
city/countryside oppositions which operate widely throughout the decade.
Female singers were not allowed this privilege. Toward the end of the
decade, however, three films present young female singers as deserving cases,
but only on condition that they come to appreciate the strength, devotion,
and support of the male who saves them from suicide, launches them on a
career, and frees them from their shady associates (39.8; 39.50; 39.96).
In general, male singers favored by the decade’s films participate in the
same set of values, attributes, and narrative conventions as the dozens of
classical singers and musicians who appear in the repertoire and, indeed, as
any high-culture artist, writer, or actor. These derive from and, in turn,
constitute the romantic myth of art and the artist as it has existed since the
beginning of the nineteenth century. An essential element is the glorifica-
tion of the artist as inhabited by an exceptional gift, which he has not had
to acquire but with which he has been invested by fate. “Practice,” “work,”
and “technique” are alien to this myth, let alone “training,” which would
call into question the originality of the output. His innate talent (or hers,
though it usually is a male) leads the artist to create a quite distinctive and
original output, which bursts on the astonished world with the force of rev-
elation; though in the classical as opposed to the popular variant, it is often
so remote from current conventions that it is not recognized, and years of
unremitting struggle are necessary before the artist (of whatever persuasion)
accedes to his rightful place in the pantheon.
Two fundamental cleavages divide the conceptual world of the artist:
that between money and art, and that between convention and art. The
 174 |   
two are, of course, related. Convention implies rules, regulations, the known,
and the routine; the romantic myth of the artist sees art as unconstrained,
limitlessly inventive, reaching out into the unknown. It has no pragmatic
function, no “use,” but is timeless in its forms, its values, and even its dis-
coveries. Its most despised antagonist is the commercially minded bour-
geois who cannot see beyond the possible monetary value of its products,
or even worse, wishes to constrain it by dint of commissioning works, and
thus determining by financial means the direction and form the work is to
take.
These values and attitudes are usually incorporated into one of a very
few standard narrative forms, of which the most common is “the artist’s
life.” A series of possible tropes in this narrative involve humble beginnings,
realization of a vocation, struggle against reaction and lack of understand-
ing, a moment of revelation in which inexplicable talents are manifested,
deception by women or patrons, rivalry and scorn from the established
cliques, the rise to mastery, and final (often only posthumous) recognition:
a new way of seeing and understanding the world has been imposed on a
blinkered public. Within the context of a performance art, some of these
narrative tropes can be incorporated into an account of “the mounting of a
production,” with its struggle to fund the production, betrayals and deser-
tions by insufficiently motivated cast members, illnesses, and ultimate suc-
cess, often achieved in the face of sentimental loss—but then, “the show
must go on.” An intersection between this and the previous narrative may
be provided by the star falling ill on opening night and the understudy, or
an unknown, being called on at the last minute. The understudy is, of
course, a revelation, and a new star is born.
Since there are fewer instances of the latter narrative, it is easier to illus-
trate it with some degree of comprehensiveness. One of the very earliest
sound movies embodies some of these narrative moves. La Route est belle
(29.5) presents a struggling singer who rises to success when he is called on
to replace the famous tenor at the last minute. Paris Béguin (31.97) uses as
one of its narrative lines the stock relationship between bloated producer
and actress, along with the rehearsals and (partial) performance of the show
in which they are involved. Already it is clear in this film that one of the
themes to be treated most affectionately by this genre will be the intricate
interplay between life and art. The star reworks her role to fit her experience
of the night before and, in so doing, foreshadows the tragic end; her man
dies in her arms on the night of her triumph, but she still sings her heart
out up there on stage, smiling through her tears. The show must go on. The
role of art is at once to deny the importance of life and to capture the
essence of life, transmuting it into something more meaningful, transcen-
dental, eternal.
 Art and Transcendence | 175
These themes, treated lightheartedly in the early years of the decade
(e.g., 31.77), will be taken more and more seriously as the decade wears
on. Among surviving films, those that deal with the mounting of a perfor-
mance include La Crise est finie (34.31) (a provincial tour, with stand-in,
rehearsals, egotistic star, the setting up of a rival company, finding a the-
ater, financial problems, lecherous producers, more rehearsals, the opening
night, and the consecration of a new star); Zouzou (34.115) (the musical
to be staged, the petulance of the white star contrasted with the natural
talent of the black laundress, the rehearsal, the star walks out, the laun-
dress sings, “Who is that girl?” says the producer, and despite losing her
man, she goes on to sing her heart out, grief transmuted into art); Rigol-
boche (36.112) (Mistinguett, on the run, tries out for a basement cabaret,
is a great success, is taken up by the aristocracy, buys a theater to put on
her own show, rehearsals, performance); and Marinella (36.75) (rehearsal,
star sick, Tino Rossi is discovered and stands in for the star, all in the first
ten minutes).
The shows themselves, insofar as audiences are privileged to witness
them, are less than overwhelming. In particular, the choreography is disas-
trous—almost self-consciously so at times. On the other hand, the singing
is often extremely moving, and toward the end of the decade a number of
Negro musicians and singers join Josephine Baker to assert the supposedly
intuitive feeling that blacks have for rhythm and melody (35.43). Princess
Tam-Tam, unduly constrained by white middle-class society, seeks solace
first among the working class (“real people, who know how to enjoy them-
selves”), then in a bar where a Negro jazz band is playing and a black singer
is reminiscing nostalgically about the delights of his tropical home (35.92).
Every nightclub seems to have its resident Negro saxophonist or pianist, its
Negress singer (37.6; 38.16; 38.27; 38.63; 39.71). Their negritude ac-
corded with the natural “untrained” intuitive values promoted by the myth,
which prizes spontaneity and improvisation, and benefited from the posi-
tive connotations of the rural. The most convincing association between
negritude and music is, however, the earliest—the Negro chanting, singing,
and accompaniment to La Petite Lise (30.66), as is the most grotesque—the
Negro tenor taken as a lover, sight unseen, by the petulant wife (30.13).
Musically, the opening scenes of La Petite Lise are among the great mo-
ments of thirties film.
But it is not only black performers who participate in this myth. A
number of films were made in which a band of aspiring musicians gets to-
gether, finds an appropriate performance site, and puts on a show (38.36);
a talented singer is found (35.17); and crapulous producers, with reprehen-
sibly mercenary motives, are thwarted (38.6). The “big band” itself, how-
ever, as the focus of a popular cult was not as significant an element in
 176 |   
thirties films as it was to be in postwar films. Even Ray Ventura and his
band, which provided the backing for nine films in the course of the decade
(nearly always playing scores composed by Misraki), seldom featured in the
diegesis. They do so only three times (36.130; 38.36; 39.87), twice consti-
tuting the focus of the narrative action. Of these films, Tourbillon de Paris
provides a clear indication of the way this and other bands will feature in
the following decade. A band is formed by a group of collegians, which im-
mediately associates swing with the young and the trendy—indeed, there is
an overt opposition between the swinging young and the conservatism of
classical music, as represented by an older and uptight classical composer
who marches his party out of the restaurant as an expression of disgust
when the youngsters starts playing. Both the collegians and the audience
subsequently ridicule the classical composer’s pretentious opera, and the
collegians begin an alternative performance in the stalls. The story is a clas-
sic one of a fight against the disapproval of established authorities, which,
unsurprisingly, leads to popular success and an idyllic finale. The fact that
both films in which the formation of a big band is central were made late in
the decade, and that in general Ventura’s appearances were clustered in the
years 1936–39, identifies the point of origin of the swing/jazz cult that was
to come to the fore between 1945 and 1955.
In general, the more popular cultural forms of whatever sort evoke and
recycle the romantic myth of the artist only in an attenuated form. Its most
forceful representation is to be found in biographical narratives relating “the
life of the artist”—specifically, the lives of certain well-known artists. For
the reasons noted above, these were almost entirely great musicians—in-
deed, great composer/performers. The thirties saw dramatized portraits of
Pergolesi (32.8), Chopin (34.25), Beethoven (36.135), Charpentier (39.49),
Schubert (39.82), and Strauss—the last both early and late in the decade
(33.63; 39s1), and again in mid-decade in less explicit form (36.141). The
combination of a popular figure whose waltzes evoked the elegance and the
aristocracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was irresistible. Alongside
these musicians, only Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, rep-
resents the other high arts (37.65).
Parallel to these biographical films of “real” artists, innumerable fic-
tional analogues drawn from the whole range of high art forms embody el-
ements of the same myth. Humble beginnings, poverty, and an early life of
struggle and disappointment are crucial to this narrative. Typical of these is
Rigolboche (36.112), in which Mistinguett plays a singer suspected of mur-
der, pursued by the police, holing up in a poverty-stricken quarter of Paris,
yearning for the son who doesn’t know that she is his mother; and Le Grand
Refrain (36.49), in which a talented composer begins in poverty and de-
scends to total indigence, faced with the public’s inability to appreciate the
 Art and Transcendence | 177
originality of his compositions. It went without saying that great art was in-
compatible with easy popular success, and especially with commercial re-
wards. The cleavage between great and false art, elitist and popular forms,
indigence and profitability is represented as profound. Thus, alliances be-
tween artists and wealthy families are doomed, at least until the artist has
suffered in some sufficiently abominable way in order to hone his sensitivi-
ties. Setting the tone for the decade, the bourgeois father of La Ronde des
heures (30.80) disapproves totally of his talented singer son-in-law and
wants to dispose of him so he can marry his daughter off again to an ad-
vantageously endowed friend. He therefore rejoices at the tenor’s double
pneumonia, loss of voice, and subsequent disappearance (he becomes a
clown) and tries to talk his daughter into a divorce. When his daughter rec-
ognizes her husband’s singing voice, he is invited to perform his clown act
in the family home; he almost collapses, but rallies (“the show must go on”).
The unmasking of a singer’s identity by way of a casually overheard song
was so standard as to become a cliché in this first decade of the talkie
(31.77; 34.92; in a sense, 38.27), providing a fitting form of recognition to
round off an artist’s life.
A classic instance of the opposition between art and money occurs in
Chotard et Cie, in which the poetic young actor is treated by his industrialist
father-in-law as a hopelessly impractical ne’er-do-well until he receives the
Prix Goncourt, and the official sanction which that prize connotes causes
the father-in-law radically to review his preconceptions. But the artist is not
to be won over so easily: a typically poetic disregard for money and “work”
has the poet “playing” at his job of shop assistant and giving away the stock
to passing kids (32.34). An even more feckless disregard for money gets a
singer into trouble with the teaching profession because he refuses to charge
the going rate for the lessons he gives. When he learns that his opera has
been accepted for performance not on its merits but because it has been
subsidized by a wealthy patron, he is in despair, as any true artist would be
(32.16). The omnipresent distrust of producers and bankers in films fea-
turing artists is thus merely an extreme manifestation of one of the recur-
rent characteristics both of the artist and of the thirties (and not only of the
thirties, of course).
Although poverty and a life of material hardship are essential to this
spiritual profession, other forms of suffering turn out to be equally effec-
tive in tempering the artistic talent. Beethoven’s deafness provides an ar-
chetypal form of suffering and deprivation (36.135) but muteness or
blindness would do just as well (31.71). Sentimental reverses compound
Beethoven’s suffering, and the malific role of women in the life of the artist
cannot be overestimated. In the extreme, the artist is doomed to be misun-
derstood throughout his life, since fate reserves for him only posthumous
 178 |   
fame. Several films play this out, notably Gance’s Beethoven film, while
others satirize it mildly by having the artist or his supporters feign his
death/suicide (32.113; 36.49; 36.85). Only thus can he witness his own
consecration as an artist.
More commonly, the artist is allowed to transcend his or her suffering
in one way or another, transmuting it into great art. Usually, this involves
some form of heroic sacrifice, on the part either of the artists or of the
lovers who release them to their destiny. Constantia must sacrifice her own
desires for Chopin’s sake (34.25); both Juliette and Thérèse, in their differ-
ent ways, are expected to sacrifice their existence to that of Beethoven
(36.135), while Beethoven himself is characterized as a martyrized Christ;
Zouzou, now a successful singer, must sacrifice her own desires for her
“brother’s” sake (34.115); the tenor who loses his voice and cannot support
his family in the manner to which they have become accustomed must
step aside and let them return to his wife’s aristocratic and disapproving
family (30.80); Pierre, the painter in Paradis perdu, must renounce his last
chance at happiness for his daughter’s sake (39.69); a female artist must re-
nounce romantic happiness and reconcile herself to her loveless life by de-
voting herself to her art (38.11). Renunciation and tragedy systematically
hound the aspiring artist—his daughter is drowned, he must renounce the
pupil he is learning to love, he loses his voice, his sanity, and finally his life
(32.152).
These psychodramas of renunciation are all the more melodramatic in
that artists are represented as feeling everything so much more deeply than
other men and women: their aesthetic sensitivities expose them to a crueler
destiny. But they are half in love with death already, since it is taken for
granted that their aspiration is toward the eternal. Cumulatively, this sensi-
tivity and spirituality render them more worthy than others, and in the
standard situation in which a woman is faced with a choice between an
artist and a non-artist there can be little doubt where her favor will fall. She
will, of course, prefer an artist to a banker (31.115), but, more impres-
sively, she will prefer him to a sportsman (32.144). She will even prefer an
artist to an officer and a prince (35.66) because, basically, the prince, like
the sportsman and the banker, can offer only worldly position, material not
spiritual sustenance, the physical and the transitory rather than the eternal.
Indeed, the artist wins on all counts, since he or she is more passionate,
more romantic. When women elope in thirties movies, it is with an artist.
Pergolesi abducts Maria; Lixie, about to marry the director of the Opera,
comes to her senses (or perhaps loses them) and elopes with her tenor lover
(33.129); Louise defies her family to elope with a composer (though when
her father falls ill, she sacrifices her happiness at least temporarily in the
name of duty) (39.49). A similar opposition is in play in Liebelei (33.76),
when Fritz sees through the artificiality of court life and abandons the
 Art and Transcendence | 179
baroness as soon as he meets Christine, whose father is conductor of the
orchestra in which she plays the cello, and who therefore will be repre-
sented as bringing warmth, humanity, and a simple sincerity into his stale
and superficial life.
The stereotype which emerges from the life and character of the artist
has at its core the notion of a disorderly and unconventional life which
makes the artist the archetypal marginal figure in polite society, living in a
different world from other people. It renders him yet another typical perpe-
trator of a crime of passion (38.100)—or at least a likely suspect (33.149).
It is also so widely and immediately recognizable that it is called upon with
great regularity in light comedies of the boulevard and sentimental genres.
Although the artist figure does not always come off so well in these genres,
it would not be accurate to see them as satirizing that figure; rather, they are
simply mobilizing it as a well-known element of the available repertoire.
Nevertheless, it is true that they do not treat the artist as respectfully as do
the more dramatic productions. A particularly common tendency in boule-
vard comedies is for artist figures to feature in situations of multiple or con-
fused identity. They are chameleon figures who may turn out to be the
Prince of Rumelia (33.69), an engineer, or an inventor (33.24), and they
often circulate disguised or masked. The “unknown singer” was a stock fig-
ure: a musician might disguise himself as a student to re-enroll at the Con
on a bet (38.1), or as a servant to test the sincerity of the woman he loves
(34.67), or as a ghost to frighten heirs from a chateau (34.72), or even as a
woman to enroll in a female orchestra (35.45). A singer might be mistaken
for a banker, or for the Count of Mareno, or, in a much-loved story, for an
empress, with tragic consequences (35.117; 32.151; 38.9). A crucial ele-
ment of their identity is, therefore, to have a somewhat slippery identity—
exuberant, passionate, volatile, marginal, ineffable. In films of the thirties,
the artist is one of the forms adopted by the trickster figure.

6.2 FORMS OF REFLEXIVITY

The true apotheosis of this chameleon artist comes on those occasions
when he (or, much less commonly, she) participates in theatrical dramas in
which “acting” is a central preoccupation. Then it becomes apparent that
the artist’s great virtue is to understand all roles, all identities, all the various
local manifestations of reality, because he draws his knowledge from
sources outside time and space. Probably the most telling expression of this
set of views can be found in Jouvet’s speech in Entrée des artistes (38.51),
but a number of scriptwriters and playwrights for whom the actor was God
worked it into script after script—writers as diverse as Jeanson, Mirande,
and, of course Guitry, but also in later years, Renoir, not to mention
Prévert in Les Enfants du paradis. Few will forget the (over)emphatic and
 180 |   
quasi-mystical expression of this point of view in Jouvet’s master-class in
Entrée des artistes, but those who have read his unspeakable treatise on the
theater will be grateful that Jouvet himself was not scripting the film.
Insofar as it glorifies the young actor’s moment of initiation into the
realm of the sacred, Entrée des artistes is, however, only one of a number of
thirties films which had focuses on the initiation of the young into theatri-
cal life, and their gradual realization of the privilege and obligations that it
bestows on them. Coquecigrole (31.39) seems to have been one of the first
of these in the sound-film period, and all narratives involving “staging a
performance” contained elements of it; yet there is no doubt that it reached
full (im)maturity in 1938 and 1939. Guitry, always inclined toward self-
glorification, promotes himself as puppet-master in Remontons les Champs-
Élysées (38.87), manipulating the children in the audience as he manipu-
lates his puppets; and the travelling players of Cavalcade d’amour (39.11)
are mythologized as the lowest yet, paradoxically, the highest of citizens, the
real aristocracy, the true royalty, alone capable of inspiring authentic love.
La Fin du jour is another well-known film organized around this theme,
though focusing on aging actors rather than young initiates (38.37).
In these and many other films, the principal message concerns the mag-
ical transformation that reality undergoes as it is elevated into dramatic ac-
tion. Endless use is made of the interpenetration of life and theater, life
and art. The one imitates yet embroiders on, varies, and transposes the
other in constant interaction. The cliché “la vie, quel théâtre” takes on re-
newed meaning when murmured in La Fin du jour. At times, “reality” is
represented as of little consequence except insofar as it can provide suitable
material for dramatization, and the actors live fully only when on stage.
Their fantasy life is more important to them than the raw material from
which their imagination fashions it, since it involves that purposeful re-
organization of reality which provides them with their identity and self-
understanding, and which makes life worth living.
When one of Jouvet’s students claims to have no confidence in herself,
Jouvet retorts, “What does it matter, as long as you have confidence in the
character you are acting . . . what matters is to put a little art in one’s life,
and life in one’s art . . . nothing is false, what matters is to have faith . . .
don’t forget, it’s only when the curtain rises that life begins . . . what matters
is to have believed in one’s role.” Inevitably, the students find that their pri-
vate lives are being taken over by their stage roles—that, indeed, their lives
are no more than a series of roles, and that nothing any longer comes natu-
rally, even the words of love, which sound to them now (as indeed to us)
like a hackneyed script. In the limit, Cecilia’s dying is no more than a well-
acted role, which gets its due recognition in a round of applause.
Bernstein’s play Le Bonheur, as filmed by Marcel L’Herbier (35.12), pro-
vides a particularly well-orchestrated presentation of such interactions be-
 Art and Transcendence | 181
tween life and art: the early scenes, in which the star arrives by train, per-
forms her sentimental song, and is shot by the anarchist, are reproduced as
part of a transposed drama which is rehearsed and reenacted by the star to
capitalize on popular accounts of the incident. The other “reenactment” of
the initial events in the trial scene is equally packed with such ironies, as the
star performs a convincing number to get the anarchist released, then per-
forms it again in a more sincere version; and the anarchist’s final departure
likewise involves accusations that her imploring him not to leave is a partic-
ularly effective scene, which might come after the station scene in her film.
Finally, he leaves the “real” star to better enjoy her recorded performances,
which will be all the convincing for her having known him. The film cuts
from her saying “Chéri” in their final farewell to her performing that same
farewell on screen, saying “Chéri” while he watches from the stalls.
The cinema of the thirties, newly conscious of recorded sound, was par-
ticularly fond of these ironic contrasts between the “real” and the “record-
ed.” René Clair’s script for Prix de beauté (30.69) ends with the beauty-
queen-become-star being murdered by her embittered husband during the
projection of the rushes of her film. Even as she gaily sings her song about
not being jealous up on the screen, her jealous husband is sidling in with his
revolver to shoot her, and as she collapses and dies in her seat her recorded
image sings naively on, the flickering of the projector illuminating oddly
the fatal tableau. At the end of Trois Valses (38.107), a similar situation is en-
gineered: the couple who are in love are required to act out a love scene, and
she (an established star) balks at “pretending” to love an actor who is, in her
view, merely an incompetent amateur. As in Prix de beauté, they are left
thoroughly immersed in a lovers’ quarrel, while above them on a giant
screen her recorded image sings a sentimental song.
The more normal interplay of life and art had been a part of the cine-
matic repertoire since talkies began, if one is to judge by Vanel’s role(s) in La
Maison jaune de Rio (30s10): a bandit aims to abduct the beautiful Anita;
by a happy coincidence he resembles her lover, who is an actor and about to
enact the bandit’s life on stage. The bandit replaces him on stage, playing
himself. Vanel, of course, played both roles. Subsequently, actors delight in
simulating low-life situations to con the jaded aristocracy out for a thrill
(30.63); acted scenes are mistaken for real assassinations by passers-by
(38.63); or plays or operettas are mounted which directly or indirectly par-
allel the lives of the composer/director/actors (31.74; 35.72; 31.97). At the
beginning of Le Mort en fuite (36.85), the scene played out between Jules
Berry and Michel Simon turns out retrospectively to have been merely a
scene from a play in which they were acting. More commonly, the theme is
treated as if it were of the utmost importance. In the life of Beethoven, for
example, life is seen as the true source of inspiration for art, and art in its
turn is seen as the truest source of consolation for life’s ills. Thus Beethoven
 182 |   
passes in the street a mother bewailing her dead daughter and goes home
to compose the Pathétique. (He plays it to the mother, who is strangely
reconciled.) When he goes deaf and a sympathetic Nature whips up a
storm, we find him wildly composing the scherzo of the Pastoral Symphony
and conducting the storm; when Juliette sacrifices her happiness and aban-
dons Beethoven, he promptly sits down and composes the Appassionata; in
the middle of her wedding to his rival, he suddenly blasts out the Funeral
March on the church organ. Everything he composes is represented as a di-
rect emotional response to his environment. The possibility that artistic
creativity might be independent of any emotion directly generated by per-
sonal experience is the subject of frequent mockery (e.g., 35.98).
One of the principal thematic uses to which this affective interaction
between life and theater was put was to debate the nature of sincerity—a
theme which has been noted as being generated both by situations involv-
ing wealth and status and by situations involving lady-killers. In all such
narratives, the central question is one of acting, yet acting can come to
seem omnipresent. If role-playing is so central to everyone’s life, could one
ever be “sincere”? If one were sincere, how would that sincerity be distin-
guishable from a convincing act? This was a particularly contentious theme
in the case of interpersonal relationships which had been represented over
and over again in novels, plays, and films, such that the role of lover could
easily seem pre-scripted to an unacceptable extent. Every word that might
be uttered had already been used and reused to the point of exhaustion.
The conventions of the sentimental drama had “infected” and “corrupted”
real relationships, rendering suspect the passionate declarations of every
lover. This situation acquires an added spice when it is represented in a fic-
tional narrative, since the problem for the text is no longer simply to distin-
guish between acting and sincerity, but between actors acting acting, and
actors acting sincerity.
These possibilities are to some extent explored in a scene in Entrée des
artistes, but the more general question of the sincerity of a lover’s declara-
tions had long been explored through the lady-killer. The classic example of
this figure in French cinema is Gérard Philipe’s 1950s role in Les Grandes
Manœuvres, but it had a long history in sound cinema. As early as 1931, a
film had shown a variant of it, in the form of a woman who uses a dog
trained to hop into expensive cars so that she can get acquainted with
promising men. Unfortunately, she falls for one, who discovers her ploy and
therefore doubts the sincerity of her affection (31.135). In another genre in
the same year, an undercover policeman falls for a good-time girl and de-
clares his love, but how can she ever believe him when she finds out about
his deception (31.34)? More generally, once anyone’s calculated routines for
securing a romantic relationship have become known, how is the object of
affection going to be able to distinguish whether the ploys are being used
 Art and Transcendence | 183
sincerely this time round? Ophüls’s Liebelei (33.76) established the more
common gender alignments for this situation, with a philandering young of-
ficer compromised in an affair with a baroness but experiencing true love for
the first time with a young girl. Inevitably, he is apprehensive as to whether
she will believe him if she learns that she is not the first. As in Les Grandes
Manœuvres, the officer is taught a painful lesson: one must pay for emptying
the words of love of meaning—in this case by his own and the girl’s death.
The Merry Widow, of which a French version was made, acts out a similar sit-
uation, but in a lighter genre, so with a happier outcome (34.111).
It is at least partly because she is an actress that the anarchist of Le Bon-
heur doubts the reality of the star’s affection for him. Is she capable of feel-
ing anything sincerely, or is everything merely an opportunity for a scene in
which the “lover” is an audience to be won over? A more classic instance has
Jules Berry seducing a girl on a mate’s behalf, only to fall for her sincerely
(36.13). She is, of course, outraged when she (inevitably) discovers the
fraud and refuses to believe that despite his initial calculation he is now
being sincere. Similarly, a cabaret dancer, paid to pretend a sudden passion,
falls “sincerely” in love with her victim (37.23). And, as the title indicates,
Gance’s Voleur de femmes recycles this mythic situation in its entirety: Berry
is again the seducer, but now of long standing, and he has become cynical.
He falls sincerely for a young girl who learns of his past conquests and pro-
ceeds to marry another. Because this is a psychodrama, he must pay for his
cynicism concerning love’s conventions and routines (37.123).
The mix of cynicism and reflexivity concerning the “act” of courting
took a number of forms toward the end of the decade. In Le Dernier Tour-
nant (39.23), after so many murders and attempted murders disguised as
accidents, Frank has accidentally killed Cora. His last soliloquy focuses on
an imaginary reconciliation with Cora in the afterlife—“I’ll take her in my
arms and say it was an accident, and she’ll believe me.” This agony of the
sincere assertion that is incredible precisely because it has been falsely as-
serted so often before is reversed in the melodrama Le Mensonge de Nina
Petrovna (37.71), in which the problem is, rather, that the lover believes
Nina’s noble lies to the effect that she doesn’t love him—he is just another
of the many men she has strung along, including his commandant—but
again, though the situation is reversed, the essence of the plot is the repeti-
tion of words, phrases, and situations which, previously acted out routinely
and coldly, are suddenly meant sincerely. Nina, however, must twice deny
her own sincerity, with fatal effects.
Le Mensonge takes place in a military setting, like Liebelei, Gueule d’a-
mour (37.57), and later Les Grandes Manœuvres, since the uniformed lady-
killer was a specialist in glamorous insincerity. In a sense, moving this theme
to a group of aspiring actors in a realistic setting is a big jump for Entrée des
artistes to make, but aside from foregrounding the theme of pretense, this
 184 |   
film links with tradition in allocating one of the students (François) a part-
time job with an escort agency, where his professional obligation to squire
young women recapitulates (again in a more formally foregrounded man-
ner) the role of lady-killer. François has, in fact, written to the girl whom we
see him squiring a number of letters in which he has professed (insincerely)
precisely the sentiments he is now professing sincerely to Isabelle, in pre-
cisely the same words. Isabelle, of course, learns of this—such plots always
require that the woman should—and reiterates the old complaint—“That’s
what you say to all of them.”
But while Entrée des artistes could be seen to that point to be engaging
in the normal form of reflexivity expected of this theme of acting, it takes
this reflexivity one step further by having the acting out of love scenes dis-
cussed in explicit relation to the cinema: François and Isabelle discuss how,
in the cinema, the fact that they have just made love would be shown . . .
thus; and, in the process, they both recapitulate the cinematic conventions
and vary them, while in the epilogue, as they exit through the stage door,
the students muse on the fact that their experiences could become the sub-
ject of a play . . . or even a film.
Apart from such pejorative uses of the notion of “acting,” it is very rare
for a thirties film to propose any sort of critique of art and the artist. Very
occasionally, a film might gently mock the arrivisme and snobbism of artis-
tic society (30.76), or an artist’s success (achieved by pretending death), as
he witnesses the statue which is being erected to his glory being peed on
by a passing dog (32.113), but the great bulk of reflexive references are af-
fectionate. Only twice in nearly three hundred films have I identified
artists who are rejected as boring or inadequate, manifesting no more than
a superficial glamour and romance (33.70; 36.121). If any form of art is
mocked overtly, it is perhaps grand opera, seen as pompous in Le Million
(31.84) where the grotesque declarations of the stage tenor are reproduced
with sincerity and simplicity behind the décor by Michel and Béatrice—
but Michel is, of course, himself an artist, as are most of the other main
characters in the film, who are affectionately represented. In two films,
novelists are seen as unworldly, needing to descend from their ivory tower
to make contact with “real life,” but then, the first of these is not only a
novelist but a woman (32.127), and as we have seen thirties films did not
take novelists as seriously as other artists, even when they were male. The
other is La Rosière des Halles (35.98), in which the academic playwright
who cannot compose a credible love scene has to be coached by his cook
and her friends from the fruit-and-vegetable market. Even as he’s being
beaten up on suspicion of trifling with the cook’s affections, he’s delight-
edly making notes on the language and gestures of his assailants, and he
subsequently mobilizes his newly acquired knowledge to see off his wife’s
lover. His “rehearsals” of his love scene offer further opportunity for play-
 Art and Transcendence | 185
ful confusion between life and art. And then, of course, there is Drôle de
drame (37.37), which offers the public a serious writer who has become fa-
mous under a pseudonym, but has managed to achieve this status only by
calling on the services of the milkman. Of all artists, it is only writers who
suffer these inadequacies, and like the inadequacies of the middle class,
whom they so resemble in this, they can only be made good by recourse to
the innate creativity of the working class.
With these few exceptions, then, it is true to say that the great bulk of
material involving art and artists that circulated in the French cinema of the
thirties was intensely favorable, and constituted a form of self-glorification
by the filmmaking community. This reflexivity, in which that community
reflected on its own status and values, might have been expected to find its
most explicit formulation in films made about filmmakers and filmmaking.
This is for the most part not so. Some thirty films, apart from the asides in
Entrée des artistes, deal with or comment directly on the cinema, but of
these a significant majority are primarily preoccupied with the notion of
“the star.” The figure of the star as constructed/mobilized/recycled by these
films is quite complex and not particularly attractive. Almost invariably fe-
male, the star is at once distant and familiar, desirable yet unlikable, often
selfish, arrogant, and ruthless, yet an object of fascination. Basically, the
star suffers from being seen as a figure of established power, and like all
such figures is subject to mistrust and liable to subversion. Yet at the same
time, for a population constantly prey to material anxieties and insufficien-
cies, the fantasy world of the screen was a form of fantasized escape, and
the figures who embodied those fantasies attracted identification. So pre-
tending to be a film star will guarantee any woman the admiration of the
male she seeks to attract (38.109). In addition, on a pragmatic level, access
to the glamorous world of the star, whether via screen tests, beauty
pageants, or chance, could seem to solve all the financial problems that
were at the origin of those material anxieties. Film magazines and daily pa-
pers constantly recycled anecdotes, biographies, and advice on how to be-
come a star.
For the filmmakers themselves, however, and particularly for scriptwrit-
ers, the success of whose efforts were often dependent on a star’s whims and
talents, the star was, to say the least, a figure of ambivalent power. In films
of the thirties, then, stars can be malicious and vengeful (31.44), tempera-
mental and fractious (35.36), or flighty and selfish (39.77); in the latter
film, she leaves her politician husband for another as he tries to negotiate
peace for Europe. Their remoteness and indifference is tellingly evoked by
the story of a young man who spends his days yearning over a star who lives
in his neighborhood, spying on her through a telescope (36.94). Young
women, once they have been tempted by the glamour of stardom, forget
those who once meant a great deal to them, even if, as in Duvivier’s
 186 |   
L’Homme du jour (36.55), they make initial attempts to show gratitude.
They are thus worse than the stereotypical actress, and more malevolent
than the dancer/singer. Not surprisingly, many other characters have good
reason to hate them, so they constitute yet another potential murder victim
in crime stories (32.143; 36.19).
Even in the early thirties, when escapist comedies abound, there are very
few films in which the desire to become a star, made good by chance or by
talent, proves to solve all problems. Three films have the rise to stardom
leading to the resolution of a sentimental relationship (32.101; 35.63;
38.59), but two propose precisely the contrary—that the temptation to be-
come a star is less important than personal relationships, and should be re-
sisted (32.42) or is likely to lead to tragedy, so should be renounced (31.82).
Perhaps the only film in the decade to successfully embody the myth of the
star as romantic heroine and as worthy love object is Trois Valses (38.107).
This episodic film covers three generations of actresses. In the first episode,
a theatrical star is allied with a count, who stands up for her beauty and
spirit in the face of family disapproval: beset by aristocratic pretensions and
conventions, his family are, in his words, “prehistoric monsters”; but learn-
ing that the alliance might mean his being cashiered from the army, “which
would kill him,” the actress renounces happiness for his sake. In the second
episode, her daughter, a star of operetta, meets the count’s son, and again
the potentially blessed union is undermined by anxiety about the propri-
eties—he finds her clothing indecent and tries to get her to abandon the
theater. Instead, she abandons him, and he realizes “his place is not here” in
the theater. The third episode brings together the granddaughter, this time
a film star engaged to play the role of her grandmother in a filmed biogra-
phy, with the grandson of the aristocratic family, now no longer an aristo-
crat. Her impresario acts as deus ex machina to get the young man the role
of his grandfather in this drama, with inevitable romantic consequences.
The cinema and the twentieth century are seen as more democratic envi-
ronments, in which a love that has been thwarted for generations by class
differences can at last be realized. In an epilogue, we find that she has
bought his family home, complete with portraits of their predecessors, as a
wedding present for him.
Although consecrating the notion of film star as modern goddess and
identifying cinematic sentiments as the counterpart of real relationships,
the film is gently satirical of the cinematic world, mocking affectionately
the personnel, procedures, and mechanisms of the cinema as an institution.
This attitude of self-mockery, usually stopping well short of real criticism,
let alone satire, is a characteristic of most of the films in which the cinema
as an institution, as opposed to simply the figure of the star, is represented.
In Fernandel films, there is often a moment in which some sardonic in-joke
is inserted, based on but also tending to refute negative stereotypes of the
 Art and Transcendence | 187
cinema. In Le Rosier de Madame Husson (31.118), the uptight matron seek-
ing to promote chastity and propriety considers the cinema the hotbed of
licentious behavior (not least because her long-suffering husband has finally
left her for an attractive young film actress). At the end of the decade,
drugged and waking up in an American jail, Fernandel is convinced by a
guard who tells him that it is all part of a Hollywood movie of which he is
the hero; his big scene, the electrocution, is next to be filmed. Fernandel be-
comes suspicious only because he finds the jail “sets” (notionally a real jail)
unconvincing (39.16).
Such amiable reflexivities are given a little more satirical point in Le
Schpountz, which is one of three films from the decade in which a gullible
dupe (“schpountz”) ends up acting in a film of which he believes he is the
hero, only to be mocked by the filmmakers for his naivete and incompe-
tence. In all three, the film in which the dupe acts turns out, to everyone’s
surprise, to be a great success (31.16; 37.104; 38.6). Le Schpountz is, in fact,
Pagnol’s attack on that other cinema of the early thirties, the American in-
ternational multiple-version cinema, so is not as reflexive as it might seem.
There are constant in-jokes relating to Paramount and its continental oper-
ations, summed up in the notorious phrase “He’s a German or a Turk, he’s
learned Russian, which he speaks with an Italian accent; that’s enough to
qualify him as a great French director.”
At the basis of all negative stereotypes of filmmakers voiced in this
decade is an insistence on the heartless, merciless ruthlessness which they
manifest as they use and exploit the naive and powerless. There is a con-
stant nastiness about the filmmakers in Le Schpountz, only partially justified
by the ridiculous pretensions of Fernandel’s aspiring star. This nastiness is
over-determined by being grafted onto the standard opposition between
the provinces and the city, and notably between the expansive, warm-
hearted Midi and the slick, knowing cynicism of Paris. So while the finale
has Fernandel returning to his provincial town with all the appurtenances
of a star, the thematics of the film as a whole undermine the myth of the
film star and of the cinema itself. Yet at certain key moments, Pagnol inserts
scenes which recapitulate the myth of the actor and the creative virtues of
the director. Thinking he is acting a tragic role, the schpountz is distraught
at everyone’s laughter—the performance has, in fact, turned into a comic
success, and his girl consoles him by reminding him that they are laughing
not at the man but at the actor. He is thus in a position of superiority—in-
deed, the comic actor is the cure for the world’s ills, a source of enjoyment,
hope, and humanity in a difficult world. But the most painfully self-serving
moment occurs when the entrepreneurial producer (à la Pagnol) takes his
colleagues to task for mocking the schpountz, thus distancing the true
French cinema (which is righteous, noble, and creative) from the American
import (which is petty, malicious, and exploitative).
 188 |   
It is probable that a similar opposition between crass commercial film-
making and creative artistic filmmaking was central to Marchand d’amour
(35.72), a film which does not seem to have survived but in which the di-
rector of a series of wildly successful films that verge on the pornographic
aspires to make one genuine, sincere film, based on his personal experi-
ences, beliefs, and opinions. Needless to say, as the romantic myth requires,
this auteurist autobiographical film is totally unappreciated by the movie-
going public. Fortunately, the love of a good woman saves him from the
slough of despond into which this blow to his professional self-esteem has
cast him.
A more modern form of reflexivity turns up, a little surprisingly, in
Abus de confiance (37.2) when the needy young girl has just succeeded in
passing herself off as the (actually dead) daughter of a famous and wealthy
writer. As she leaves and walks off through the night, her anguished state of
mind is exteriorized in a distinctly Godardian manner in cinema billboards
and posters that she passes, including one that proclaims the nature of her
action and the film’s title, “Abus de confiance.” More conventionally, the
next scene is set in a fairground, where the chaos of seething crowds, flash-
ing lights, and half-naked women comments on her anguish in a way more
traditional to the realistic/expressionistic tradition. This leads to a squalid
attempted seduction in a sleazy hotel and a subjective montage of images
from the past, accompanied by wild music. Altogether it must be consid-
ered one of the more aggressively Brechtian moments in thirties French
cinema. Like Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Abus de confiance engages in
other Brechtian foregroundings of production, notably a violent series of
punctuations resembling the tearing and burning away of one image as it is
replaced by the next. Lange is particularly rich in such “virtuoso” effects, as
are a surprising number of films from a period when pressures toward real-
ism are generally considered to have hampered the poetical effects so
beloved of artist filmmakers of the twenties. Such virtuosity might take the
form of extravagant camera movements, rapid montage and superimposi-
tion effects, zip-pans, direct address to the camera, extreme camera angles,
tilted frames, and aggressive focus changes. These have to some extent been
catalogued in chapter 7 of The Classic French Cinema.1 Their main formal
justification was as expressive effects externalizing the subjectivity of the
characters at a particular point in the narrative, but their implicit significa-
tion is the artistic standing of the filmmaker(s) whose mastery of expressive
techniques the spectator is being called upon to admire. Yet it was not only
directors and teams recognized, then or now, as artistically motivated who
employed such foregrounded techniques. As I have noted elsewhere,

there is no watertight exclusion of such practices from films directed by De-

lannoy, Cloche, Clément and Autant-Lara . . . let alone Carné. It was not
 Art and Transcendence | 189
only magic, fantasy, horror, comedy, violence, chaos, or powerful subliminal
forces that attracted these “aberrant” camera and lighting practices—not
only, that is, criteria relating to expressionism, surrealism, the gothic, the
baroque, or the allegorical. A perfectly realistic film might veer unpredictably
toward them, because the site seemed compatible (a stairwell, a cliff-top, a
fairground, or a forest) or for no perceptible diegetic motive. They formed,
that is, part of an array of potential practices available to the industry, which
might be mobilized according to genre, incident or personal preference. . . .
Statistically, however, one or another of them was likely to occur in any
given film, whatever the genre, narrative, or personnel. In these conditions
they can scarcely be described as aberrant at all, but one more instance of
the tension surrounding the production of a realist diegesis in the classic
French cinema.2

It was not only by technical/stylistic means that the artistic claims of

the filmmakers might be asserted; formal and structural patternings might
achieve the same poetic effect—the same Brechtian distancing from the
diegesis. This might take the relatively simple form of a narrative voice-over
“presenting” the diegesis. Guitry’s self-absorption and self-promotion often
led him to employ this stratagem, usually to irritating effect (37.89; 38.87),
though the extreme sophistication and infectious humor of its employment
throughout Le Roman d’un tricheur (36.115) makes of that film a real gem.
A number of other films were formally “presented” in their opening mo-
ments, especially those that had epic pretensions. The actors are thus pre-
sented in Golgotha (35.53), as is the whole film project in L’Appel du silence
(36.7). In Verdun (31.147), a visitor to the front relates his experiences to
his children, while at the end of the decade another reports his impressions
of the Maginot Line (38s3). The latter is a documentary reportage, and one
purpose of “presentation” in a fiction film was to authenticate the diegesis.
Occasionally, this could be used in more purely fictional works, as when lo-
cals “recount” to a visiting reporter the reality of Marseille low-life (34.53).
An interestingly ambivalent instance is the novelist character “Carco” in
Prisons de femmes (38.83), played by the novelist Francis Carco, author of
the film script, who introduces and comments on the action, including a
number of flashbacks. But, of course, prison life was an element of “reality”
that could be expected to attract authentication techniques when fictional-
ized. Perhaps the most charming of these presentations occur at the begin-
ning of the decade, when they come across as an exuberant exploitation of
the newfound possibilities of the talkies. In Chacun sa chance (30.18), the
presenter says, in effect, “Since this is a talkie, we might as well talk,” then
proceeds to introduce the actors. A similar direct address to the audience
takes place in the epilogue to the musical Le Chemin du paradis (30.21), in
which the gratuitous big number of the finale is offered to us as a sort of ex-
 190 |   
tradiegetic bonus for having been a good audience. The opening of La
Crise est finie (34.31) does something similar, as does that of L’Opéra de
quat’sous (30.61), in which dummies, a mechanical clock, a presenter, and a
song introducing the characters all conspire to distance the audience from
the action. The use of dolls, dummies, puppets, or allegorical figures to in-
troduce the themes and characters on a nonrealistic level can be found in a
number of films early in the decade, the best known of which is Boudu
(32.25; cf. 31.98; 31.109), while a trio of ghosts in effect narrate and com-
ment on Ophüls’s La Tendre Ennemie (35.109).
On a more comic level, Fernandel’s character in François 1er (37.50), an
understudy who is suddenly called on to act the role of the king, has himself
hypnotized and is transported back in history to relive the life and times of
François 1er. A more elaborate narrative frame is to be found in Princesse
Tam-Tam (35.92), an otherwise quite unpretentious film, where it works to
call into question retrospectively the status of much of what the audience
had seen. Like many works developing ambivalence of this sort, it employs
a writer figure, whose “book of the film” is mockingly presented at the end.
The crucial events occur toward the end of what we might well to that point
have taken as a unified diegesis, when the writer mentions that the previous
scene constituted the last scene of his novel. If that was the last, which was
the first? In effect, the viewer is being asked to reflect back on the film in
order to identify the moment (if indeed there was an exact moment) when
the represented events ceased being the filmic diegesis and became the film’s
visualization of the novel’s diegesis. While all such narrative frames created
a certain distance, the more aggressively Brechtian devices tend to occur in
films with a programmatic purpose, such as the political propaganda work
La Vie est à nous (36s2), which employs a brilliant array of techniques in-
cluding maps, voice-over, a teacher/class situation, cartoons, choruses
shouting slogans, satirical juxtapositions of rich and poor, inter-titles, ex-
tracts from Nazi and other documentaries, newspaper headlines, and direct
address by political figures to frame three short fictional dramas, and also
the more narrative Le Temps des cerises (37.109), which, despite its (unsuc-
cessful) aspiration to enter the commercial circuits, employed titles, cho-
ruses, documents, caricatures, and satiric juxtapositions.

6.3 OTHER FORMS OF TRANSCENDENCE

It remains true, however, that the great bulk of foregrounding devices used
in thirties films served primarily to signal the aesthetic status of the film-
making team, and that the prime reason so many “artistic” figures appeared
in thirties films was to promote the transcendental qualities of the artist as
supreme humanist guide and mentor, which naturally rendered him or her
superior to the rest of humankind—indeed, often made him or her a mar-
 Art and Transcendence | 191
tyr in the cause of higher ideals. More traditional religious figures were rare.
It is a commonplace to observe that the gradual decline of religious com-
mitment over the last two hundred years has been paralleled by the progres-
sive rise of the cult of art, in which the artist as demigod, creator of fictional
worlds, displaces the supreme creator of religious belief. As a final comment
on the thematic currents in thirties French films, then, this is a logical place
to consider what forms of spiritual transcendence other than art these films
proposed to their audiences. The briefest of surveys of those films would
suffice to indicate that the place occupied by art and the artist is greater both
in quantity and in mythic intensity than that occupied by more traditional
forms of transcendence. Men of religion appear relatively rarely, even as sec-
ondary characters, in films of the decade, and when they do, it is less as
guides and mentors than as figures of fun, or even of detestation.
Films which were calculated to appeal directly to the religious viewer by
bringing to the screen the life of Christ and the saints invariably failed,
often miserably. Despite intense publicity and a cast of stars (including
Robert le Vigan as Christ, Harry Baur as Herod, and Jean Gabin as Pontius
Pilate!), Duvivier’s super-production Golgotha (35.53) was relatively unsuc-
cessful at the box office in most regions; yet only a few months previously
his Maria Chapdelaine had been one of the outstanding successes of the
year, and a few months later his La Bandera was a stunning hit. One might
find Golgotha a rather coldly “artificial” re-creation of the life of Christ, but
one might find La Bandera, La Belle Équipe, and La Fin du jour equally
stilted, and all attracted large audiences.
As further evidence, a film relating the miraculous cure of a lame boy
by the Virgin at Lourdes (33.144) lasted only one week in exclusive release
in Paris. The reception was so poor it could scarcely be said to have received
a general release at all. In the same year, a film focusing on the original
Lourdes story opened in a marginal theater and also experienced little, if
any, general release (33.88). Yet these were precisely the years in which a
concerted campaign was being waged by the Catholic church urging pa-
rishioners to bless such well-meaning films with their patronage (and to
shun the more salacious). It was also when gross military vaudevilles were
experiencing extraordinary popularity and when nightclub performances
involving largely naked females were a commonplace in films. A film on
Sister Theresa did a little better in the weeks immediately preceding the
war, but then disappeared without trace (38.101). Another film which, in
summary, sounds like the most pious of melodramas and in which St.
Theresa’s name is invoked to cure a seriously ill boy, had earlier faded with
scarcely a trace (36.117). Marie, légende hongroise (32.81) did reasonably
well at the box office, but primarily because of its melodramatic appeal, the
Assumption to heaven being, as far as it is now possible to tell, no more
than an epilogue.
 192 |   
I have identified only eight films out of thirteen hundred that propose
a man of religion as the protagonist, and four of those are sentimental
comedies in which the parish priest, either alone or with help, solves the ro-
mantic problems of a young couple. The most successful of these films,
Mon curé chez les riches (38.64), was the third version of a popular novel
(c.f. 32.91). Its representation of the parish priest is somewhat similar to
that which was to find even greater popularity after the war, in the Don
Camillo stories—the “humble village priest,” vulgar, smoking and drinking
and swearing, privy to all the secrets of his parishioners, a cherubic twinkle
in his eye, and taking a malicious pleasure in doing down the malicious, yet
ultimately an agent of harmony and reconciliation in the community. It is
probable that the man of religion in Mon oncle et mon curé (38.65) served
the same marginal role of facilitating the romance of the male and female
leads. This was certainly the case in L’Abbé Constantin (33.1), which, de-
spite its title, allows the amiable but rather bland priest to be manipulated
by the local chatelaine for much of the film, and relegates him to a relatively
minor role. His main claim to fame is that his adopted son (one of the
young leads) is a marine aviator.
While this general tendency to minimize the role of men of religion
can scarcely be said to hold true for Drôle de drame (37.37), the bishop
played by Jouvet cannot have done much for the image of the spiritual life.
His salacious taste for music-hall stars gets him into trouble, and he has to
disguise himself as a grotesquely attired Scotsman in an attempt to recover
the incriminating program. He is even accused of the murder of Madame
Molyneux, and the people clamor for his lynching (or, indeed, for any-
one’s). It seems that a man of religion had to be marginalized or mocked,
and when a film attempted something more serious, it failed. A single in-
stance exists of the more heroic parish priest, solidly patriotic, hiding
refugees and resistance fighters from the German army of occupation, him-
self a resistance leader, who outwits German spies, endures torture without
speaking, and finally turns the tables on the enemy (39.27). Kneeling at the
foot of a statue of Christ, he says that it is in prayer that he finds the
courage to go on. Yet this heroic Christian is so anomalous that it is easier to
see the success of the film late in 1939 and in 1940 (of course, only provi-
sional, since its release was qualified by the conditions of the phony war,
then the occupation) as being due to its place in the Deuxième Bureau tra-
dition of spy thrillers, which invariably drew large audiences in those pre-
war years.
More typical of stories about men of religion were the three other
parish-priest stories which told of anguished men torn between the flesh
and the spirit, struggling to affirm their faith in the face of the temptations
of this world. Such temptation might take the form of a young aristocratic
woman whom he renounces, only to hear her dying confession years later
 Art and Transcendence | 193
(33.72), or the widow whom his brother loves, but whom the man of reli-
gion hypocritically attempts to win over to a religious life (39.28); they will
certainly be embodied in an attractive woman. In these stories, then, the
priest is simply the archetypal instance of a slightly broader group of films
in which disciplined men are sorely tempted by a seductive and often
treacherous woman, but find solace in some ultimate redemption. The idea
that the loss of virginity involves a loss of benign spiritual powers is a com-
mon theme (35.78), and it was played out in less immediately allegorical
but more psychodramatic form in films such as Le Puritain (37.96), in
which a rigid moralist assassinates a woman of loose morals only to realize
that his act is motivated largely by love and jealousy, and even more so in
the abominable Les Musiciens du ciel, in which a virtuous and idealistic
young Salvation Army woman becomes fascinated by, and committed to
saving, a sleazy but handsome villain (39.59). She becomes intensely jeal-
ous of the slut he has been living with, but resists the ultimate temptation
and, by her selfless and tragic death, succeeds in passing on her spiritual vo-
cation to the villain, who sees the light. In the same year, and released in the
same week as Les Musiciens du ciel, La Charrette fantôme tells an analogous
story, but drawing more obviously on melodramatic conventions, of a
young Salvation Army woman who devotes herself to bringing back into
the fold a lost soul in a handsome body. Again, triumphing over improba-
ble odds, she ensures his salvation, but at the price of her own life (39.12).
Earlier in the decade, another woman torn between the flesh and the spirit
had renounced the veil in favor of her handsome singer; but then she was
Spanish and living in a different set of genre conventions (30.20).
Les Musiciens du ciel is shot through with analogies from the martyrdom
of Christ, as are numerous other films of the decade. They might find their
way into the narrative of a humble schoolteacher (32.134), or of a Robin
Hood figure (35.51), or of an artistic genius (36.135), but they find their
most effective expression in a film which links them to the spiritual mission
of French colonialism in Africa—L’Appel du silence (36.7). Immensely suc-
cessful, this biography of Charles de Foucauld, a French officer in, then
French missionary to, Africa, tells of his graduation from boisterous im-
moral youth, with a dancer as mistress, to his scandal and cashiering. He
develops a fascination with the great spaces and silence of the desert, where
he settles as a hermit. A peculiar intermediate episode has him disguised as
a Jew, spying for France in Morocco, where he prepares for France’s colonial
expansion. Disenchanted by modern technological advances and the mas-
tery of the material world that they offer, he asks for a sign and, with a clash
of orchestral brass, Christ’s face appears to him. He burns his past and
abandons this world for the spiritual life. Called to Algeria, where his
brothers are being martyred by the Tuaregs, he establishes a mission and be-
friends the natives so that the spiritual power of his ministry can reach
 194 |   
them. This model spiritual biography is paralleled by the rise of his friend
Laperrine in the army, and their twin civilizing mission takes them ever fur-
ther into the desert. A series of biblical analogies involving desert locations,
miracle cures, and ultimate betrayal by a Judas figure leads to his martyr-
dom by the Tuaregs, as he has foretold. He and his friend are buried to-
gether on a hill in the desert, symbols of France’s military and spiritual
grandeur in a bleakly beautiful world.
In thirties films, the desert provided a recurrent setting for the spiritual
trials of noble visionaries. St Exupéry had used it thus, of course, and his
Courrier-Sud was made into a film in 1936, and to some extent L’Esclave
blanc (36.40) and SOS Sahara (38.95) exploited it similarly. Moreover,
Charles de Foucauld was, in a sense, merely one among several of these
historical figures carrying the torch of French civilization into benighted
regions, and his martyrdom was, in a sense, merely recapitulating the self-
sacrifice which formed the climactic gesture of any number of thirties
films. His more thoroughly fictional predecessors in L’Atlantide (32.12)
had known their own spiritual trial in the desert, where the drifting sands
hid a matriarchal anti-civilization which called all their accepted values into
question.
One of the most widely successful films to foreground a man of reli-
gion was La Tragédie impériale (37.113), in which the Russian peasant-
Christ, Rasputin, takes the French village priest who smokes, drinks, and
curses to typically Russian lengths. To the outrage of the formal church au-
thorities, he preaches (and practices) enjoyment of the sensual life, engag-
ing in orgiastic festivities, and “curing” the women of the parish in a less
than spiritual way. Miracles seem to occur spontaneously in his vicinity, and
seeing him as an instrument of God to be used to the church’s advantage
the bishops introduce him to the court. This provides an opportunity for
even greater sensual excess. Blamed for the people’s unrest under the czar,
he is exiled to Siberia, but in time of crisis he is summoned back. His un-
due influence at court outrages the military, and they try to assassinate him.
There is a truly wonderful scene in which a gun aimed at him misfires
twice. His food is poisoned, to no effect; they shoot him again and again
and again, only to see him recover and stagger out into the snow, singing.
He has said he loves life as intensely as an animal, and he holds onto it no
less tenaciously. As a portrait of a “people’s saint” who might have saved the
monarchy if they’d only listened, this is a splendid achievement, but it
probably succeeded precisely because it was so remote from any normal
representation of the spiritual. In fact, however broadly one defines the
term “spiritual,” it is an inescapable fact that representation of a spiritual
vocation and the spiritual life are singularly rare in the films of the
decade—almost as rare as the men of religion who notionally embody
them. Salvation and redemption are much more likely to be found in and
 Art and Transcendence | 195
through other spheres of human experience, such as the nation, work, the
land, and nature, not to mention love and even sensuality.
To invoke salvation and redemption through contact with the land, in
the thirties, is to invoke Pagnol. While not every one of his thirties films
deals with this sort of material, several do so, and it was a vein he continued
to mine fruitfully through to the fifties. The three most striking instances
from the thirties are all drawn from novels or short stories written by his
Provençal compatriot, Jean Giono—Jofroi (33s5), Regain (37.100), and, to
a lesser extent, La Femme du boulanger (38.34). In the first, a peasant, hav-
ing sold his land, is nevertheless outraged when the purchaser, Fonse, pro-
poses to rip up the old and fruitless orchard to plant wheat—the trees are
part of his past, integral to his existence, and to rip them up is to kill him.
He threatens suicide and pursues it in various quasi-comic fashions until
the purchaser, thoroughly ashamed and guilty, takes to his couch and pines
away, even though legally he has done nothing wrong. Finally, Jofroi dies
naturally. The suddenly reinvigorated Fonse dashes out and rips up the or-
chard but leaves a few old trees in memory of Jofroi—“If he knows, he’ll
think that Fonse wasn’t such a villain, after all.”
This identification of peasant with land can’t be taken further than the
intensely moving Regain, in which the story of a dying village slowly regen-
erated by the last male inhabitant’s passionate commitment to the land is
paralleled by that man’s acquisition of a wife and the formation of a family.
In both cases, what had seemed barren and doomed proves fruitful, and the
final images are of other families, attracted by the superior quality of the
produce resulting from his old-fashioned labor-intensive farming methods,
arriving to expand the new community. This “back to the land” theme is
very close, of course, to Vichy’s “Famille, travail, patrie.” It is accompanied
here by a powerful reaction against modernity in all its forms—specifically
the mechanization of production, but also all forms of hierarchy and au-
thority. Politics is rejected as divisive, as are all uniforms: “The clothes you
wear for taking orders are no use for working in.” Rather than a pre-Vichy
ideology, this comes across as a profoundly anarchic and libertarian morale.
In general, in both these and other Giono/Pagnol films, the basic essentials
of an existence close to the land—the earth itself, water and springs, the
baking of bread—are turned into sacraments that are explicitly opposed to
the formal Christian sacraments proposed by the church, whose represen-
tatives are usually marginal or ridiculous.
Possibly the only other film of the decade to adopt this attitude is the
early color film La Terre qui meurt (36.127). The countryside is dying, and
the family farm is in hock to sinister, vulture-like lawyers from the city; the
old mother is as dead as the earth itself, and the father is unable to manage.
The two older children see the struggle to save the farm and the land as
hopeless and are seduced by city life (which is far from glamorized by the
 196 |   
film or by them but is, nevertheless, judged better than the death-in-life of
rural existence); another seeks his fortune overseas; and the fourth, posses-
sive and vindictive, is killed in a fire which he himself lights. The distrust of
modernity is again present, with factories likened to prison, the power of
money and the ideology of individual self-gratification seen as the prime
threats, and rural regeneration is initiated by the young daughter and an
“outsider” who loves her—they alone have that mystical union with the soil
which will render it fruitful. A final title announces “Thus despite every-
thing, the soil of France will become fertile again, through the love and
work of its children.” The disintegration of traditional structures is re-
versed, presumably including the restoration of the patriarchy (which has
not, however, been represented in at all attractive a light in the film); and
another generation of youngsters will engage in the twee folkloric rituals
and round-dances that had opened the film.
In both Regain and La Terre qui meurt, salvation through identification
with the land goes hand in hand with salvation through back-breaking
manual labor in the fields. “Work” was not otherwise widely represented as
an avenue to redemption, though Vouloir (31.148) which may in fact not
have been a full talkie, if it was ever finished and released, was reputedly in-
tended to glorify the work ethic of a northern weaver, and Dans les rues
(33.41) has a worthy youth who has gone wrong saved from a life of crime
by his industrious nature.
Films of the sort mentioned above are readily identified because of
their programmatic nature. The plot is impossible to summarize without
mention of the fertile earth, the sweat of one’s brow, or the (attempted) re-
nunciation of the flesh. If such forms of transcendence are relatively rare,
two others are extremely common, but implicit rather than explicit, ideo-
logical rather than programmatic. Those two are love and nature. Both are
seen as sources of inner harmony and of redemption, offering the charac-
ters moments or even (implicitly) a lifetime of transcendence. Because they
are such an omnipresent ideological assumption, they are difficult to quan-
tify. In general, of course, where love normally represents the narrative end-
point of a spiritual journey and comes as the resolution of a number of
defeats, humiliations, and frustrations, nature offers momentary glimpses
of that ultimate transcendence in the course of the plot, often in conjunc-
tion with love, and suffices to maintain the protagonist’s spiritual drive,
which is usually at a low ebb at that point.
In a sense, it is unnecessary to explicate these forms of transcendence
since they are still so much with us. In particular, love, as a private form of
transcendence bringing about the sentimental resolution of the narrative
and involving the definitive formation of a heterosexual couple, has usually
served to signal the resolution of some more public thematic conflict. So
much a taken-for-granted of the times, it is rarely explicitly referred to,
 Art and Transcendence | 197
though regeneration through love is thematically central to the plot of Les
Frères Karamazoff (31.60), and in a gentler vein love might bring about the
salvation of a French underworld figure as well (33.127; 34.21), or, more
improbably, a banker (32.141). Indeed, as a source of spiritual regeneration
it was normal to oppose “true love” to some form of egotism or materialis-
tic greed (e.g., 39.30) which was the initial cause of the spiritual fall from
which the protagonist needed saving.
Nature as a source of salvation is a much more complex subject. It is
clearly related to the back-to-the-earth-movement, but is lyrical rather than
religious in kind. It could take various forms. Since at least 1926, German
expressionism had established the mountain film as an explicit celebration
of the literal and figurative transcendence of everyday mediocrity, and four
early French sound films took up the theme (30.23; 33.7; 33.137; 34.88),
including a Franco-German co-production directed by Fanck which in
summary sounds, however, to have attempted to demystify the generic pat-
terns, or at least to work against them. Later in the decade, with a renewed
interest in mountain heights, alpine landscapes are used for both mythical
and demystificatory purposes. Commonly the setting for romantic situa-
tions (39.41), snowy heights connote an implicit purity which can lend an
ephemeral optimism to the most doomed relationship (37.71). They can
even represent an ultimate escape from the mercenary machinations of
contemporary society (38.71). As the Carnet de bal (37.117) episode shows,
however, the mountaineer, disillusioned by women and returning to the
mountains as one might previously have retired to a convent or hermitage,
offers no more hope of redemption to Christine than had her other former
dancing partners. And Epstein’s Altitude 3200 (38.5) does not allow the
idealistic couples aiming to set up a less corrupt republic in the mountain
heights any hope of fulfillment: they bring with them all the jealousies, dis-
trusts, and resistances of the everyday world which they aspire to transcend.
This ambivalence between a straight mobilization of the myth of alpin-
ism and the use of it as a logical aspiration which proves impotent in the
face of everyday realities is typical of the more general myth of nature. In
both cases, however, nature is basically being represented as a beneficent
presence and an inevitable recourse in time of need. Only rarely is it repre-
sented as a fierce, jealous, or destructive antagonist and, when it is so, it is
usually in the form of the sea (33.102; 39.79). In the occasional more ex-
plicit films in which nature represents a harmonious alternative to civiliza-
tion, deprived urban dwellers are painfully but beneficially introduced to
fresh air, exercise, and work in the fields (35.94), or the survivors of an air-
plane crash live harmoniously on a desert island but begin to squabble and
bicker once “rescued” and returned to civilization. Needless to say, they de-
cide to return to their island (35.56), as Princess Tam-Tam had decided to
return to her North African village.
 198 |   
For the most part, however, nature (at least in the topographical sense)
is not a fundamental structural element in the thematics of thirties films,
but a digression, an episode, a momentary respite in the narrative trajectory
which serves to revivify and relaunch the protagonists. Some such cases
have been mentioned in chapters 2 and 3. Poil de Carotte, for instance, es-
capes from his awful family to his godfather and Mathilde in the country-
side, where he swims naked in a stream and processes in a “marriage,” ac-
companied by a barrel organ and farm animals. Throughout the decade,
similar episodes offer urban dwellers momentary relief from their financial
and sentimental stresses, even if only in a park where lovers can meet
(36.63; 37.57). The alternative of a day in the country made famous in
Renoir’s film was equally common (e.g., 36s1; 37.109; 39.39). André be-
gins to believe in Cœur de Lilas’s innocence and to fall in love with her
when he takes her boating in the Bois (31.34). When the wife of the engi-
neer constructing the transatlantic tunnel becomes jealous, he takes her to
the country, for only there can he hope to mend their relationship (33.134).
Elsewhere, when a “criminal” boyfriend needs to distract the young lawyer’s
attention from her family’s conspiracies, he takes her boating in a park and
picnics in the hall of a nearby chateau, omitting to tell her it belongs to his
family (36.136). When M. Poirier’s son-in-law is beginning to fall in love
with his own wife, he takes her for an idyllic trip into the countryside.
(33.59). In all these instances, the resort to nature constitutes the single
brief evasion from an otherwise totally urban setting. The contrast between
elsewhere-prevalent urban and interior decors and this single brief excur-
sion into genuine location shots is often quite startling (35.117). In Le
Temps des cerises, of course, the attempt to make contact with these “nat-
ural” values through a fishing trip is frustrated by the wealthy landowners,
who have appropriated nature for their own use (37.109). Similar, more
ephemeral relief might be found in a guingette beside the Marne, a picnic, a
fishing party, or a holiday on a farm. In L’Alibi, for instance, Hélène and
André find a moment’s respite from the mysterious murders committed by
von Stroheim’s sinister telepath and from the decadent nightclub ambience
of the city in a swimming party at the river and a boating party with some
amiable thugs (37.6). A similar idyll on a farm among sheep and chubby
children offers respite to André and Françoise in Orage (37.87).
Indeed, any grim tale with an urban background could be expected to
introduce a moment of euphoria amidst nature at about the halfway point.
When the conspiratorial courtier Cercleux accords the errant prince a last
moment to himself before assuming the duties of kingship, the prince takes
Cercleux on a student camping trip to the countryside. Cercleux has never
slept better, and is completely won over. He had only known nature at sec-
ond hand before this; now, under its influence, he lightens up and decides
to help the prince (38.29). In several films toward the end of the decade, a
 Art and Transcendence | 199
scouting trip, with its campfires and camaraderie, serves the same function,
as in La Fin du jour (38.37) when Cabrissade accompanies his “son” the
scout leader to an idyllic campsite by a stream (see also 38.117). Affections
mature and are confirmed as true love in the context of trees and streams.
In Sans lendemain (39.80) when Georges is trying to talk Babs into re-
nouncing her Paris existence (and thus the job as chanteuse and good-time
girl that he doesn’t know about) and coming to live with him in Canada, he
abducts her and takes her for a drive in the country. Their car breaks down
and they take refuge in a deserted chateau, where momentarily it seems that
she may be able to erase her past life and begin all over again from zero.
Within the general opposition of culture and nature, city and country,
a more specific opposition often featured: that between night and day, night
life and nightclub contrasting with an idyllic episode in the woods (36.62;
37.6). In certain Chaplinesque films, the open road and liberty are synony-
mous with nature, as in Boudu, Les Bas-Fonds, or À nous la liberté, in which
nature is the ultimate narrative reward offered at the end to those who re-
solve or reject the tensions inherent in contemporary industrial society. In a
less innocent version of this opposition, nature could also offer the oppor-
tunity to cast off the moral inhibitions of a repressive society. In this form,
nature appears in a relatively few films as unbridled sensuality, sexual liber-
ation. The allegorical desert island in Les Aventures du roi Pausole, where yet
another aviator lands, provides such an opportunity, as does the shepherd,
much more convincingly, in La Femme du boulanger (33.12; 38.34). As the
old fisherman reports, in his wonderfully digressive account of coming
upon the shepherd and the baker’s wife in the woods, “There they were,
stark naked, and singing.”
This all-too-brief indication of the presence and importance of nature
in films of the thirties should be read in conjunction with the material in
chapter 3 on workers, urbanism, guinguettes, days in the country, and work-
ing girls as flowers, and the material in chapter 2 on the role of the
provinces in contrast with the representation of Paris, and on the role of
barbarous lands and races with respect to European civilization. By itself,
however, this discussion establishes nature as providing one of the most
credible forms of transcendence available to the protagonists of this decade,
second only to art. At a much less explicit level, however, the transcendence
provided by romantic love is almost as omnipresent, if often less attainable.
Compared to any of these three, the institutionalized transcendence offered
by the church plays a very small role in the everyday life of the protagonists
of these films.
In La Règle du jeu, of course, nature does not figure any euphoric tran-
scendence of the constraints of an urban society, but a set of principles—
animality and an anarchic disregard for all regulation—which are opposed
to the rules and regulations of the civilized world but, at least in their pure
 200 |   
form, are equally dangerous to any true humanity (39.78). The violence
unleashed in the hunt scene, when civilized man systematically massacres
the animal world, is matched soon after by that other, appropriately more
chaotic, hunt scene in the chateau, as animality takes over the civilized
world.
In fact, it is not to nature but to art as the preferred form of transcen-
dence that this film ultimately reverts, since it places Renoir himself, as Oc-
tave, the unifier, at the formal center of the schematic set of relationships
outlined by the film, alone capable of drawing together all the threads. The
affectionate friend of all, with privileged access both above and below stairs,
he has that more complete understanding of the human heart which the
cinema of the time considered appropriate to the creator of the comédie
dramatique. As the marquis says of him, he is a poet, and a dangerous poet;
though here the term “dangerous” has connotations of reluctant admira-
tion, used of a category of visionary who pushes situations and people to
the limit and, in the process, reveals, both to them and to us, wry and un-
comfortable truths. Admittedly, in La Règle du jeu the director as artist has
his moment of self-doubt, of inadequacy. He is the disciple of that great
conductor, Christine’s father, who received him like a son, yet when he re-
members that man’s achievements in a supremely reflexive moment on the
“podium” and makes as if to conduct the assembled forces, Octave/Renoir
is forced to realize that the chaos which they have generated is by this stage
beyond his or anyone’s power to control. Yet it is, of course, not beyond his
power to represent, and subsequent films directed by Renoir will not feel
obliged to adopt even this modest degree of self-doubt, as socialist solidar-
ity and even humanism begin to take second place to a transcendent belief
in art such as had figured all too often in reflexive and rather complacent
films of the thirties.
 Part Two

GENRE, STAR, BOX OFFICE

[Genres are designed] to pander to the broadest, and basest, tastes

of the unconscious masses.
—Moussinac (1933)

[Because of the genre system] the true face of France is concealed

beneath a grotesque mask.
—Benoît-Lévy (1945)

Insofar as genres unify the tastes of the spectators . . . they prevent

the masses from becoming aware of themselves and contribute to
the reinforcement of the reigning ideology.
—Bächlin (transl. 1946)

All great films that delight us nowadays have only one thing in
common—precisely the fact that they escape from the framework
within which laws too hastily drawn up would confine the cinema.
—Spaak (1949)

I will go so far as to say that the generic system is the springboard

to creative freedom.
—Bazin (1957)

The American cinema is a classical art, so why not admire what is

most admirable in it—not just the talent of this or that filmmaker,
but the genius of the system.
—Bazin (1957)

There will never be any good European films unless we avoid genre
subjects, since every genre is essentially doomed.
—Rivette (1957)
 SEVEN

Cinematic Genres in France:

“A grotesque mask” or “the genius of the system”?

7.1 CONTEMPORARY COMMENTARY ON

GENRE AND MYTH IN THE CINEMA 1930–60

7.1.1 Genre

A s was noted in the introduction, neither the genre system nor the star
system was as well developed in the classic French cinema as they were
in Hollywood, so it is not surprising that genre was not a concept that fig-
ured prominently in the articles written by French critics and commenta-
tors of that period. Where they did find it useful as a critical concept was in
the analysis of American films and, to a lesser extent, German films. Popu-
lar film magazines such as Ciné Miroir and Ciné Magazine regularly men-
tioned genres in the early thirties, though they gradually ceased to do so as
it became apparent that they were not going to be central to the French cin-
ema in quite the way they were to Hollywood, and that French audiences
were giving their preference to French films. Thus La Cinématographie
Française notes in 1930 that, after an interval due to the introduction of
sound, adventure films have made a comeback in America, though not yet
in France;1 and Ciné Miroir in a discussion of the German expressionist tra-
dition notes that the French cinema has not yet really explored the horror
genre.2 Similarly, J. P. Dreyfus, in La Revue du Cinéma,3 notes that horror
films are characteristic of the German and American cinemas, but not the
French, while Cinémonde sees horror films and gangster films as typically
American genres.4
The tendency for French film critics to reject genre as a useful tool for
understanding the French cinema was to be taken up again after the war,
and in order to provide a broader context for the views on genre and myth
of thirties commentators in this section I survey all books and articles pub-
lished on the topic of genre and myth during the period 1930–60. In the
postwar years, Positif reiterated the view that genre and series were funda-
 204 | , ,  
mentally un-French, seeing them as characteristic of the American cinema
because of its industrial base,5 and seldom mentioned them in its articles on
the French cinema. Numerous accounts of the musical comedy in America
in Le Film Français and Image et Son likewise wrote off French attempts at
the genre, describing them as timid, tentative, and pitiful,6 while Cinéma
59 questioned whether there could ever be a non-American musical com-
edy.7 Nevertheless, Cinéma 54 (55, 56, etc.) and Image et Son were among
the few French journals in the postwar years to deal seriously with genres,
convention, and stereotype, devoting articles to the fantastic, to melo-
drama, and to science fiction, as well as to musical comedy.
The prevailing disregard for genre was apparent outside the confines of
the film magazine. Most serious critics were committed to the notion of au-
thorial creativity, which they saw as threatened, if not totally undermined,
by the notion of convention, and they seldom referred positively to the con-
cept of genre. Bazin’s reflections on the Western are well known, but this,
too, was an American genre. Although he sees such genres as having fueled
the triumph of the American cinema throughout the world, he nevertheless
usually speaks of European cinema in terms of the skills of individual di-
rectors (Bresson, de Sica, Eisenstein, Renoir, Cocteau, von Stroheim, but
also Chaplin and Welles).8 The same is true for most other serious critics.
Ford refers briefly to “the genre question” in On tourne lundi, seeming in a
curiously offhand remark to consider that there are really only two film
genres that matter—the dynamic and the static, the action film and the
psychological film.9 Even Sadoul, who, as a Marxist talking of a popular
medium, might have been expected to distance himself from the rampant
individualism underlying auteurist criticism, constructs the entire history of
the French cinema in terms of the rise and fall of individual directors, sel-
dom even mentioning generic categories.10 His 1948 book on world cinema
does contain a chapter entitled “Film Genres,” but after a very brief over-
view he digresses onto the documentary and the cartoon. Symptomatically,
the running title at the head of these pages misspells the word “genre” as
“génie,” substituting cinematic geniuses for cinematic genres.11 As he was to
say in a later book. “In France, our vocabulary for designating film genres is
poor.”12
Moussinac, no less a Marxist, in his outline of the categories of books
that would compose an ideal library on the film medium, does not once
mention genre (except, again, in a chapter devoted to documentaries).13 He
lists history, aesthetics, technique, criticism, education, law, production and
distribution, and the state, but throughout demonstrates an almost reli-
gious awe for the individual creative artist. In L’Âge ingrat du cinéma,14 writ-
ing of the desperate measures being resorted to by the capitalist cinema, he
describes genres as destined to flatter the basest tastes of the unconscious
masses, and thus as a sign of the imminent death of the American cinema.
 Cinematic Genres in France | 205
Among non-Marxist commentators, this scorn for generic formulas was, if
possible, even more emphatic. There were generally considered to be two
opposed and incompatible types of cinema—the popular, characterized by
generic conventions, which was trivial and unworthy of serious comment,
and the artistic, marked by directorial creativity, which alone was worthy of
consideration. Jeanne and Ford in Histoire du Cinéma,15 Charensol in Re-
naissance du Cinéma Français,16 and Leprohon in Présences contemporaines17
all assumed this position. Recapitulating it in 1950, Charensol was to con-
firm that in his view it was what distinguished the films of America and Eu-
rope, respectively. “Whereas in France a common drive to invent allows us
to make films that break completely with formulaic productions, in Holly-
wood even the most famous directors [“metteurs en scène,” not “réalisa-
teurs” or “auteurs”] seem bogged down in formalism.”18
Claude Mauriac, writing in 1954 specifically about ways of classifying
films, notes the possibility of using the name of the director, the producer,
the scriptwriter, or even the director of photography, as well as categories
based on different ways of reading (psychoanalytic or Marxist), but never
once contemplates the use of genres.19 When he later mentions Westerns
and gangster films, it is in the context of a discussion of the American cin-
ema. Roger Régent’s landmark book on the French wartime cinema, pub-
lished in the late forties, deals exclusively with directors and individual
films,20 while Chauvet, writing in 1950 in auteurist terms, makes a plea for
the cinema as art, but is happy to talk of the American cinema in terms of
genre.21 The same disregard is apparent in Jos Roger’s book on film gram-
mar: of the thirty-five questions that he considers a critic might ask of any
film, not one relates to generic classification or inter-textual links.22
Denis Marion attributes this distrust of generic classification in France
to the baleful influence of Brunetière, a late-nineteenth-century literary
critic given to the “over-systematic classification” of literary texts. Reacting
against this, “we have ceased to believe . . . in the existence of ‘genres’ that
might possess their own autonomy and develop their own specific laws.
When we divide up film production under different headings or discern
different trends, we know very well that we are indulging a craving for a sys-
tem which in the real world finds only the most superficial justification, and
which is thereby at best artificial and arbitrary.”23
The history of this long-standing dichotomy between convention and
invention, the popular and the élite, money and art, the consumer-driven
and the author-initiated has been adequately chronicled elsewhere, and it
would be superfluous to rehearse it ab initio here. It is, however, worth not-
ing the satiric glee with which the commentators who promoted this di-
chotomy listed the supposed excesses of filmmakers who worked within
generic frameworks. Much of Charles Ford’s On tourne lundi is organized
around a pastiche of formulaic plots. Like many before him, he quotes the
 206 | , ,  
notorious “thirty-six dramatic situations” which supposedly compose the
entire range of available plot lines (a disaster, a kidnapping, an enigma,
madness, remorse, etc).24 In the same ironic tones, Sadoul, speaking to an
international conference in Basel, proposes such formulas as the arch-
enemy of the cinema. He reminds his audience of Elmer Rice’s Purilia—
that fantasy-land in which all Hollywood films take place—a land from
which all nature and all humanity are excluded. It is a land “peopled with
operetta cowboys, femmes fatales, vamps, millionaires and their servants,
singers and dancers, where money appears miraculously, and where no one
works . . . where heroes always win out, and . . . those guilty of the mildest
of crimes against traditional morality are always punished. . . . Purilia is
that legendary world of modern times, where kings still marry shep-
herdesses, and millionaires their secretaries.”25
Perhaps the best-known French put-down of generic conventions is
Charles Spaak’s account of the script-writing machine that Feyder brought
back from America (of course) for him: “It was composed of three parts—
a notebook providing a sort of repertoire of possibilities, a needle mounted
on a pivot, revolving around a numbered clock-face, and a user’s guide, of
the sort provided for pharmaceutical products.” It provided lists of possible
male and female professions and occupations, places where a meeting
might take place, problems that might arise disrupting the resultant rela-
tionship, and mechanisms for reconciling the couple.

The anonymous inventor of this singular instrument had . . . perfectly un-

derstood that most films are produced according to the same formula: a man
(handsome) and a woman (beautiful) meet, fall in love, but are thwarted in
their desire by someone or something. Fortunately for the pleasure of the
masses, a series of remarkable exploits allows them to triumph over these ob-
stacles, and over all evildoers. A scenario, in its most basic sense, is just that.
Apprentice scriptwriters, acquire such a machine, or fabricate one your-
selves. It will provide you with as much imagination as many professional
authors have.26

While not totally rejecting such a dependence on formulas, Spaak

claims that “all great films that delight us nowadays have only one thing in
common—precisely the fact that they escape from the [generic] framework
within which laws too hastily drawn up would confine the cinema.”27 For
him, scriptwriting is an art whose laws may be rigid but are unknowable;
creativity is and must remain a mystery. Attitudes such as this led to the
widespread denigration of any scriptwriter who explicitly exploited such
formulas, and who thus proved suspiciously prolific, such as Companeez,
who reputedly employed “a stable of hacks” to fill out the schematic plot
lines which he provided.
 Cinematic Genres in France | 207
What is really interesting is that amidst all this denigration, there were
some, though relatively few, critics of the opposite tendency, who recog-
nized the importance of a generic or conventional base and saw the popu-
lar appeal of the cinema as central to its mythic status. Of about four
hundred books on the cinema published in France between 1930 and
1960, about twenty-five relate explicitly to genres; when those specifically
devoted to the cartoon, the documentary, and various American genres are
subtracted, about twelve remain. Typical of these are Leprohon’s L’Exotisme
au cinéma 28 and Pornon’s Le Rêve et le fantastique.29 Both of these imply by
their very existence that generic patterns are worthy of study, though nei-
ther attempts to provide a theoretical justification for that study, preferring
to see genres as simply and self-evidently there. The former focuses primar-
ily on documentaries, according only twelve pages to French fiction films,
while the latter, with a foreword by Giraudoux, asserts the essentially oniric
nature of the cinema in order to minimize the popular aspect of the fantas-
tic genre and link it to the artistic afterglow of surrealism.
In addition to these books on specific genres, several books had argu-
ments organized around the existence of genres or, in their single-minded
determination to come to grips with the notion of contemporary myth in
the cinema, foreshadowed much later work on the subject. Most authors
who developed an argument about genre did so to some extent pejoratively.
In Ça c’est du cinéma, Altman undertakes a left-wing ideological critique of
genres in the context of the functions of a capitalist cinema;30 in Les
Grandes Missions du cinéma, Benoît-Lévy bases his critique on a realism
which is seen as to some extent incompatible with all generic convention;31
while in Précis d’initiation au cinéma, H. Agel and G. Agel manifest a right-
wing distaste for genres, which they see as the opium of the people and a
manifestation of collective infantilism.32
The only book published in France to come to grips with the economic
and industrial base of genre production was Peter Bächlin’s Histoire
économique du cinéma (originally written in German and translated into
French in 1946). In his Marxist analysis of capitalist production procedures
as they affect the cinema, Bächlin notes the tendency of any system of mass
production toward standardization because of pressures to reduce costs,
and he likens the balance of difference and sameness within the genre sys-
tem to the customization of car models. Bächlin sees the genres thus pro-
duced as having a basically conservative purpose: “Insofar as they unify the
tastes of the spectators . . . they prevent the masses from becoming aware of
themselves and contribute to reinforcing the reigning ideology.”33 He does
accept, however, that the French production system, among others, is rela-
tively free from genres because of its fragmented industrial structure. Faint
echoes of Bächlin’s arguments appear over the following decade in works by
Bazin, by Morin, and by Agel and Agel, in the form of oblique references to
 208 | , ,  
the industrial and commercial origins of the generic system, though Morin
is more inclined to focus on genres as an implicitly arbitrary set of rational-
izations of the psychoanalytic work of the cinema.
For Benoît-Lévy, however, the existence of a multiplicity of genres is
simply an unavoidable but inexplicable fact of filmmaking. It gives rise to
one of his two fundamental “laws,” allowing the filmmaker “to classify an
original idea within one of the genres. [Thus the spectator] will learn to ap-
preciate a film in terms of the genre to which it belongs.”34 This unusually
forceful recognition of the importance of genre in both the production and
the consumption of films is slightly qualified by the fact that his two main
generic categories are (once again) the “documentary” and the “dramatic.”
Moreover, when he does begin to deal with specific dramatic genres, he is as
inclined as other critics to mock stereotypes as simply false. “There are
French films destined for the international market which show a France ex-
clusively made up of the dancehalls and bars of Montmartre, and inhabited
exclusively by models and toughs in berets and red scarves—a fantasy
France conforming precisely to the ads put out by travel agencies: Paris by
night, under reliable escort.”35 Thus “the true face of France is concealed
beneath a grotesque mask.” These anxieties about genres and formulas arise
from the crucial place occupied in his ideological framework by the natural,
the authentic, and the real. Les Grandes Missions du cinéma is thus a schizo-
phrenic book, at once urging the centrality of genres to both production
and consumption and bemoaning the “lies” which arise from the conse-
quent presence of artifice and convention.
The systematic analysis of filmic conventions and of the ideology be-
hind them which one might have expected from Sadoul or Moussinac is
forcefully, and even viciously, expressed by Altman. Outlining in 1931 “the
same script Hollywood has been serving up for fifteen years,” and its French
equivalents, Altman sees generic formulas as cumulatively embodying a
“Paramount ideology” designed to reconcile the worker to his intolerable
lot, and thus to defuse any revolutionary impulse.36 Noting the typical set-
tings, plot lines, and characters of romances, boulevard comedies, war
films, adventure films, and crime movies, not to mention newsreels, he
concludes that their formulaic patterns serve the interests of the forces of
order—politics, religion, and the military—encouraging conformity and
resignation. The various representations of the world which such conven-
tions articulate are not just false, as Benoît-Lévy argued, but systematically
false, leading the viewing public to suppose that the world need be neither
explained nor transformed, but must simply be accepted. In this monstrous
and quasi-conspiratorial cinema, all that Altman can find to defend are the
relics of a Robin Hood pattern in Arsène Lupin, and the films of Charlie
Chaplin, which might at least incite the viewer to reflect “That too is what
 Cinematic Genres in France | 209
life is like. Is that just? Why should it be so? What should be done about it?” 37
An art, in his view, can attain timelessness only when it calls everything into
question, when it refuses to accept the superficial laws of the genres which
underpin the conduct of contemporary life.38
A decade later, one of the commentators of the wartime period to ac-
knowledge most forcefully the importance of the categorization of pro-
duction into genres was Jean Keim. Writing in a prisoner-of-war camp, and
thus taking into account only prewar production, Keim devotes a hundred
pages of his Un nouvel art: le cinéma sonore to the problem of generic clas-
sification. As with other critics, documentaries and cartoons figure promi-
nently in those hundred pages, but fifty of them are devoted to dramatic
genres, and Keim essays some general theoretical propositions to justify his
classificatory system. In this he is alone among commentators of the period
1930–60.
First, he recognizes the difficulties involved in any classificatory sys-
tem—filmic output, as far as he can see, does not divide up into self-evident
categories, and no inherent distinguishing features suggest themselves. Un-
fortunately, he does not indicate why, in the face of these difficulties, he still
feels that the effort to develop such a system is so important. Indeed, his ac-
count of the formation of genres is as slighting as that of his contempo-
raries. When a film is successful, “a large number of similar films are made,
generally conceived in haste to profit from the fad, until the spectator, dis-
gusted by these pale imitations, is repelled. It would be possible to follow
the periodic movements which lead to the production of these series; such
a history would be amusing from an anecdotal point of view, but from an
aesthetic point of view it would be deprived of all interest.”39
Having got this off his chest and made a preliminary division into spec-
tacle, documentary, and propaganda (“according to the purpose of the di-
rector”), Keim proceeds to outline a set of three intersecting criteria for
organizing a study of the first of these. It is here that his essay becomes in-
teresting. The three criteria he will use are the character of the work, the
type of action, and the tendency of the plot. By the first, he means the de-
gree of realism. His brief discussion of realism is fairly sophisticated, finally
defining it in terms of plausibility. Applying this, he distinguishes known
and unknown parts of the world, present and reconstructed past ages,
worlds that conform to known laws and worlds that do not. This leads to
identification of the fantastic and historical genres and the abstract film.
Under type of action, he distinguishes exterior and interior action, which
allows him to separate the psychological film from such action genres as the
Western, the epic, and the murder mystery. His preference for the former is
obvious, and he contrasts its exploration of the depths of the human soul
with the latter’s emphasis on the body—“man can be seen, if not in all his
 210 | , ,  
brutality, at best with a simple, direct mind that pays no attention to sub-
tleties. . . . The instincts gain the upper hand, and the veneer of civilization
is peeled away.”40
Finally, in his section on plot tendencies, Keim surveys the range of pro-
duction categories from the tragedy to the comedy, by way of the “comédie
dramatique,” “without forgetting the adventure story, which constitutes
one of the most fertile areas,” and which includes gangster films, crime sto-
ries, Westerns, war films, and exotic and colonial films. That he should have
felt it necessary to distinguish this category from the other, more conven-
tional range of tragedy, comedy, and comédie dramatique may seem singu-
lar, yet will be seen to be characteristic of the day. His justification is that in
adventure films “tragedy and comedy exist only as secondary considera-
tions. [What is central is] material struggle—struggle against men or against
the elements.”41
While Keim’s set of three intersecting criteria lead to a given genre, such
as the Western, appearing several times, in different sections, and while the
films that he uses to illustrate his categories and principles are very limited
in number, further contributing to a sense of repetitiousness, the very fact
that he attempted such an ambitious task as the systematic categorization of
international film production set him apart from all his contemporaries. It
is hard not to see his undertaking as related to the conditions under which
it was undertaken—a period of wartime imprisonment when he was forc-
ibly distanced from film viewing for a period of years, and able to reflect in
the abstract on the previous decade’s production.
Toward the end of the thirty years under review, another book appeared
which used generic categories as a guiding principle—Précis d’initiation au
cinéma by H. Agel and G. Agel—but, like most others who accepted the
principle of genres, these authors were severely critical of the practice. Ad-
mittedly, this work was a textbook for college students, written in a care-
fully moral tone by authors accustomed to promoting a religious cinema,
but still the distrust of genres is almost pathological. Agel and Agel write of
a genre cinema as an escapist cinema, offering facile euphoria to the masses.
Certain time-worn stereotypes, especially romances organized around the
display of a star, are seen as covert eroticism, “appealing to the grossest in-
stincts and the most deluded sentimentality.”42 Cumulatively, such generic
forms are acknowledged as having created “a cinematic mythology,” but the
effects of that mythology are uniformly sinister.
Agel and Agel approvingly quote a pamphlet, Éducation et cinéma no 1,
put out by the Direction générale de la Jeunesse et des Sports, as saying that
genres deserve study “to see how they produce or encourage the process of
escape into a dream world which is the last, desperate resort of a collective
conscience incapable of accepting and coping with the real world. Tarzan
does not represent a nostalgic fantasy about far-off, sun-drenched land-
 Cinematic Genres in France | 211
scapes so much as a rejection of slums, of dreary work in an office or fac-
tory, and of preparations for World War III; it is the negation of the here
and now.” Continuing this somewhat pessimistic explanation of genres, in
their introduction to the major section of the textbook entitled Les Genres au
Cinéma, Agel and Agel note that “it is most often the least successful films
that . . . are easiest to catalogue and class by genre. . . . The great classics
often belong to several genres . . . or transcend all aesthetic categories. . . . So
it is with prudence that one should resort to this sort of categorization,
which has above all a limitative and methodological value [sic].”43
As a consequence of their distrust, Agel and Agel decide not to use the
normal (unjustifiable) generic categories, but a new range that they had de-
vised on a more justifiable (though never actually justified) basis. These
genres are based not on the story or the content, but on the implicit content
and the style. Unfortunately, these terms, subsequently redefined as “the
dominant” and “the line of force,” are never rationally explained. They re-
sult, however, in the exclusion of historical and biographical films as “inau-
thentic,” and of the politically committed film (film à thèse) as “opposed by
definition to art because of its didactic purpose.” Didacticism, they quote
Bazin as saying, inevitably undermines psychological plausibility, complex-
ity, and free will, and thus reduces the real to “an intelligible organization
without mystery.”44
The categories which do pass muster are the epic and its “regressive”
forms—the crime story and the swashbuckler; the war film; the Western;
the tragedy, drama, and melodrama; the comedy; the burlesque; the poem;
the documentary; the short film; the cartoon; and the youth film. If there is
a basis for accepting these and rejecting the others, it must be ideological;
certainly, there is no logic to the internal ordering of their system, except a
general tendency to move from the serious to the frivolous, then add on
whatever is left over.
In the same year as the Agels’ book appeared, Cahiers du Cinéma inad-
vertently conducted a debate on film genres. A discussion of authorship
had led the magazine by negation to talk of convention. As is readily imag-
inable, the Young Turks of Cahiers were outspoken in their condemnation
of genres. Rivette’s comments summed up their attitude: asked by Bazin
what he thought was at the origin of the mediocrity of the British cinema,
he said simply that “the British cinema is a genre cinema,” and later, “there
can’t be any good European films, far less great ones, unless one decides to
avoid genre subjects, since every genre is essentially doomed.”45 In response
to this, Bazin comes out with perhaps the only unequivocal defense of gen-
res to have been published in the entire thirty years. He asserts that “the
weakness of the European film industries is that they cannot rely on genres
for their current production. . . . One of the main problems of the French
cinema is its inability to sustain good basic genres that thrive as they do in
 212 | , ,  
America.” This assertion can be taken in conjunction with his comments
46

in the well-known article “De la politique des auteurs,” which had appeared
in the previous issue of Cahiers, where he had delicately kicked the stuffing
out of his younger colleagues, “who look down on anything in a film that
comes from a common stock of material, yet which can sometimes be en-
tirely admirable.” In his view, the popular American culture which lay be-
hind the American comedy, the Western, and the gangster film was entirely
beneficial,

for that is what gives the cinematic genres their vigor and richness, resulting
as they do from an artistic evolution which has always been in wonderfully
close harmony with its public. Yet one can read a review in Cahiers of an An-
thony Mann Western (and God knows I like Anthony Mann’s Westerns) as
if it were not, above all, a Western—that is, a whole collection of conven-
tions in the script, the acting, and the direction. I know very well that in a
film magazine one may be permitted to skip such details, but they should at
least be implied, whereas what in fact happens is that their existence is
glossed over rather sheepishly, as though they were a rather ridiculous impo-
sition that it would have been inconvenient to mention.47

Bazin goes on to praise many “non-auteurist” Westerns, and concludes un-

compromisingly that “the genre tradition is a springboard for creative free-
dom. The American cinema is a classical art, so why not admire in it what
is most admirable, namely not just the talent of this or that filmmaker, but
the genius of the system.” The (re)allocation of the terms “talent” and “ge-
nius” to “filmmaker” and “system,” respectively, is sufficient indication of
the gulf between his thinking and that of his younger and more romantic
colleagues.

7.1.2 Myth
As this review of comments on the principle of a genre cinema makes clear,
there were few critics writing between 1930 and 1960 who took the princi-
ple seriously, and no one except Bazin—and he only at a very late date—
who supported it. Certainly, none of the commentators indicated any
appreciation that there might be a connection between generic categories
and what might be termed a modern mythology, though such a connection
might be considered implicit in Altman’s discussion of the ideological sig-
nificance of genres. Where a connection was sometimes explicitly made be-
tween a popular cinema and mythology, it was made not because of the
existence of a genre system but rather on the basis of the cinema being a
mass medium, or because of the existence of a star system. On the other
hand, it was quite common for the connection between cinema and my-
thology to be made not because the cinema was a popular medium, but, on
 Cinematic Genres in France | 213
the contrary, because it could occasionally attain the status of a high art.
For such commentators, the explicit assumption was that only great artists
could aspire to be myth-makers.
Critics on the right, in particular, were inclined to see the highest artis-
tic goal of filmmaking as the creation of a mythology of the modern age.
At the same time as Altman was writing Ça c’est du cinéma, Abel Gance was
asserting,

All legends, all mythology and all myths, all founders of religions, and all re-
ligions themselves, all the great figures of history, all those millennia of ob-
jective reflections of the world of the imagination await their luminous
re-creation [in the cinema], and heroes crowd at the door to enter. All our
dream life, and all the dream that is our life, awaits its chance to register on
our sensitized celluloid, and it is in no sense a grandiose overstatement to
imagine that, given the chance, Homer would have filmed The Iliad or, bet-
ter still, The Odyssey.
The time of the image has arrived.
We march forth, a select band, on wreaths of cloud, and when we engage
in battle, it is with a reality that we strive to transform into dream.
Each camera hides a secret divining rod, and its lens is a modern Merlin’s
eye.48

Both this exalted view of cinema as at its best aspiring to mythic status
and the elitism implied in the term “a select band” were to be perpetuated
in later books by Dekeukelaire and Duvillars, but as they were writing in
the postwar period they were also building on the famous essay published
by Malraux in 1941, which did to some extent explore a more popular ori-
gin for the concept of a cinematic mythology.49 Malraux’s fascination with
myth had been apparent since his earliest writings, and he was arguably as
much obsessed by myth as were his characters. For him, as for many others
at the time, the cinema was a privileged site for the production of myth,
not because of its aspiration to the status of high art, but precisely for the
opposite reason—because of its mass audience. “The American cinema . . .
attains willy-nilly that domain where art is never absent: myth. And the
whole task of the cinema over at least the last decade has been to attempt to
cope with myth. . . . The cinema addresses the masses, and the masses love
myth, whether it be for good or for evil.”50 Again, establishing what was to
become a commonplace among writers who succeeded him, he linked this
mythic status of the cinema to the star system.

A star is in no way simply an actress who makes films. A star is a person with
that necessary minimum of talent whose face expresses, symbolizes, embodies
a collective instinct. Marlene Dietrich is not an actress like Sarah Bernhardt,
she’s a myth like Phryné. The Greeks ascribed vague biographies to their in-
 214 | , ,  
stincts, just as our contemporaries invent story after story for theirs, just as
the creators of myths invented one after the other the Labors of Hercules.
So true is this that stars recognize more or less vaguely the myths that they
embody, and demand scenarios capable of perpetuating them. . . . A great
actress is a woman capable of embodying a great number of different roles,
whereas a star is a woman capable of bringing into being a large number of
convergent scenarios.51

Published in the same year as Malraux’s article, André Boll’s rapid

overview, Le Cinéma et son histoire, likewise sees the cinema as productive of
myths, both in certain specific characters whom it elevates to mythic status
(Zorro, Ben Hur) and in certain recurrent stereotypes (the swashbuckling
hero, the vamp). Of the stars who embody these characters and character
types, he says, “Their every gesture, their silhouette, gait, hairstyle and pro-
file, their make-up and gaze, and the intonation of their voice . . . all serve
instinctively as a model for the general public, which is drunk with the de-
sire to imitate them.”52
The notion of a model is a passive one. The phrasing of Malraux’s
statement might seem, on the contrary, to ascribe key agency to the star,
who “brings into being” the myth. Dekeukelaire is clearer about the in-
significance of the individual in the mythologizing process. “Myth does not
arise . . . from the influence of a personality. It arises spontaneously, collec-
tively. It is an ideal that the collectivity pursues all its life, and that corre-
sponds to its true nature.”53 Recapitulating Dekeukelaire, Duvillars notes
that once upon a time the theater embodied and exalted collective anxieties
and needs, but now it is the cinema that does so: “It is the ideal vehicle for
modern myths, because myth . . . is a collective fact, the sum total of the
dreams aroused by a collective instinct and crystallized in a single man, the
hero—even if that hero is of dubious morality. Incontestably, cinema alone
has the necessary audience [to generate contemporary myths].”54 For
Duvillars,

the spectator seeks in the cinema the exteriorization of all his dreams and
suppressed desires, and thus, favored by the surrounding darkness, liberates
all his most profound anxieties. It is a sort of official . . . safety valve that al-
lows the honest man to live out in an hour and a half all the adventures and
experiences that he suppresses but secretly longs for. Safe in his comfortable
theater seat, he avenges himself . . . on all that is above him in rank and
wealth, and tramples underfoot the society that suffocates him, wielding his
machine gun along with Scarface and Dillinger.55

Duvillars spends much of his book elaborating Malraux’s comments by

analyzing the images of stars of the day, notably Viviane Romance, Jean
Gabin, Marlene Dietrich, Michèle Morgan, von Stroheim, and Chaplin.
 Cinematic Genres in France | 215
At no stage does he extend this analysis to genres. Indeed, like Gance, he
tends to see only “great filmmakers” (and he instances Eisenstein, Lang,
Clair, Chaplin, and later Stiller, Carné, and Cocteau) as capable of recog-
nizing and elaborating these mythic structures. That is, while myth is a col-
lective fact, it is not directly the product of a collectivity, but relies on the
mediation of a man of genius. Also, as the above implies and as Dekeuke-
laire makes clear, the task of reconciling the underprivileged to their lot
and teaching them resignation is not an ignoble one. “[Our] civilization
dreams of a reality that will make us forget weariness and work. It [achieves
this in] myth, which condenses all desires in the hero.” And if, at the end,
“the last bullet fired, it returns [the spectator] to the street and to his daily
responsibilities, his family, his office, restores to him his bourgeois soul and
his habitual routines,”56 this is seen as one of its strengths, one of its vir-
tues—transcending commercial considerations rather than (as a leftist such
as Altman would have claimed) serving them.
The rather unremarkable fact that the stars—as divinities, as (sex) god-
desses—embodied mythic personae whose appeal to the people was of an
exalting nature had become common currency by the mid-fifties. Henri
Agel talks in 1953 of the obsessive faces of various stars (in France, Jean
Marais and Viviane Romance), which “are not just human faces, but the
disquieting faces of two idols all too ready to receive the suspect adoration
of their faithful.”57 Likewise, the following year Claude Mauriac speaks of
sex goddesses as allowing their worshipers to participate in the magic of
myth. He entitles one of his essays “Mythology of the Cowboy,” says of
Au-delà des grilles that it represents “the death of the Jean Gabin myth,” and
speaks in general of the crowd’s vague appreciation of the fact that “the
least of films is a means of intercession by which it can make contact with
that transcendent reality subtended by the world of appearances. It loves
instinctively in the cinema what is dangerous and disturbing . . . contact
with the sacred.”58 These and numerous similar observations speak of a
general intellectual agreement in the mid- to late fifties about the mythic
significance of the cinema, and specifically about the mythic stereotypes
embodied by the stars.
At the same time, it is clear that the term “mythology” was being used
with somewhat different connotations by different critics in different con-
texts. Was it acceptable to use the term, as Chauvet did, in a passing refer-
ence to the swashbuckling swordsman slaying modern “dragons” (“After all,
haven’t you heard of those legendary knights who overcame fabulous mon-
sters with no more than a sword? The one myth is as valid as the other”59).
Surely, a popular cinema as figured in the star and genre systems could not
have the same status as the mythic aspirations of a high-art cinema in which
intellectuals aspired to reproduce the timeless truths of ancient myths. This
anxiety is captured in the otherwise excellent article by Raymond Barkan,
 216 | , ,  
“Une mythologie du quotidien” (A mythology of everyday life), in which
he feels it necessary to distinguish two types of cinematic mythology, the
“noble” and the “humble”: “While the frontiers between the commercial
and the art cinema are not always easy to define, you could almost say that
there are two categories of mythology in the cinema: an artificial mythol-
ogy, fruit of the mercenary values of producers and of the need of the
masses to contemplate up there on the screen the reflection of their most
coarse and instinctual appetites, and that noble and authentic mythology of
the work of art, which transposes life without betraying it and which en-
dows our hopes and sufferings with grandeur.”60 In his view, it is clearly only
from the latter, and not from the “inauthentic” and implicitly generic
mythology, that anything of worth can emerge. Treading a difficult line,
Barkan secures Gabin’s heritage for the true (artistic) mythology, despite the
fact that it is the masses who recognize themselves in the resultant “mythol-
ogization of the ordinary”:

There is no doubt that it was in the cinema that the masses first realized that
their daily life, that monotonous daily struggle for existence . . . could aspire
to as much tragic grandeur . . . as dramas portraying exceptional events and
people. One’s job, one’s profession, the daily routine that one loves and that
has a real social importance, have acquired, thanks to the screen, a prestige
that they never had before. . . . Through this mythology of the real, the
human masses have attained an almost physical, instinctive appreciation of
the great truths of their lives, which would not have been possible before the
cinema. . . . This spontaneous perception by the masses of the beauty of the
true translates notably into the success of actors who are lacking in any
physical attractiveness, but who identify totally with characters drawn from
everyday life.61

This debate on the applicability of the term “myth” to popular culture

provided some context for the development during the fifties by Roland
Barthes of the notion of a contemporary mythology inhering in the rhe-
toric of contemporary culture as a whole. The ideas which he explored were
quite common in critical debate of the day, but his conception of them was
at once broader and less euphoric than was that of other commentators. In-
stead of seeing contemporary mythology as providing spectators with de-
sirable glimpses of their own place in the transcendent scheme of things,
Barthes saw the function of such a mythology as essentially conservative,
naturalizing and depoliticizing the historical ascendancy of the bourgeoisie
and thus working against the interests of a duped public. While the cinema
was not central to his thought, his comments on Greta Garbo, on the Ro-
mans in historical films, and on the exotic locations in such films as Lost
Continent serve to apply those general ideas to the filmic medium.62 As a
 Cinematic Genres in France | 217
left-wing commentator picking up on but reworking a decade of commen-
tary on the cinema, he can easily be read as continuing the work of Altman
twenty years before, though in a more urbane tone and on a more solid theo-
retical base.

7.2 BROAD GENERIC CATEGORIES 1930–60

While the above discussion summarizes a not inconsiderable body of work
on genre and myth in the years 1930–60, it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that genres as a whole were disregarded or derided. When Richard Abel in-
troduces a selection of critical essays from the period, he quite reasonably
sees no need to mention genre at any stage.63 Nevertheless, it was common
practice for both the industry and the critical fraternity to use generic de-
scriptors when classifying films. These commonly consisted of two sets of
terms—a first, broader set, confined primarily but not exclusively to
“drama” and comedy,” and a second, narrower set of terms: “military” or
“war” film, “poetic” or “fantastic” film, “musical,” “psychological,” “social,”
and “crime” film. Thus the annual lists would normally include such classi-
fications as “crime drama,” “musical comedy,” or “psychological drama.”
The primary division of all films into the categories of “drama” and
“comedy” clearly corresponds to a gross distinction between serious and hu-
morous films. It was the contemporary equivalent of the earlier theatrical
practice of dividing productions into tragedies and comedies. The use of
“drama” instead of “tragedy” is significant. In the early theater, both trag-
edies and comedies were “spectacles,” presented to the public, but from
about Shakespeare’s time onward, and paralleling the development of hu-
manism, the audience began to be invited to share the tragic protagonists’
state of mind and emotional experiences, rather than simply “recognizing”
them. The aim was to abolish any sense of distance between actors and au-
dience. This dramatic involvement in the narrative through psychological
identification with the characters led to serious productions being called
“dramas” rather than “tragedies.”
Along with the evolution of the tragedy into the drama went a devolu-
tion of agency from the gods to humanity. As Keim notes in his discussion
of what he still calls “tragic” films, “the heroes are no longer princes but men
marked by fate, burdened by exceptional circumstances, who pose often in-
soluble problems [and who] become representative types with a significance
greater than their individual personalities.”64 Because he still saw them as
tragedies, Keim was led to condemn any trace of optimism, let alone a
happy end, in filmic “tragedies.” Other commentators, using the term
“drama,” had no such difficulty, since the key consideration was the nature
of the audience’s experience resulting from specific techniques of audience
 218 | , ,  
involvement and identification, not the ultimate outcome of the narrative.
Apart from Keim, very few contemporary film reviewers used the terms
“tragedy” or “tragicomedy” in their categorizations , the term “drama” hav-
ing almost entirely displaced them.
The distinction between “dramas” and “comedies” commonly em-
ployed by film reviewers, then, distinguished films that aimed to involve the
spectator intensely in the action from those that aimed to provide a specta-
cle—in other words, it distinguished films that the audience was invited to
feel along with from those that it was invited to be entertained by. To quote
Keim on the comedy, “Real life is not represented here. . . . A world appears
which, though it may not be deformed, sets aside all ugliness and grief. . . .
Feelings are not profound; great sadness is rapidly dissipated; nothing
seems really serious.” Human beings and their relationships are merely the
material for a textual game, executed for the delight of the spectator, and
“joie de vivre carries the young and vital protagonists along apace, to a res-
olution which dissipates all misunderstandings and reunites all lovers.”65
On the whole, comedies were not expected to deal with serious topics,
though they might do so on occasion, and dramas were not expected to be
wryly amusing, let alone hilarious; yet inevitably the two major categories
were not watertight, and the industry acknowledged an intermediate genre,
called the “comédie dramatique.” Like the “true” drama, the comédie dra-
matique aimed to involve the spectator in the narrative action, but this ac-
tion constituted a relatively gentle comment on human nature, in which
affectionately drawn characters worked out problems of human relation-
ships (but never social or political, let alone spiritual or transcendental rela-
tionships) in a basically optimistic way. Often, there was nothing comic in
the English sense about these “comedies,” since the French have always
used that term more broadly, but even if the narrative ended badly, or am-
biguously, the spectator came away from these films warmed and uplifted.
Over the years, commentators had difficulty clearly distinguishing
comédies dramatiques from sentimental comedies and psychological dra-
mas, but they felt that the effort to do so was justified because there was
something peculiarly French (and therefore peculiarly valuable) about the
production of comédies dramatiques. It was something that they felt they
did better than any other nation, perhaps because it involved a profound
understanding of the human heart. As Le Film Français was to say some-
what baldly, in 1947, “The comédie dramatique corresponds to the genius
of our race, which is why there are so many of them in the year’s produc-
tion of sixty-five films.”66 Pagnol’s films were regularly categorized as
comédies dramatiques, as were Becker’s postwar domestic comedies; one
reason for the welcome extended to the New Wave was the perception that
Truffaut, Chabrol, and Rohmer were renewing this typically French vein,
then (correctly) considered to be in decline. Writing during the war, when
 Cinematic Genres in France | 219
the comédie dramatique was at its apogee, Keim was inclined to extend the
category to include all contemporary realistic productions dealing with
everyday situations. While no one else was as inclusive, Keim’s definition is
still useful: the comédie dramatique provides “a slice of life, with its joys
and its difficulties, its grotesque incidents and its moving moments. . . .
The common man is its protagonist, and he is motivated by feelings that
the spectator also experiences in the course of his everyday existence.”67
Likewise seeking to define the nature and the importance of the
comédie dramatique, but in the context of a discussion of the importance
for each film-producing nation to be true to its own national strengths,
Benoît-Lévy sees the strength of French film as being neither in tears nor in
laughter, but in

that smile, half ironic, half affectionate, that has been seen by some as frivo-
lous, but is really more philosophical. . . . You could say that elements of
drama inflect all laughter in French films, which will never manifest the sim-
ple boisterousness of American laughter. The opposite is also true. An ele-
ment of laughter inflects French drama, which can never achieve the
harshness, often touched with grandeur, of certain foreign films. [This is
due to] a profound understanding of human nature, made up as it is of
both good and evil. The great wisdom [of French films] is to accept human
beings as they are—with a smile. . . . Admittedly the French cinema has not
produced exclusively comédies dramatiques. We must not forget robust dra-
mas like Renoir’s La Bête humaine or Duvivier’s Poil de Carotte. . . . But es-
pecially since the advent of the talkie, the dominant tendency has been to
infuse the living images with laughter and with tears, which melt into a
smile of irony or of compassion.68

As a consequence of the prominence given to the intermediate category

of the comédie dramatique, what resulted was not so much a binary system
as a ternary system, though the third term was always in the minority. In-
deed, as Keim’s insertion of “adventure films” suggests, for some it was a
quaternary system. The fourth term arose because “drama” was felt to be a
very broad category—far broader than comedy, and far less homogeneous.
It ranged from the “true” drama, moving for its representation of some
somber and powerful aspect of the human condition, across the whole
range of more “formulaic” dramas, which might be classified as historical
or period dramas, murder mysteries, Westerns, horror, science fiction, and
the fantasy. Throughout the classical period, there was some hesitation as
to whether these latter works, which belonged to an already widely recog-
nized genre and which unhesitatingly mobilized the relevant formula,
should in fact be classified as dramas at all. Lacking any viable alternative
term, many commentators simply labeled them crime “films” or war
 220 | , ,  
“films.” By the war years, this division between true dramas and the more
formulaic dramas simply called “films,” while never clearly articulated ex-
cept indirectly by Keim, had become almost routine. Goupi Mains-Rouges
was labeled a “peasant film,” Pontcarral a “period film,” and La Main du
diable a “poetic film.” All of these more generic dramas were at one remove
from contemporary reality, at least in their formal qualities, but usually also
in their spatial or temporal remoteness. In their rule-governed, game-like
way, they did not claim to reveal truths about contemporary social or psy-
chological reality, but to set certain somber, dramatic, or poignant, but
fairly stylized aspects of reality within known textual frameworks.
Since throughout the classic period industry journals routinely em-
ployed this ternary or quaternary system to describe the season’s releases, it
is possible to assess the proportion of each year’s output which, in the eyes
of the anonymous classifiers, fell into each of the broad generic categories.
Figure 7.1, which accepts without question those anonymous categoriza-
tions, is based on a ternary division into dramas, comedies, and comédies
dramatiques. It at once confirms certain widespread assumptions about the
output of the classic French cinema and contains certain surprises. In gen-
eral, it shows that, after an initial year in which dramas heavily outnum-
bered comedies, comedies prevailed throughout the 1930s, in a proportion
of roughly fifty-five to thirty-five. During the war, however, the propor-
tions abruptly reversed, and toward the war’s end the proportion of dramas
in the year’s output hit an all-time high of about 60 percent. From 1946
onward, the proportions were about equal, though there were annual fluc-
tuations which became more marked in the late fifties. Meanwhile, comé-
dies dramatiques, which had been rising steadily in number throughout the
thirties, reached a peak of 12 percent in 1947 and subsequently declined
toward a low point of 5 percent in 1958.
The predominance of comedies in the early thirties is precisely what
one would have expected on the basis of contemporary accounts. The great
debate about filmed theater which raged throughout the thirties was trig-
gered principally by the practice of filming theatrical comedies—vaude-
villes, farces, operettas, and boulevard comedies. In September 1933, La
Cinématographie Française listed 180 comedies filmed in the preceding two
and a half years, and of these 121 were more or less direct transcriptions of
theatrical comedies.69 So it is not surprising that industry journals ex-
claimed over the increasing number of “frivolous comedies” in 1931 and
over the excess of operettas in 1932. “Their time is past,” wrote Lucie De-
rain, a little optimistically, in 1932, noting that of that year’s production 60
films were either vaudevilles or operettas. “What can you hope for from a
cinema like that?”70 Yet in 1935, Charensol was still complaining about the
number of operettas, vaudevilles, and music-hall productions transcribed
for the cinema, protesting that “the cinema is basically a visual art. The
Figure 7.1. Main Generic Categories 1930–1958

solid line = dramas

dotted line = comedies
dashed line = comédies dramatiques
 222 | , ,  
most obvious effect of the talkie has been to create two categories of film
production: in one, the traditional laws [of the silent cinema] are respected,
whereas the other confines itself to more or less faithful reproduction of
theatrical works. Not surprisingly, I will tend to neglect the latter, not so
much out of scorn as because I have no desire to analyze the repertory of
the Comédie Française or the Palais Royal.”71
While the production of comedies in the early thirties is unsurprising,
their continuing predominance until the declaration of war is unexpected,
given the wide reputation acquired by the poetic realist films of the late
thirties. Commonly called “drames d’atmosphère” at the time, these can
seem nowadays to have been the characteristic product of the period. That
they seemed so even then is apparent from the role attributed to them in
the early years of the war by both the French and the German authorities,
as not just a prime symptom of France’s prewar decadence, but a prime
cause of it. Yet in terms of pure volume, the number of such productions at
no time matched that of comedies.
Equally unexpected is the rapid disappearance of comedies once
wartime production resumed. Not only is there a widespread assumption
that wartime audiences would have wanted escapist entertainment, with an
emphasis on comedy, but also we might expect Goebbels’s notorious
(though privately expressed, as far as we know) desire that the French
should be provided with “films that are light, superficial, entertaining, but
trivial” to have had some impact on production. Yet even the output of the
German-controlled firm Continental, while it was dominated by comedies
in the early stages, included more and more dramas after Goebbels’s pro-
nouncement, including Tourneur’s horror film La Main du diable and Le
Corbeau, of notorious reputation.
The expectations that are overturned by these data are based on a com-
mon-sense assumption that in times of crisis audiences will look for relief
from their hard lot in escapist entertainment and artificial paradises. This
theory is somewhat distinct from that of Altman, who saw what he called
“the Paramount ideology” as systematically designed to distract audiences
from their hard lot, and who saw it therefore as sinewing dramatic produc-
tions as much as comedies. However, it closely resembles that of Gorel
who, writing in the same year as Altman, describes the cinema as “a ma-
chine for retouching reality, correcting it, weeding out the undesirable as-
pects, softening the asperities, the rocks, all that bruises or hurts.”72 His
most startling analogy involves his visit to an asylum, whose director
screened films for the inmates because they constituted the most effective
mechanism for calming the mad: paraphrasing Brecht’s observations, he
sees it as leaving them exhausted but happy. As the asylum director memo-
rably remarks, “Since the cinema came into being, sir, there are fewer mad-
men.”73 For Gorel, all that kept the soldiers of World War I at their stations
 Cinematic Genres in France | 223
was the American cinema. In the midst of chaos and suffering, “they would
screen an American film and the soldiers would laugh like mad. This shook
them up, purged them. And when the show was over, they would go off
happily to die, thinking of Pearl White’s long eyelashes.”74
Even among those on the left, the conspiracy theory postulating an ide-
ologically conservative purpose behind all capitalist film production was
held to apply all the more strongly in the case of comedies, and their suspi-
cions could only have been reinforced by prevailing commentary. In 1936,
La Cinématographie Française protested, “We have quite enough opportu-
nity to contemplate problems during the daytime, and thus we prefer that
the cinema not confront us with yet more in the evening. If the entire
French population were plunged into the direst pessimism, our line of con-
duct [i.e., in the film industry] would shine forth all the more clearly: our
task would be to restore our spectators to a happy frame of mind. . . . A cus-
tomer who enters a theater in a melancholy mood must leave it restored to
tranquillity. If depressed, he must find in our theaters reason to be hope-
ful.”75 And two years later, speaking out against La Marseillaise as an instru-
ment of propaganda, Cinéopse said, “The cinema has nothing to gain from
intervening in politics, if only because it raises the anxiety level of so many
citizens. . . . Its task is to give us shows that are entertaining, healthy, and re-
assuring, that will cause audiences to forget their excessive troubles, and
that will maintain civil order and moral health.”76
Essentially, this was the “theory” behind the celebrated musical comedy
of 1934, La Crise est finie—an out-of-work theater group from the prov-
inces decides that what Paris needs to drag it out of the depression is a rous-
ing musical comedy. It’s all a matter of attitude: sing along with the cast and
all your troubles will disappear. And of course, in the film, their theory is
validated: the troupe plays to packed houses and France is cured. Yet in
practice the contrary was the case. Comedies dominated in the early thir-
ties, even before the depression hit France, yet had no reported deterrent ef-
fect, while dramas dominated during the war, when conditions were at
their most arduous for audiences. Indeed, as we will see in chapter 9, the
same was true even in the second half of the thirties, when, in the face of
prolonged economic and social disturbances, it was dramatic productions
that were most popular, not the numerous comedies with which producers
flooded the market. The more somber the experiences of the audience, the
more they looked to somber representations of the world. The escapist the-
ory seems not to hold, at least in any simple way.
Goebbels, then, in his celebrated and derided wartime statement was
merely reproducing standard French industrial observations concerning the
social function not only of comedy but of the cinema as a whole; Ciné
Miroir is doing the same after the war when it publishes an article calling for
more comedies: recognizing that “bad boys and bashings” had dominated
 224 | , ,  
production in recent years, it protests that, in view of the hard times and
with daily life a constant struggle, producers should reorient their efforts to-
ward comedies. “We see too many somber dramas, frightful tragedies, grim
tales.”77 In fact, however, production of comedies and dramas was to equal
out in the ensuing decade, which also saw the high point and gradual de-
cline of the comédie dramatique. But this relative stability was disrupted in
the late fifties by wild swings which suggest a rudderless production system
desperately seeking a new formula to combat unpredictable, then dramati-
cally declining, attendance.
While films formally classified as comedies were still numerous in the
fifties, the conviction grew among commentators that the French cinema
had lost its ability to produce amusing films, insofar as they believed it had
ever had it. In 1953, reviewing the previous seven years’ production, Do-
niol-Valcroze notes despairingly that the French comic film has been mori-
bund for some time, and it is neither Fanfan la Tulipe, charming as it is, nor
Don Camillo that will revive its fortunes.78 In the same volume of essays,
Tallenay entitles his contribution “Have the French Not Got a Sense of
Humor?” “In the last seven years,” he says, “successes can be counted on the
fingers of one hand . . . in France we have neither a comic tradition nor a
school of comedy.”79 The supposedly comic films that have been produced
depend on the malicious observation of cowardice, human frailties, weak-
ness, and baseness, which is “far from liberating as a form of comedy.”
Mauriac agrees about the absence of any true French comic tradition,80 and
in their chapter on comedy Agel and Agel also see the comic as depending
on degradation and victimization. The only acceptable examples belong to
the sentimental branch of the genre, close to the comédie dramatique.81
Both Agel and Agel and Étienne Fuzellier distinguish two main sub-genres
of comedy, the realist and the burlesque, but Fuzellier considers both of
these to be destructive—indeed, he sees the intrinsic function of comedy as
subversion, and rejoices in it.82
No one sees the comic genre as flourishing in the fifties, though all
qualify their despair by mentioning Tati, whose work is seen as isolated and
inimitable. It is not surprising, then, that in a survey conducted in 1959 by
the Institut Dourdain, romances are the most popular genre, followed by
crime stories, then historical and adventure films; “comedies received very
few votes.”83

7.3 NARROW GENERIC CATEGORIES 1929–39

Since the range of generic categories used by commentators of the day fol-
lowed no system and evolved over time as the films themselves evolved, a
large number of descriptive terms were used to identify specific genres.
 Cinematic Genres in France | 225
Some of these were relatively stable throughout the thirty years of the clas-
sic cinema, while others appeared for a greater or lesser length of time, then
disappeared. Some were closely related to one another, such as “fantasy”
and “poetic film,” or “burlesque” and “farce,” or even “crime drama” and
“drame d’atmosphère.” The following discussion, which focuses on the
ways in which films were commonly categorized by critics between 1929
and 1939, will adopt a modified version of the quadripartite division out-
lined earlier, beginning with the formulaic dramatic categories commonly
termed simply “films,” then proceeding from comedic sub-genres through
to dramatic sub-genres by way of intermediate sub-genres which blended
in different ways and to different degrees the comic and/or the escapist
with the serious and/or the real.

7.3.1 Crime films, war films, period films

The genres which came to be known simply as “films” were seldom the sub-
ject of extended commentary. They were considered such a routine and
quasi-permanent element of the cinematic environment that when they
were mentioned in annual reviews or overviews, it was normally only to
note unusually abundant or meager years. Nevertheless, cumulatively a
view of their nature and function emerges from commentaries of the time.
The most frequently mentioned was the crime film. Most of the articles de-
voted to this genre consist largely of historical lists of major films, though
some testify to a belief that its popularity surged in the early thirties, re-
mained high until the mid-fifties, then experienced a rapid decline marked
by parodic mockery of the conventions. The high point of this trajectory
was the war years, when the crime film was among the most prominent of
genres.
The theme of many thirties articles on the crime film was that it was
typically American rather than French, but that a number of fine examples
were beginning to appear in France. In 1932–33, referring to such films as
Au nom de la loi, Cœur de Lilas, and La Nuit du carrefour, commentators
speak of “the rise of the crime film from its ashes” and “the renaissance of
the crime film in France.”84 An article by Carné in 1932 giving a history of
the genre85 refers back to Fantômas, Judex, Mandrin, and the boy reporter
Rouletabille, who had just been revived by L’Herbier in Le Mystère de la
chambre jaune and Le Parfum de la dame en noir. A 1934 editorial in Ciné
Miroir notes the anxiety expressed by police at the increasing popularity of
the genre, but protests that there is no need to ban them, since, unlike their
American counterparts, French crime films seldom involve the use of guns
and always promote the agent of the law as having intelligence and flair. In-
deed, “they have encouraged more young people to become police officers
than to become criminals.”86
 226 | , ,  
It is precisely this exaltation of the forces of order that infuriates the ir-
repressible Georges Altman. Regretting the disappearance of the Robin
Hood–type chivalrous outlaw of yesteryear, he sees only Arsène Lupin as
still able “to turn the tables on the authorities, the police, and the courts.
Everywhere else, force is on the side of the law.” Police officers have become
family men, without complexes, and with a single aim: “To defend, as good
servants, the society that pays them.” The moral of such films is that “it is
useless to oppose the law, there is a world of middle-class values to be pro-
tected, consolidated, justified.” More generally, the proliferation of such
films suggests that, for contemporary society, “the only adventure worth un-
dertaking, it seems, is the attack on or defense of Society’s Moneybins. . . . It
is money that orders life. It is for money that people become intoxicated,
suffer, struggle.”87
The genre’s popularity fluctuated during the thirties, but within rela-
tively narrow limits. Cinéopse saw 1937 as a particularly good year for the
crime film and the spy film, while the following year La Cinématographie
Française classed these two as “formulas particularly favored by the pub-
lic.”88 Subsequently, Ciné Mondial was to note the regular success of crime
films during the war, and critical interest was to increase in the postwar pe-
riod as a series of pastiches of the genre, starring Eddie Constantine, regu-
larly achieved box-office success.
The spy film was often associated with the crime film. It was common,
and frequently if unhelpfully commented upon, in the immediate prewar
years, when Edwige Feuillère figured as the seductive female spy. It was to
experience a brief, unremarkable resurgence in the early fifties, when be-
cause of its technical coding it was generally grouped with the crime film as
forming communally the série noire, but it was at no stage the subject of any
serious analysis. In a sense, it was more closely related to the war film,
which attracted slightly more extensive commentary from critics. This
genre was recognized as having occupied a minor but constant place in Eu-
ropean output consequent on World War I. The few articles published in
Cinémonde and Cinémagazine are disparaging, implicitly contrasting the
pretensions of these “celluloid heroics” with the mediocre quality of the re-
sultant films. Moussinac sees it as primarily an American genre, and in-
cludes it in his remarks about these films being designed to flatter the basest
tastes of the masses.89 Most others, such as Keim and Arnoux, make an ex-
ception for three or four exemplary war films—usually Quatre de l’infan-
terie, À l’ouest rien de nouveau, Croix de bois, and less frequently Westfront,
No Man’s Land, or Verdun, visions d’histoire.90
Altman is, once again, the only critic of the thirties to attempt to dis-
criminate in any detail between different types of war film, their different
effects on the public, and their relationship to different national ideolo-
gies.91 He identifies two main categories. On the one hand, standard war
 Cinematic Genres in France | 227
films attempt to glorify battle and conceal the reality of pain, suffering, and
death. For them, the division of humanity into nations is taken as a funda-
mental fact of life, and the experience of these nations rising up in pride
and anger against one another is cast as an exhilarating adventure. He com-
ments in particular on the current vogue for films representing the war in
the air, “in which war is reduced to a few stars heroically taking to the air,
far from the immense anonymous mass of grubby foot-soldiers being sacri-
ficed on the altar of nationalism, crawling on hands and knees amidst mud
and blood. War, that great adventure that consists of massacring other
human beings, has to be prettified to be bearable.”92
As these comments imply, Altman’s sympathies are internationalist and
humanitarian. He praises films such as Quatre de l’infanterie, which show
war as “a chaotic and incoherent bloodbath laced with mud and terror. . . .
A deluge of steel, fire, earth, and passionately contorted faces,” where even
the hospitals provide “an appalling symphony of fear.”93 Another such film
is À l’ouest rien de nouveau, through which “a grim wind of suffering blows,
a violent wind bringing catastrophe, implacable and irreparable.”94 Ulti-
mately, however, his fear is that even such “realistic” war films can be read
against the grain by a generation trained in nationalistic reading practices,
as he himself has witnessed with a group of children happily cheering along
with the slaughter of Quatre de l’infanterie.
The historical genre (the historical film, the period film, the costume
drama) was much more widely discussed during the thirties than either the
spy film or the war film, and was seen as following the same general trajec-
tory as the crime film. Well established since the period of the film d’art, it
was widely recognized as a standard genre in the twenties and experienced a
brief surge in popularity with the advent of sound. A 1930 article by Mar-
cel Carné entitled “Les Œuvres romantiques au cinéma” in fact deals with
such films as Les Misérables, Le Collier de la reine, and several Balzac tran-
scriptions.95 By 1932, the genre was felt to be so common that Cinémonde
protested against its expansion. Why make Les Deux Orphelines, Monsieur
de Pourceaugnac, Les Trois Mousquetaires, and Violettes impériales? “The cin-
ema is a living art, not a history teacher. . . . What we would like to see on
the screen is more images of contemporary life, not masquerades like
these.”96 Less common for a few years, the historical film surged again in
the late thirties. A review of 1938’s films noted thirteen period films—over
10 percent of production—and the genre was noted as prominent in all re-
views of the next decade. In 1946, La Cinématographie Française was to
proclaim that “the world recognizes France as particularly strong at histori-
cal reconstructions,”97 which by then constituted about 20 percent of the
year’s output. The genre continued to be seen as flourishing until 1954.
Two explanations for the genre’s prominence were adduced by thirties
commentators, one related to the needs of spectators and the other to
 228 | , ,  
industry conditions. Usually, the genre was dismissed as a nostalgic form of
escape into a supposed golden age, whose romance and glamour contrast
with the stress and squalor of the present. In 1934, Cinémonde criticizes
the swashbuckler sub-genre, and notably Le Bossu, for its indefensible rep-
resentation of the past. “Our tormented age is nostalgic for heroes like
these, who track down the lost heirs of noble families, return daughters to
grieving mothers, punish traitors with their vengeful swords, and console
afflicted females (as long as they’re attractive).”98 The genre was not seen
solely as escapist, however. Keim notes its potential for allegorical comment
on the present, and later commentators were to interpret such wartime
films as Pontcarral and Les Visiteurs du soir as providing just that distanced
reference to the present. Leenhardt provides the standard comment on this
aspect of wartime production when he asks what else filmmakers could do
under the occupation, forbidden as they were to speak openly of current
events. “They chose the most noble form of escapism—history.”99 In his
view, all the best wartime productions were costume dramas. Less inclined
toward such a political explanation and more toward the ideological, Alt-
man had earlier seen danger in a genre of this sort, “which implies that
everything of importance takes place among the great of the earth”100—
and, of course, has already been settled, long ago.
Two commentators attempted to explain why certain historical figures
rather than others were the focus of historical films. Arnoux notes the
prominence of Napoleon (his wars did, after all, affect the greater part of
Europe, he was a great self-publicist, and he left memorable images of him-
self for hagiographers to exploit), Catherine of Russia (democracies have
always been fascinated by the imperial system they displaced, and there is
an irresistible delight in contrasting her formal public face with her licen-
tious private life), and Joan of Arc (the fascinating conjunction of the peas-
ant and the divine, not to mention her patriotic significance). Finally, he
proposes an implicitly mythic basis for the genre, which he sees as catering
to “obscure lyric impulses, collective hallucinations . . . the demands of po-
etry.”101 Keim was also interested in identifying the reasons that certain fig-
ures and certain historical periods appealed to contemporary audiences,
concluding that an age dominated by world war, the growth of national-
ism, and the clash of political ideologies looked back to the past for a time-
less justification of its problematic contemporary engagements.102
The main reason adduced for the fluctuating prominence of this par-
ticular genre related to its cost. This could explain its disappearance during
the tough years of the mid-thirties and subsequent rise to prominence in
the late thirties, when several production companies were flush with funds.
Even more clearly, it could explain its prominence during the war. A cast of
thousands and elaborate decors such as that required for Les Enfants du par-
adis would have been almost inconceivable previously. And we can be a lit-
 Cinematic Genres in France | 229
tle less astonished than Nino Frank that “there should have existed in
France, at the very moment when a war-torn Europe was beginning to
crack open [1944], a producer willing to undertake the preparation of a
monumental Louis XIV, in two parts [which was to cost] 80 million francs,
and for which it was planned to renovate the Grand Canal at Versailles, re-
construct the Escalier des Ambassadeurs, and create a hundred sets and a
thousand costumes.”103

7.3.2 Boulevard comedies, slapstick, military vaudevilles, musical comedies

While a large number of comedic sub-genres were recognized as existing,

little significance was attached to the differences between them. Commen-
tators routinely recognized “comédies gaies,” “comédies sentimentales,”
“vaudevilles” (particularly “vaudevilles militaires”), “comédies boulevard-
ières,” comédies musicales” (including “operettas”), and even “comédies
comiques.” Less frequently they used the terms “farce,” “burlesque,” “comé-
die loufoque” or “comédie absurde,” and “comédie régionale.” But despite
the proliferation of labels, comedies as a whole were most commonly seen
as the classic instance of an escapist cinema aiming to distract spectators
from everyday concerns and help them keep their sanity in the face of ad-
versity.
The most aggressive case for comedy having the effect of a safety valve
was made by Altman in his extraordinary tirade against the boulevard com-
edy (which he never explicitly names, however). The principal filmic genre
espoused by the suaver set (Guitry, Mirande, Rivers), it provided a useful
target for Altman because it treated the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie as
if they were the only categories of people worthy of attention. The elegant,
often modernist, settings of such filmed theater are seen as substituting for
any real humanity. In such plays and films,

you find only people with titles and people with millions—that is, only the
most restricted and least real portion of humanity—the falsest idea that
could possibly be given of real life. . . . On these phantoms the cinema
struggles in vain to bestow the gift of life. . . . Such films reproduce a milieu
which the bulk of spectators can never know . . . an excellent stratagem for
acknowledging and consolidating the barrier which must be erected be-
tween two social worlds, properly separated by both birth and standing—
the life of the master race, presented by the masters themselves, conde-
scendingly, to the slaves who gape glumly and accept. . . . Aside from these
fixed settings, these milieus which establish the caste system of the cinema,
you may also be introduced to that much-savored milieu called “Bohemia,”
the world of music-hall and stage, as a pretext for an affecting display of
dancing girls’ thighs.
 230 | , ,  
And the People in all this?
The People?
They open doors
They carry baggage
They say, “Dinner is served, Madam.”
They say “Thank you,” when tipped.
They constitute the masses, and during newsreels they shout “Long live
France.”104

A large proportion of the vast literature directed against theatrical tran-

scriptions in the early thirties was likewise aimed, explicitly or implicitly, at
the boulevard comedy, though as much for its lack of congruity with cine-
matic technique and practice as for its ideological function. But if such
“base idiocies” were often felt to be fundamentally conservative, neverthe-
less the potential for comedy to be subversive was occasionally acknowl-
edged, though usually with the provision that such subversion seemed for-
eign to the French cinema. The labels applied to explicitly subversive forms
of comedy were the burlesque and the slapstick (comédie loufoque). Leen-
hardt speaks of the Prévert brothers’ L’Affaire est dans le sac as a burlesque
and notes that it has been banned by the censor. Most of his examples are
American, and he regrets that “the French, who don’t have the knack for the
epic, don’t seem to have the knack for the burlesque either.”105 It is interest-
ing to find Bresson’s earliest (and later disowned) film, Les Affaires publiques,
being categorized thus, though condemned for its lack of pace. In 1937,
Drôle de drame was greeted as an Anglo-Saxon transplant, and as the first
French burlesque film. It is the sole French film that Keim can cite in his
category of slapstick, where “the unexpected, the abnormal, and the inco-
herent have been pushed to the ultimate limits.”106
The general tendency to be pessimistic about the subversive potential of
such genres in France seems to have been related to a general agreement
about the efficiency of the largely informal political censorship operating
throughout the industry. If genres that were even implicitly subversive were
suppressed, there was even less hope that satire, with its explicit critique of
the status quo, could flourish. This view was expressed with considerable
force by Lucie Derain as early as 1934, in an article called “Satire on the
Screen”: “[There must be] no disrespect for magistrates, or for the police, or
for public servants, or for bankers, let alone for politicians or, of course, re-
ligion.”107 She can instance only three French films which might be consid-
ered satirical—Feyder’s last silent film, Les Nouveaux Messieurs; Clair’s À
nous la liberté; and Ces messieurs de la Santé, which had to be reworked and
toned down before it was granted a release. Twenty years later, presenting a
retrospective called “The Comic in the French Cinema,” Image et Son was
still forced to acknowledge that “after an astonishing flowering in the silent
 Cinematic Genres in France | 231
era, the comic genre faced a real crisis” in the sound era, when it was domi-
nated by bland romantic comedies.108
In this generally pessimistic portrait of the comic genres, the military
vaudeville occupied an odd position. In its fragmentary and often parodic
representation of a key French institution, it clearly had explosive social po-
tential, but even right-wing critics sensitive to that potential did not for the
most part see the genre as dangerous. As the threat of war increased, how-
ever, there were moves to suppress it, and the Renaitour inquiry heard of
the minister’s attempts (unsuccessful, as it happens) to ban Les Bleus de la
marine, and of the Censorship Board’s more effective pre-censorship of var-
ious “comic military and maritime films.” The tone was still measured,
however—French spectators “can easily distinguish the element of fantasy”
in military vaudevilles, and thus “attach relatively little importance to the
matter.” It was the ridiculing of the French military abroad that preoccu-
pied the authorities, and the emphasis was on the need for a separate export
certificate to limit such negative propaganda.109
This is still the overt cause of the genre’s banning on the outbreak of war,
though it now also begins to be seen as a potentially debilitating moral virus
sapping France’s war efforts from within, as well. This is the official verdict
on the genre during the Vichy period, when it is one of the very few genres to
remain outlawed for the duration of the war. After the war, Charensol’s claim
that censorship on the basis of quality would almost be justified if it hauled
the French cinema out of the mire of vaudeville was superfluous: the genre
made no substantial reappearance. “These days, no one dares make films like
La Margoton du bataillon, which only ten years ago broke upon us in wave
after wave.”110 Effectively, then, the military vaudeville was one of the dis-
tinctive genres of the thirties French cinema, though few then or later saw
this as a characteristic of which they could be proud.
The only other comic genre that was isolated for extended comment
was the musical comedy. Acknowledged as a significant category for the
classification of French production from the early sound years, when such
films as Le Chemin du paradis and Le Congrès s’amuse were among the most
popular hits, through the late thirties and the forties, when Tino Rossi
alone starred in some fifteen musicals, the genre was the subject of recur-
rent commentary in the postwar years and of an extensive ten-part retro-
spective in Image et Son between January 1959 and March 1960. The
parameters of the debate were double: was this so intrinsically an American
genre that the numerous French attempts at it would always have to be
viewed compassionately, and was it so intrinsically anti-realist that attempts
to integrate it into a realistic framework were doomed to aesthetic failure,
and were perhaps even heretical.
In 1945, referring to thirties examples, L’Écran Français proclaimed
musical comedies to be intrinsically American and difficult to transplant.
 232 | , ,  
Identifying the genre with slick, highly choreographed, fast-moving, big-
budget productions, L’Écran Français recognized that a French musical
comedy was and had to be different, and less impressive. “We are at once
the land of Montmartre, of sentiment, and of penny-pinching producers.
The girls are rationed, the car hoods less long, the orchestras smaller.”111
This inferiority complex was to be most forcefully articulated in Cinéma,
which devoted some 110 pages to the American musical comedy and ques-
tioned whether such a thing as the French musical comedy could even exist.
Reviewing instances to date, the magazine condemned them as mere exten-
sions of caf ’conc, with occasional “items” for well-known singers. “The dis-
aster has been total, and it has lasted for thirty years already.”112
Most accounts of the genre were more affectionate. While the films
were often seen as ineffectual in terms of narrative drive, the mere fact that
they recorded the performances of such famous thirties music-hall artists as
Chevalier, Mistinguett, Fréhel, and Josephine Baker (not to mention Ga-
bin), and later Trénet, Piaf, Greco, Brassens, Montand, and Aznavour, was
enough to justify the genre’s existence; though, as René Gieure was to say in
his retrospective, “It’s still a painful sight to see famous music-hall singers
collaborating only in the most execrable films.”113
Most vitriol was reserved for clumsy attempts to play down the obvious
artifice of the genre and render it more plausible. From his prisoner-of-war
cell, Keim nostalgically recalled the gross trickery of the early French (and
German) musical comedies, where “furniture moved about of its own ac-
cord in Le Chemin du paradis, rocking chairs swayed in time to the general
rhythm in Le Congrès s’amuse, and cows wandered into houses and drank
from goldfish bowls in Les Joyeux Garçons.”114 These fantasy worlds, with
their own particular rules according to which people could intone their dia-
logue and suddenly break into a song or tap-dance, were what enchanted the
critics. Attempts to incorporate the music-making into a realistic diegesis by
organizing the narrative around a singer, a real or fictional composer, or the
members of a band were almost universally derided as sentimental claptrap.
As van Parys says sadly, “They felt the need to explain away the presence of
any music. The cinema must on no account resemble the theater, where the
actor could for no apparent reason abruptly burst into song. Nothing like
that in the cinema, they said, where everything must ring true.”115
Tino Rossi, Guétary, and Hirigoyan were the target of their most sar-
castic remarks, and the conventions of the narratives constructed around
them were frequently derided:

(1) A charming young man squanders his aunt’s or uncle’s money on the most
typically Parisian of young women. Nightclubs, Pigalle, duets, French Can-
can, Sacré Cœur, Champs Élysées, artists’ studios, the roofs of Paris, unmade
beds, and photogenic hangovers. In a word, Gay Paree. . . . Over the final kiss,
 Cinematic Genres in France | 233
reprise of the film’s theme song. Music by Misraki or van de Parys [sic].
(2) A sentimental story about a handsome Corsican/handsome Basque/
handsome Marseillais. Local color: the Island of Love, the Côte d’Argent,
the Old Port. The Big Smoke, the Evil Woman, the Broken Heart, the Re-
turn, the Fiancée-Who-Has-Waited, the Old Mother, Village Church Bells.
With or without regional accent. Guitars, aubade or serenade, floods of
tears, vats of rosewater. . . . Music by Vincent Scotto.116

7.3.3 The exotic and colonial genres

The exotic genres were also seen primarily as escapist. Quantitatively, the
exotic was long dominated by documentaries, often full-length, with such
titles as La Croisière jaune, L’Afrique vous parle, Chez les mangeurs d’hommes,
Au pays des buveurs de sang, Symphonie exotique, and La Grande Caravane,
but the exotic inflected a large number of fiction films as well. Moreover,
most accounts of it included documentaries and fiction films dealing with
the French empire. Occasionally the latter were distinguished as “the colo-
nial genre,” or (quite unabashedly) “national propaganda.” The conventions
and social functions of these genres are all covered in Leprohon’s 1945 re-
view of the exotic, L’Exotisme et le cinéma, which inevitably deals primarily
with films made in the thirties.
Recognizing that the prime interest of the exotic was its sense of other-
ness, Leprohon deals with two parameters of the genre—first, as it repre-
sented the alien in factual and informative terms, or as myth; second as it
represented the alien as barbaric and archaic, or as impossibly paradisiacal.
Certain documentaries are identified as providing a new yet basically reli-
able understanding of the world. This informational function is seen as
being particularly attractive to the intelligentsia, whom it has been instru-
mental in bringing to the cinema. More often, however, whether documen-
tary or fictional, the exotic is seen as poetic rather than prosaic, dealing in
dreams and fantasy rather than in reality.
But the nature of the dream varied. At times, Leprohon talks of the fas-
cination of the genre as being the acquaintance it provides with the primi-
tive, viewed as ugly and violent. “You feel, behind the images, the sinister
presence of a world alien to our understanding, our customs, our very
imagination,” where “people with archaic ways live in the heart of a prolif-
erating and unhealthy nature.”117 In such films, barbaric peoples practice
sorcery and ritual murder, while the ever-present threat that they may run
amok is a constant reminder of the frailty of social controls in the face of
instinctual violence.
At the other extreme, the primitive is often contrasted favorably with
more sophisticated European cultures, the genre setting up, as in Nanook,
“admirable models of primitive life for the instruction of our own civiliza-
 234 | , ,  
tion, spoiled as it is by the comforts of life.” Moana also exemplifies the
natives’ “happy existence in the midst of tropical nature, their tasks and
games, the secular traditions of these purebred Polynesians.”118 The words
“ease” and “serenity” recur to describe this “idyllic existence,” this “terres-
trial paradise.” In its perfection, this alien civilization calls into question
the notion of progress so dear to the Western mind, and the function of
the genre is to reacquaint desiccated Westerners with something profound,
something eternal, while recognizing that the very contact necessary to
achieve their reacquaintance with it will irretrievably corrupt “these last
refuges of felicity.”119
The genre, then, is seen as engaging in the debate about the nature of
Nature, and of human nature, of progress, and of civilization. But at times,
in contrast to the twin poles of the barbaric and the paradisiacal, both of
which underline the almost unimaginable gulf that separates “them” from
“us,” the genre is seen as working subtly to bridge that gulf. Over and above
the otherness of these alien cultures, we experience a common bond with
them. Leprohon quotes Ruttman, speaking of La Mélodie du monde: “What
we had to show was the similarities as much as the differences between men,
the relationship between man and animal, the bonds that tie men to the soil
and the climate; we had to express those things which concern humanity
across all ages and all frontiers: love, religion, arms, warfare; motherhood
and children; the arts . . . nourishment, commerce, pleasures, sports.”120
And again, “beneath the surface we felt ourselves similar to Nanook, strug-
gling to provide for his family’s and his own existence.” Here is something
that speaks of a universal human condition, “close to our own, reduced to
basic problems which, in our own civilization, we had grown unaccustomed
to considering. . . . If it showed us what separated man from man, it also
showed us what united them.”121
Two summative statements by Leprohon point in different directions.
At one point he speaks of the exotic as betraying a fascination with other
times and places (“la nostalgie d’ailleurs et d’autrefois”) and goes on to say
that “we need to believe in Edens and El Dorados. Such an illusion sustains
us.”122 Elsewhere, he points to the negative aspect of the exotic as “a con-
temporary manifestation of disquiet.”123 While he doesn’t expand on that
phrase, it is possible to read into it the confusions and uncertainties atten-
dant on growing contact with cultures based on principles totally alien to
those that one has long taken for granted as natural. In this reading, the ex-
otic generates a form of national self-questioning and self-doubt, while a
defensive reaction against this self-doubt produces the assertive nationalis-
tic propaganda of the colonial genre.
Other accounts of the exotic genre in the years 1929–46 reproduced
one or more of the above discourses. It was seen as one of the main generic
 Cinematic Genres in France | 235
groupings in the first two years of the sound cinema, with numerous films
set in Oceania, India, and the Far East.124 Cinéopse observed that with its
picturesque images and mysterious ways, it proposed “a wider and more
perfect view of the world. Places that we could not hope to see except by
taking long and costly voyages, the screen brings to us with an intensity that
leaves nothing to be desired. By way of the cinema the whole world is
brought to us, and the most secretive tribes are no longer hidden from
us.”125 Perhaps this early popularity was due to the Colonial Exhibition,
since Cinéopse noted a diminution thereafter, though in 1933 Ciné Miroir
could see the triumph of the exotic in the career of Reri, star of Tabu—
symbolic of “that carefree island of eternal spring,” even as she performed
at the Gaumont Palace, fresh from the Ziegfried Follies.126
Perhaps the most passionate account of the genre comes from Ciné-
monde, which in 1932 published an article entitled “Mœurs cruelles et
douces.” Dealing mainly with documentaries, the article underlines the
barbarous and repugnant aspect of the Other: “Man displays those core
moments of his animal life—love, birth, death. . . . The screen projects an
immense and monstrous human activity, an activity at once grimacing, vo-
ciferous, and demoniacal. Scenes of magic, sorcery, and incantations suc-
ceed tableaux of hunting and fishing. Death . . . death . . . life . . . life, in an
unending alternation.”127 But Cinémonde also has something to say about
the graceful Polynesian women and the exquisite naked breasts of their
daughters, and in a balancing article, Lucie Derain welcomes the fact that
such films had chased from French screens all the worldly dramas and facile
comedies of recent years. By their power, “they make us regret that we’re
only petty shop assistants, lowly soldiers scrubbing out the barracks, busi-
nessmen tied to the telephone . . . unable to return to that slow, immutable
vegetative life for which humanity is made.”128
Thereafter, for over ten years, the exotic in its non-colonial form came
primarily to signify a finer world “out there” which French citizens, for one
reason or another, were prohibited from experiencing—it signified, that is,
a fantasized escape from harsh realities. For this reason, the genre acquired a
particular poignancy for wartime audiences. Writing (from Switzerland, ad-
mittedly) in 1943, Élie, in an otherwise forgettable book, notes, “For us, at-
tached as we are to a town, a house, a job, the land that nourishes us, and
without any real possibility of travelling, the cinema . . . carries us off to the
most distant reaches of the world.”129 Writing five years later about the
wartime cinema, Roger Régent notes, “Confined within restricted borders,
our directors and producers strove to evoke distant lands, exotic customs. . . .
We needed the feel of open spaces and the sight of distant horizons.”130
Certainly, during the war both Le Film and Cinémonde record the continu-
ing success of the exotic, and in the immediate postwar years Le Film
 236 | , ,  
Français could, in a retrospective on the genre, claim that it was still very
popular.131 But by the end of 1946, La Cinématographie Française was fore-
telling its decline: “In the face of modernity, mechanization, and shrinking
distances . . . exoticism is tending to disappear, both from reality and from
our screens. For those who sought to flee the cares of everyday life by going
to the movies, this type of film managed to create a sense of escape, as it re-
vealed visions of the wider world for those haunted by the secret desire to
set sail.”132
Indeed, the exotic was thereafter to fade from critical view, except for a
number of observations in the late fifties concerning exotic documentaries,
which experienced a tentative revival with the advent of color and wide
screens. So we can say that, like the military vaudeville, the exotic genre
flourished primarily in the thirties and was one of the distinctive genres of
that decade. However, the conventions which it mobilized seldom domi-
nated an entire fiction film, but rather pointed to an idea of exotic other-
ness which could be evoked briefly, usually as an idealized alternative to
contemporary social reality.
The colonial genre, which had often been considered an integral part of
the exotic because of its foreign locations, had a far shorter period of
prominence than its parent genre. Not often recorded in the early thirties as
an actualized genre, though often called for by nationalists, it was discussed
more and more as a developing genre with the approach of war, but it dis-
appears in 1940, never to re-emerge. In his review of the exotic in 1945,
Leprohon accords an important place to the colonial propaganda film of
the thirties, which he sees as having had the double function of bearing wit-
ness to the civilizing mission and achievements of past heroes of the French
nation, and of inspiring a younger generation to emulate those heroes. By
recounting the work of Lyautey, de Foucauld, Brazza, and their like, such
films had foregrounded “the prestige which France enjoys among its colo-
nized peoples,” and “shown the world what French civilization really
means, and why the native peoples love France.” “The public focuses its
gaze above all on those sun-drenched lands where its ancestors courageously
directed their steps. The immense empire conquered by our pioneers, our
soldiers, and our missionaries represents in its eyes a form of exoticism with
which it feels at one, to which it is attached by bonds more concrete than
those of reverie or of poetry.” Viewing such films cannot but “renew in
French youth that love of courage, that active curiosity which inspired so
many maritime and colonial vocations.”133
This inspirational view of the colonial genre was to ring rather false in
the France of 1946, but was common currency in the thirties. The fact that
the French cinema was not exploiting the propaganda potential of film was
a permanent source of astonishment and dismay to the more nationalistic
commentators. From 1932 on, Cinéopse, in particular, calls repeatedly for
 Cinematic Genres in France | 237
the French cinema to emulate the Italian cinema, which under the guidance
of Mussolini had become “a national force, applied to education, to train-
ing, to workers’ use of leisure time, to tourism, and to propaganda.”134 It
praises the Administrator of the Colonies, M. Chaumel, for his evening
talks presenting propaganda documentaries, and welcomes all films which
tend to demonstrate the civilizing effects of French colonization.135 In the
immediate prewar years, this journal’s appeals for “films worthy of France”
become more urgent, and it recommends ministerial coordination of pro-
paganda via the cinema to eliminate unworthy films and promote those
“glorifying the French spirit and supporting French honor.”136 It welcomes
the initiative of M. Pietri, Minister for the Navy, when he permits the ships
of the fleet to be used for a number of documentaries (La Marine Française,
La France est une île, Branlebas de combat) and fiction films (Veille d’armes,
La Porte du large). As the genre begins to succeed with the public, notably
with Alerte en Méditerranée, Légions d’honneur, and L’Appel du silence,
Cinéopse expresses its satisfaction: “Although the essential and principal aim
of the cinema is entertainment, we have always maintained that it nonethe-
less had other tasks, and notably that of working for the grandeur and
worldwide influence of our country. . . . It is toward our magnificent colo-
nial empire that the cinema’s activity is now [January 1939] turning. Yes,
‘France is an empire,’ as has often been said, and now is the time to demon-
strate it.” Brazza, l’épopée du Congo, La Chevauchée héroïque, Lyautey
l’Africain, and L’Homme du Niger are “four important works, on which
great hopes can be pinned.”137
Other magazines, such as Cinémonde and La Cinématographie Fran-
çaise, were more preoccupied with the negative effects of films which pre-
sented France in a bad light. In the early thirties, the focus of these anxieties
was the representation of the foreign legion. In 1931, Jean Dumas noted
the proliferation of such films, with their tendency to represent legion-
naires as reprobates and drunkards who were likely to lash out without rea-
son and were tortured and tormented by officers, who acted more like
prison guards. “It’s time to redress this injustice toward men who have quite
rightly been called knights-errant of the ideal. . . . Bound by their common
commitment to the flag they serve, they harbor a real reverence for the
honor of their military calling.”138 Cinémonde seems at times to see this
“false image” of the legion as the product of an American conspiracy139 and
welcomes films, such as Sergent X, which call it into question by talking in
terms of sacrifice, self-denial, and heroism. The growth of the colonial doc-
umentary is a cause for celebration. La Symphonie malgache, notes Ciné
Miroir, reaffirms “our love and pride at the thought of our vast colonial em-
pire,” and “the freedom, tolerance, and justice that French colonialism has
disseminated around the world. Everywhere before our arrival reigned . . .
cruel superstitions, piracy, and slavery.” Now, on the contrary, we find “a
 238 | , ,  
sentiment of equality and justice for the poor and humble. Everywhere we
have elevated the condition of humanity.”140
Moreover, from 1936 on, La Cinématographie Française joins Cinéopse
in noting with satisfaction a parallel series of fiction films that are taking the
French military as their subject. At last, “films which will exalt our coun-
try.”141 Ciné Miroir, which had also been regretting the fact that despite the
centrality of maritime communications to the unity of the empire “we
French seem to have lost our taste for the sea,” welcomes the increasing
presence and success of such films, though finds it not really surprising:
“Films on the navy are always popular. Our lads in blue . . . always attract
the admiration of the masses.” Through such films as Alerte en Méditer-
ranée and Nord Atlantique blow “the winds of adventure, great voyages, de-
partures, and escape.”142
In the mid- to late thirties, the focus of patriotic anxieties was not so
much on foreign legion films as on the damaging effects of military vaude-
villes (considered innocuous up to then), pacifist films such as La Grande
Illusion, and poetic realist films. Hitler finds favor with Cinémonde for as-
serting that pacifist films fail to portray a sufficiently intransigent national-
ism. Fortunately, by this time a large body of sufficiently intransigent
nationalist productions existed to counter such debilitating films. In a series
of African films, Charles Vanel embodied the noble man of action “who
finds in himself the strength to struggle against the hostile elements” (Lé-
gions d’honneur, L’Occident, Bar du sud, SOS Sahara); while Trois de St. Cyr

shows St. Cyriens to be motivated neither by ambition nor by self-interest;

it is simply that they desire open spaces and movement and have a taste for
action, and their souls are devoted to promoting the grandeur of their native
land. St. Cyr is where those virtues of uprightness, courage, and honor,
which have always typified the French officer, are formed. It is good that the
cinema should exalt the highest qualities of our race. . . . The St. Cyr life,
with its harsh discipline and its stoic young men, is a wonderful lesson in en-
ergy; it demonstrates to all those who believe us to be degenerate that our
race has preserved the virtues that have made it great throughout history.143

By this time, the conventions of the developing genre could be readily

recognized, and Leprohon lists them at length: “Here we find a sort of ori-
entalized romanticism: young warriors with fierce eyes, tribal chieftains and
their raiding parties, villages shrouded in the shadows of white-walled al-
leyways, caravans and palm trees, conflicts of race and religion, the Berber
child raised among whites, the naval officers with their ‘little wives,’ the
chant of the muezzin floating over the towns, and of prayers over the
desert, burnooses and headdresses, displays of Arab horsemanship, the
clash of arms, a highly colored world of violence, mystery and passion.”144
 Cinematic Genres in France | 239
There is “much simple-minded talk of honor, of duty and of heroism,” but
these are sentiments reserved for the whites, who as engineers, doctors, and
missionaries, devote their lives to the civilizing mission of the empire, while
the ungrateful natives do their treacherous best to undermine their every ef-
fort, and it all ends with a climactic attack by the rebellious natives. Lepro-
hon sees the genre’s main effect as confirming spectators’ cliché-ridden
views of empire. “All this is so insistent that the colonial cinema can seem
. . . resolutely hostile to the very setting whose charms it claims to be pro-
moting. It thus constitutes a sort of counter-propaganda, [giving] a dis-
tinctly odd idea of the civilizing mission of France.”145
That conservatives cherished the postwar hope of resuscitating this
genre, and the nationalist sentiments that went with it, is evidenced not just
by the desires expressed in L’Exotisme et le cinéma but by a 1946 article in
La Cinématographie Française regretting the disappearance of the exotic,
and particularly the colonial, genre. “The French colonies are the order of
the day. . . . Only the screen can illustrate the magnificent devotion that has
been shown and is still being shown over there each day, often unrecog-
nized or misunderstood, but which nevertheless places France in the front
rank in terms of humanitarian achievement.”146 But any hope of regenerat-
ing the genre was necessarily to come into conflict with recent memories of
defeat and occupation, and any belief in the natural affection of native peo-
ples for France was soon to be undermined by a series of anti-colonial wars
of liberation. A harsh censorship régime aimed specifically at suppressing
any alternative views of these wars was to eliminate virtually any portrayal
of these colonies from French screens during the fifties.

7.3.4 The realist drama, poetic realism, the youth film

As we have seen, dramas, while never produced in as great a number as
comedies during the thirties, were nevertheless extremely popular with the
public in the latter half of the decade. The form that attracted most critical
commentary throughout the relevant period was the realist drama. There
were four very general approaches to it: it was a fictional variant of the doc-
umentary, of which a central and essential element was the use of authentic
locations, people, and events; it focused on certain contemporary social
problems, regardless of whether these were filmed on location or in the stu-
dio; it might or should argue a case, leading to a debate as to whether pro-
paganda was compatible with realism; it might or should threaten the
existing order, leading to a debate as to the role of censorship.
The documentary approach early led to calls for the camera to descend
into the street and to film what it saw there—predominantly the humble
everyday existence of the “little people” of Paris, but also, by extension, the
characteristic patterns of life in the various regions of France. Both of these
 240 | , ,  
were proposed as a reaction against the sophisticated frippery of boulevard
comedies and motivated in part by the retreat from location shooting
brought about by the introduction of sound. A number of articles in Ciné-
monde in the years 1930–33 promoted the filming of “real life.” A classic
instance, “when the cinema descends into the streets of Paris,” promoted
the use of exteriors to bring to the screen the various districts of the capi-
tal.147 It rapidly became normal for a significant proportion of each film’s
scenes to be shot on location, and a standard way of generating plots was
for the scriptwriter and director to identify a regional setting with visual or
dramatic potential and to settle into a local inn to develop a script based
around that potential. As early as 1931, in an article on typical scenarios
submitted to him at Pathé Natan, Franck Servais lists fictionalized docu-
mentaries focusing on workers and craftsmen and glorifying work in the
factory, at the forge or the looms, or in the mines.148 In a similarly euphoric
mood, Arcy-Hennery in 1935 enjoins the apprentice scriptwriter to “take a
lesson from the theater of the street—no spectacle is so rich; life seethes and
refashions itself there; what a splendid study it can provide for you”—in, of
course, “that noblest of tasks, discovering and glorifying the soul of our
race.”149
But if what the camera found in the streets represented the soul of
France, that soul was far from healthy. More often than not, the term “real-
ist drama” was applied to films that focused on the sordid aspects of every-
day existence—poverty, slums, and the pressures that these exerted on the
less fortunate to engage in a life of crime. It was not the everyday experi-
ences of the workingman but the nighttime underworld of the milieu, with
its apaches and its prostitutes—not the street but “the street”—that came to
dominate the genre. French realism, that is, was heavily influenced by Ger-
man expressionism, as the titles of films most commonly cited as early in-
stances already indicated—Une nuit à l’hôtel, Les Nuits de Port Saïd, Paris la
nuit, Dans les rues, La Rue sans nom. The startling success of L’Opéra de
quat’sous was instrumental in this proliferation, and many of Gabin’s early
films were categorized in this genre—Cœur de Lilas, Paris Béguin, Adieu les
beaux jours, Du haut en bas, even Zouzou.
Similar films had, of course, been made during the silent era, and it was
to protest against their “false” realism that André Thérive published “Pop-
ulism in the Cinema” in Cinémonde, calling for a more documentary and
less mythologized view of social existence.150 Certainly, he says, reality is
often “grim, harsh, and vulgar,” but the cinema should not ignore the hum-
ble everyday life of the healthy, vigorous, industrious French working class.
The degenerate marginals on whom film and novel seem to be concentrat-
ing are not typical: “Alongside all these lay-abouts and perverts there are the
people of the factories, the workshops, the offices.” As examples of his pre-
 Cinematic Genres in France | 241
ferred populist cinema he cites En rade, La Tragédie de la mine, La Zone, and
Ménilmontant.
By 1933, however, it is the theme of youth that is being recognized as
central to the realist drama. Cinéopse notes that Dans les rues is of burning
importance “at a time when there is so much debate concerning the influ-
ence of the street on certain categories of young people who are thrown
back on their own resources.”151 La Maternelle, Jeunesse, and Maternité gen-
erated further commentary concerning the problems facing young people
during the crash, and particularly the problem of unmarried mothers,
which attracted perhaps the only use of the term film à thèse in the thir-
ties.152 Commenting on Jeunesse and Lac aux dames, Ciné Miroir notes the
difficult life of today’s hard-working young people setting out idealistically
on life’s journey: “You hear everywhere the complaints of young people
who have qualifications and have studied long and hard to get a job, but see
doors shut in their face.” The result is anguish, listlessness, and disaffection.
Germany had produced stories like this in the 1920s, Ciné Miroir warns,
and there is a risk of creating a similar pre-fascist situation in France.153
Pour Vous showed itself to be equally aware of the contemporary filmic
preoccupation with young people, and between the end of 1933 and the
end of 1935 published a number of (superficial) articles on this genre,
which came to be called the “youth film” (film de jeunes and, much later,
film sur l’enfance). These articles tended to focus on child and adolescent
stars and on the social problems which they were being called upon to act
out.154 Seen as a whole, they are curiously ambivalent, unable to decide
whether contemporary social conditions are such as to inevitably corrupt
the innocence and purity of childhood, or rather such as to provide the
young with opportunities that previous generations would have envied. In
the former mode, which was the more common, it was normally males that
were featured, whereas in the latter it was normally females. Thus the mod-
ern miss may come bursting into the room, brushing aside books, and
throw herself down carelessly on the sofa to be interviewed. “Young girls
have evolved terribly quickly,” exclaims the interviewer. “See them on a
surfboard, a defiant laugh on their lips, or driving a car, or astride a polo
pony, as free as any boy. . . . How different from their predecessors.”155 Im-
plicitly, this view of the young woman who is “liberated, independent, in-
tending to live as she pleases” comes from America, whereas harassed,
corrupted youths, beset by social problems not of their own making, are in-
trinsically European, and particularly German. Various commentators, how-
ever, note that in French films the representation of social pressures and
institutions is less severe than that purveyed by German films.156
After a gap of three years, these concerns resurface in 1938 and 1939—
not so much the promotion of a documentary realism, but, within a frame-
 242 | , ,  
work of social problematics, the “Germanic” focus on working-class mar-
ginals forced into a life of crime, and the “American” optimism about social
progress. Summing up the production for 1938, one critic sees such youth
films as providing “healthy and fresh scenarios,” evoking the sentimental af-
fairs of students, their hopes and fears, “all the exhuberance [sic] of that
happy age.”157 But another reference to the genre recalls films that had fo-
cused on the hardships faced by the young—speaking of films d’enfants,
Claude Bernier says, “For some years, reading newspaper articles on the
martyrdom that so many kids endure these days, you might believe that in
France we don’t love our children, that we maltreat them, bring them up
harshly, and deprive them of food and affection.”158 A number of more op-
timistic films are about to correct that impression—Feu de paille, L’Enfer des
anges, and Air pur (the last of which never got made). “Let’s hope that these
works, full of compassion and suffering, will confound our misguided edu-
cators and put an end to ways of dealing with children which are a shame to
humanity.”159
The youth film was to become a characteristic genre of the mid- to late
fifties, when the development of a “youth culture” ensured the success of
films starring teenage actors such as Jean-Pierre Léaud. Critics of that time,
such as Agel and Agel, readily acknowledged that the origins of the genre
(and its various sub-genres) could be traced back to such films of the thir-
ties as Les Disparus de St. Agil, Jeunesse, and La Maternelle, not to mention
filmed versions of nineteenth-century melodramas. More generally, the role
of a social cinema bearing on urgent contemporary problems was to be
brought to the fore by postwar meditations on the occupation and the re-
sistance, the decolonization process, the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, and
the censorship debates consequent on them. Proportionately, it was to play
a far greater role then than it had in the thirties, though it was never again
to attain the mythic significance that it attained in that decade.
Another form of realist drama to gain critical attention was the “loca-
tion film,” which was considered to be proliferating in the thirties. An arti-
cle in La Cinématographie Française in 1939 notes the recent success of the
location film or “reportage,” but lists under that heading everything from
straight documentaries (Neiges de France, La Croisière noire, La Grande In-
connue) through fictionalized documentaries (Flaherty) and Sommes-nous
défendus? to the Benoît-Lévy–Marie Epstein films (La Mort du cygne, La
Maternelle, and Altitude 3200).160 All of Jean Epstein’s prewar writings, of
course, testified to a passion for location shooting, for actors chosen from
the local populace, and for scripts woven around local myth. Of Finis terrae
he wrote, “I think that . . . there will be an ever greater demand for natural
real-life actors, in all countries and all classes of society, and all occupations,
and also for natural settings, true stories, and authentic atmosphere.” And
 Cinematic Genres in France | 243
of L’Or des mers, he wrote, “I didn’t want to ask actors to copy gestures, at-
titudes, characters, when there were people there who could live them.”161
Summing up his ideals, he said, “Each of [my] films is the savorous expres-
sion of one among millions of those little communities of which humanity
is made up. . . . From a blacksmith we will learn about the life of his forge.
An actor imitating a blacksmith won’t give us reason even to suspect that
there is anything to learn. . . . We must go out and uncover each of the
thousands of varieties of humankind in its own environment, its own
life.”162 Insofar as a genre of documentary realism existed in the thirties, it
was largely a product of Epstein’s theorizing, promotion, and practice.
As has been noted earlier, the underworld film, which had steadily
moved up-market, was to become the poetic realist film, but considering its
subsequent notoriety there was relatively little contemporary comment on
it. Called films d’atmosphère, such films were regularly listed and noted as
increasingly numerous, but it was the mythical character created in certain
of them by Jean Gabin that attracted attention, rather than the genre as
such, so they receive greater attention in the next chapter. Any contempo-
rary mention of them tended to be in the condemnatory mode of the
wartime and, particularly, Vichy régimes. Even before the war, Cinéopse
could seldom resist this right-wing discourse, and one rather self-contradic-
tory article reproached Quai des brumes for exploiting the baser tendencies
of human nature: “Although such films . . . have sometimes proved prof-
itable, they have always harmed the general interest of the cinema itself—
all the more so when films of this type proliferate and drive from our
theaters the family audience, the only audience big enough to enable us to
recoup the cost of a film.”163 Cinéopse also raised the specter of a cinema of
propaganda, reproaching La Marseillaise for being no more than a political
tool.164 The cinema had nothing to gain from such a course of action.
Cinéopse felt, however, that the cinema had everything to gain by producing
films that exalted the French soldier and sailor. Such films were not, of
course, propaganda—they were not political, but national; not divisive, but
unifying.
In the late forties, André Bazin was to mount a passionate defense of
poetic realism, which he saw as metaphysical rather than social; a more bal-
anced appreciation of the drame d’atmosphère as a coherent and significant
body of films had to await the mid-fifties, when commentators such as
Denis Marion and Pierre Leprohon were retrospectively to explore its con-
ventions. Commenting on the Carné–Prévert films in Présences contempo-
raines, Leprohon lists as typical of the genre the themes of escape and of
destiny, the aspiration of lost souls toward purity and happiness, a bitter vi-
sion of a doomed society, a romanticized view of the underworld, a fasci-
nation with the idea of departure, and a feel for the cyclical celebrations of
 244 | , ,  
the people. “Man is not at all inherently evil in these films; destiny has got
him in its grip and traps him in a criminal act alien to both his nature and
his intellect.”165

One of the more remarkable observations to emerge from this survey of the
generic categories most commonly used by contemporary French com-
mentators is the extent to which the terms used to describe the national
output of France are quite distinct from those used in other countries. Of
course there is a degree of overlap, particularly among the “adventure” gen-
res. The categories of musical comedy, period film, war film, and crime
story or murder mystery were widely accepted elsewhere—but labels such
as boulevard comedy, exotic film, military vaudeville, colonial film, poetic
realist film, and youth film (not to mention poetic film and religious film,
which were to become the subject of more critical comment than any other
genre in the immediate postwar period) would have been less readily recog-
nized. Yet it was precisely these latter categories of film which were the most
widely recognized and discussed in France in the thirties. This distinctive
array of genres points to a distinctive array of preoccupations in the French
cinema and, in turn, a distinctive array of social problems exercising the
minds of the film-going public.
Another observation to emerge is that most interest in generic classifi-
cation was shown in the postwar years. No books on the topic were pub-
lished in the years 1930–43; the first were Le Cinéma et la Montagne and
L’Exotisme et le Cinéma, both by Leprohon and published, respectively, in
1944 and 1945. Of course, books on the cinema were not common in the
thirties, and they were even less common in the years of the occupation,
given the political constraints and paper shortages of that period. Yet a re-
naissance was evident at war’s end, with IDHEC considering the topic of
genre sufficiently central to warrant a course (“Literary and Cinematic
Genres,” given by Étienne Fuzellier), while several publishers now saw the
cinema as a profitable field to exploit. From 1953 on, the contribution of
Les Éditions du Cerf to this study of genres was very significant. This com-
pany published Bazin and Rieupeyrout’s book on the Western, Le Cinéma
et le Sacré by Agel, Cinéma, Foi et Morale by Ludmann, Le Cinéma et l’En-
fance by Vandromme, Le Film Criminel et le Policier by Cauliez, Miroirs de
l’Insolite by Agel, and Images de la Science-Fiction by Siclier. While this level
of publication does indeed bear witness to a degree of interest in genres on
the part of both commentators and readers, it has to be seen in the context
of a level of production of books on films that averaged about twenty per
year throughout the period 1945–60, in which books on genre were far
outnumbered by books on film history, books on individual filmmakers,
and even books on theory. Individual filmmakers were the subject, on aver-
 Cinematic Genres in France | 245
age, of two books a year in the early fifties, rising to four, then six a year, to
reach at least ten in 1960; the postwar years also saw the beginning of the
long-term historical projects by René Jeanne and Charles Ford and by
Georges Sadoul. When one adds to these the many books of memoirs, to-
gether with accounts of the industry and its processes, it becomes apparent
how minimal was the interest in genres even in the postwar period.
Nevertheless, the fact that it existed at all must be due to some extent to
the change in the nature of French film production under the wartime
regime. The industrial anarchy of the prewar years had ensured that generic
production could never dominate the French production system. Not only
was it more possible during the war, because of the limited personnel avail-
able and the limited range of production firms, but the political constraints
on production severely restricted the types of film that could be made.
Under these conditions, it is not so surprising that commentators should
have begun to find it easier to see patterns emerging from the rather limited
annual production, and should have been encouraged to try to describe,
name, and explain those patterns. In this sense, it is very likely that it was
the sudden dominance of wartime production by such genres as the crime
film, the poetic film, and the period film that triggered the (still relative)
postwar resurgence of interest in genre as a way of discussing film. This is
slightly ironic, since these genres themselves are seldom the focus of ex-
tended commentary, which is reserved for more novel categories of film
such as the exotic, the fantastic, the religious, and even the youth film.
 EIGHT

The Stars in Their (Dis)courses:

“Anemic dreams” and “poetry for pallid people”?

The worship of film stars will be the downfall of the cinema.

—Georges Altman (1932)
[These clapped-out hacks of surrealism] are all too anxious to
take us wandering along the banks of canals, and to evoke for
us the poignancy of bleak suburban wastelands, of rain-
drenched villages . . . and of piteous young girls caught up in
anemic dreams. . . . Never a true emotion, never a powerful
feeling. . . . What I hold against them is that they get lost in a
fog of literary allusions and of poetry for pallid people.
—Jean-Georges Auriol (1941), talking of the plots
and characters of poetic realism

8.1 CHARACTEROLOGICAL DISCOURSES 1930–39

A ny attempt to come to grips with the range of mythic identities on

offer to audiences by the classic French cinema must deal sooner or
later with the ways in which the principal actors and actresses (“stars,” for
simplicity, though they were not stellar in the Hollywood sense) of that cin-
ema were represented to the public through the medium of fan magazines
of the period. The following analysis is based on a survey of several of the
most popular magazines published between 1930 and 1940: Ciné Miroir,
Pour Vous, and Cinémonde. In it, I attempt to identify the principal charac-
terological discourses that were woven around leading actors and actresses
from 1930 to 1940, and to chart the evolution of those discourses. It con-
stitutes the initial section of a broader attempt to chart such discourses from
1930 to 1960, during which time some twenty major discourses were ap-
parent. These are listed in table 8.1 in an order approximating the chronol-
ogy of their impact on the cinema and its public. The first ten of those
discourses are of particular interest to the thirties.
Each of the ten is here characterized by a single term (e.g., nature, ma-
turity, professionalism, the body) and can be thought of as articulating a set of
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 247
interests, an implicit corpus of thematic material, or a distinctive view of
human nature as manifested by the stars in their filmic roles and (suppos-
edly) their private lives. The discourses crystallize into a set of normative
questions asked of stars in interviews and of expectations concerning their
replies, or into a normative account of their daily lives. When those discur-
sive patterns recur insistently in issue after issue of a magazine, applied to
star after star, then there is a case for claiming that they are “mythic”—that
is, that they are closely related to fantasized identities that readers of the
magazines were anxious to assume.
In chronological terms, the first discourses to occur were popular vital-
ity, attached primarily to the male, and wide-eyed childlike innocence, at-
tached almost exclusively to the female. Neither of them lasted for very
long, particularly the latter, which is recognizably related to that well-known
theatrical emploi, the ingénue. Commentators clearly expected that the cin-
ema would have as great a need of such a supposedly basic character type as
did the theater, and they consequently saw examples of it on all sides, but
only for the first two years of the period. Pola Illery talks of having skipped
barefoot through the fields in her childhood. “Ah, what youthful vitality she
has,” exclaims the interviewer, “like one of those bright, attentive young
girls.”1 Lily Damita emerges from the shower, “her hair held back by a cute
little pink clip that makes her look like a young girl, a delicious young girl,”
Dany Marèse is “a joyful, bubbly child,” Danièle Darrieux “a graceful fresh-
faced blonde . . . her limpid eyes wide open on the world,” while Vera
Sherbane is “disconcerting: this young thing, who behaves and moves like a
child, nevertheless speaks with tranquil assurance of the most serious writ-
ers of the day, and of their work.”2 Indeed, it is common for this childlike
freshness of face to be contrasted with an unexpected studiousness, or even
wisdom. When not skipping through the fields, Pola Illery is surrounded by
books on geography and engineering and is very excited by mathematics.3
Admittedly, many of these actresses were very young—no more than
fifteen in many cases—so it is not unexpected that they should be so de-
scribed, yet what is so interesting is that so many of them are described in
these terms from 1930 to 1932. They dominate the pages of Pour Vous, in
particular. The benjamines (that is, the latest cohort of starlets) of the French
cinema are young, bright, fresh-faced, pure, overflowing with childish grace
and vivacity, yet sure of themselves, well-read, and thoughtful. Simone
Bourdet’s eyes “gleam with intelligence, her alert air giving her the appear-
ance of a grande fillette [girl on the verge of adulthood] who is just begin-
ning to understand the world.” Josseline Gaël has the face and figure of a
child: “There is a freshness, an extraordinary naiveté, in her voice. Who
would suspect that between takes she rushes back to her dressing room to
do her homework.”4
 248 | , ,  
Table 8.1. List of Discourses 1930–1960
Note: The first ten of these discourses are of particular relevance to the thirties

1 Childlike Innocence: the ingenue, youthful, fresh-faced, gazing with wide-eyed won-
der on the world that is opening up before her, but intelligent, wise beyond her years,
modest, and self-effacing (1930–32, and occasionally to 1935)
2 Popular Vitality: a man of the people; joie de vivre; spontaneously bursting into song,
so full is his heart (1930–1932 and occasionally thereafter). Momentary revival as a
gruff sort of “mate” (1951–52)
3* Sport, and the Sportsman: dynamic, healthy, lover of all forms of outdoor activity, es-
pecially the more glamorous and expensive (1930–39 and occasionally during the war)
4* The Sensitive Artist: lover of all the arts; lets fingers drift over piano; a little un-
worldly; shrinks from the social scene; in the extreme, exhibits a world-weary lassitude
(1932 on)
5* Nature: communicating with nature; wind in the hair; contemplation of sunsets;
soaking up sun on the beach; retreating to the harmony and tranquillity of the coun-
tryside (mainly 1934–45)
6 Patriotism: worthy representative of empire; uniforms and military service; every
Frenchman naturally a soldier (1933 on, but nowhere near as frequent as might be ex-
pected; more common in editorials). Features later as “war-work” (1940–42)
7 Moral Regeneration: rehabilitating a degenerate society by denunciation, and less
often by example (occasional till 1936, peak years 1938–41; not commonly applied to
stars; more frequent in editorials)
8 Femininity: delighting in frilly things or in elegant fashions; frivolity, gaiety; only a
woman can understand (1936–44); women who are “all woman”
9 Maturity: solid, substantial, responsible men of authority; father figures (1937–39,
and less frequently thereafter)
10* Sensuality: mysterious, seductive femmes fatales; passionate, mocking, treacherous;
mostly of foreign extraction, as likely Nordic or East European as sultry Southern
(1936–39)

11 The Family: proud fathers, loving mothers, many sons but few daughters; the humble
pleasures of family life (1942–44)
12 Internationalism: international solidarity (but not with just anyone); cultural ex-
changes (1942–44)
13 Anti-Fascism: political correctness, or lack of it, during the occupation (1945–50)
14 Realism: ordinariness admired; the unglamorous; not stars but people off the streets
(occasionally in the thirties, but peaking 1946–50)
15 Professionalism: craftsmanship, technique; acting as a craft; the construction of screen
personae ( 1945–53)
16 Existentialism: ennui, and the craving to define oneself; alienated, insolent intellectu-
als, frequenting trendy bars; raging in St. Germain (1948–53)
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 249
17 The Good Life: middle-class comfort and affluence; the mansion in the country; the
penthouse, tastefully arranged seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiques (early to
mid-fifties)
18* The Cult of the Body: at first through physical exercise, later more passive; most no-
table in its male version involving display of pectorals and biceps (1953 on)
19* The Sex Kitten: the female version of the carnal animal; a "healthy eroticism"; sulky,
pouting, provocative, yet innocent (from 1952, but dominant from 1956)
20 The Elfin Look: androgynous, ethereal, diminutive; the startled wild creature;
(1954–56)
* The dominant discourses of their time.

A key element of this discourse, and one which could be applied to

both men and women, was their lack of pretension. Completely without
any sense of self-importance, these bright-eyed young girls retreat modestly
as soon as the spotlight is turned on them. In 1930, Marcelle Chantal and
Suzy Vernon are the subject of full-page studies which focus primarily on
their retiring nature and discretion, as well as their intelligence and
thoughtfulness.5 A year later, Madeleine Renaud murmurs to the inter-
viewer about her distaste for the spotlight. “She is so young, so simple, so
blonde, and yet so self-effacing,” says the interviewer.6
In perhaps its last clear appearance, the discourse attempts to incorpo-
rate into its ranks the distinctly older Lilian Harvey, “so full of life, active,
and changeable. From the gravest solemnity she can pass rapidly to a really
childlike smile. . . . What is surprising about Lilian Harvey is her youth, ac-
centuated, in moments when she is overtaken by some serious matter, by
her habit of sticking her lower lip out, like a sulky child.”7 Rarer uses of the
same discourse during 1932 and 1933 are applied to Rosine Deréan and
Sylvia Sydney, and there is a late mention of Renée St. Cyr as “youthful,
gay, carefree . . . with the most delicate and French of talents,”8 but the in-
tensity and frequency of its use has diminished markedly. A eulogy for the
young girls of France late in 1935, intended (quite wrongly) as a foreshad-
owing of the tone of the coming year’s output, constitutes instead a retro-
spective on the discourse, summarizing it most effectively. “This year’s films
will be youthful, fresh, direct. The cult of the fille-fleur [budding beauty]
will be observed for our greater delight. . . . Youth is the meaning of life, the
spice of love, the soul of the earth. . . . These figures of the dawning day
bring to the cinema a sweet gentleness, a feeling of unfinishedness, a
promise of love. . . . These young girls seem to figure again the creation of
the world.”9
Contrasting with this, but placing equal stress on the quality of vivacity,
was the discourse of popular vitality. It tended to focus on male actors such
as Lef èvre, Roanne, and Gravey, and particularly on male singers with a
working-class background such as Préjean, Garat, and Trénet. Lefèvre, who
 250 | , ,  
knows what life is all about because he has had to take all sorts of menial
jobs to keep body and soul together, never says “vous” to anyone, and prob-
ably wouldn’t to the Pope himself.10 Préjean summarizes his philosophy as
“living in the sun, as close as possible to nature, with good mates, and not
leaving your high spirits behind in the cloakroom.” In the studio, “his good
humor and high spirits are infectious. When Préjean is there you can be
sure you won’t be bored. He cheers up people with problems and brings a
smile to the most stubborn face.”11
This discourse was common in the early thirties, when the musical and
operetta were omnipresent, and circulated in such enormously popular
films as Le Roi des resquilleurs and Théodore et Cie, but it rapidly faded away,
recurring fitfully in the late thirties. Charm, fantasy, and whimsicality are
key characteristics, along with an amiable sentimentality and a fundamen-
tal good humor punctuated by outbursts of joie de vivre. The actor cannot
repress the song that rises spontaneously to his lips. This discourse has a
popular edge: the actor is a man of the people, and his irrepressible good
humor and gaiety are a sign of their vitality. It also has an urban edge, ap-
plying as it does particularly to singers of Parisian industrial origin, or (with
appropriate modifications) to singers from Marseille. This was perhaps the
only discourse to be applied to comic actors, who were largely ignored by
fan magazines in favor of dramatic actors, with whose personae spectators
could more readily identify. For this purpose, actors such as Milton, Bach,
and Rellys were readily confused with the (often recurrent) characters that
they played. Milton—“a poor guy, making do and enjoying life, not com-
plaining or whining about his lot, but staying honest and winning in love in
the end”12—is praised affectionately for his gaiety and repartee, his senti-
mentality, and his sardonic, mocking spirit. He is “your typical Parisian . . .
full of energy, warm-hearted, not rebellious, but not too patient either.”13
Later in the thirties, Charles Trénet, emerging from music hall in 1938,
is immediately categorized in terms of this sort of joie de vivre—“a lad
bursting with exuberance and vitality, whose aim is to turn everything into
a dance or a song.”14 In true populist mode, he is said to have spent his first
earnings on a bicycle, that emblem of the thirties working class. The war
puts an end to any residual traces of this discourse, though Maurice Cheva-
lier (too old and a bit fat for the image, but at least a singer, exuberant,
populist, superficial) appeals to it rather grotesquely on his arrival in Paris
in 1941: France is basically unchanged, he says; the French should recap-
ture their well-known gaiety, take heart in the new order, and sing along
with Marshal Pétain.15 It was for such rather unwise remarks that he was
obliged to repent publicly in the immediate postwar years, yet he had only
been picking up, in a politically tactless way, on the discourse that had been
at the origins of his prewar prominence. A commentary on him in 1936
notes “the modest origins of this true Parisian, always joking and good-
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 251
humored, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. . . . In his kindly heart, his
good humor, his subversive mocking attitude, and his inimitable whimsy,
anyone can recognize a typical Parisian.”16 His early job as a mechanic in
Ménilmontant is noted: “It’s no doubt there that he picked up this sponta-
neous vitality.” Among women, Paulette Dubost was one of the few actors
to attract elements of this discourse, though Florelle, too, could be de-
scribed as having “an exceptional and radiant joie de vivre . . . a spontaneity
and whimsicality; all her life is an impromptu.”17
The third and fourth discourses—of sport and of sensitivity, the extro-
vert and the introvert, the dynamic and the aesthetic—were by far the most
common discourses to be applied to stars in the thirties, and were not lim-
ited to that decade. By the early thirties, it is already clear that the sportif—
the sporty type whose leisure-time activities involve a healthy open-air
lifestyle—is one of those ideal personae that interviewers expect any actor
to assume. Favored sports are horseback riding, swimming (preferably in
exotic locales), driving (fast cars), golf, yachting, tennis, skiing, and avia-
tion. The emphasis is on expensive sports which readers/viewers could only
fantasize about participating in. Encouraged by her friend Johnny Wiess-
muller, Lily Damita can’t wait to leave the suffocating atmosphere of the
studio: “I leap into my car and head for the sea, where I relax in the broad
swell of the Pacific. . . . Sport is one of my greatest joys.”18 Others head for
the mountains to ski. Even Richard-Willm, in an atypical moment, is
caught indulging in this activity. Alongside this rich man’s sporting life,
with its glamorous appeal, there is however room for the working-class
sportif, who engages in cycling, boxing, and soccer. Gabin is frequently
cited as the classic working-class sportif, with his love of these three sporting
activities, but also of hunting. “Jean Gabin, a true son of Paris, is a sportif,
and of the sportif—the true sportif—he has the openness, the simplicity, the
healthy physique and the good humor.”19 Here the sportif myth partially
overlaps with the myth of popular vitality.
Throughout the thirties, articles remark on the intimate and “natural”
connection between sport and cinema: “All our stars love sport, because it’s
fashionable,” says Ciné Miroir in 1931 in an article entitled “Stars on
Horseback.”20 The practical aspect of this interest is recognized—they need
to engage in these activities on screen, and prefer not to have to use a dou-
ble—but there is also an element of moral strength to be gained through
healthy physical activity: Murat “loves driving, swimming, sailing—every-
thing that leads to healthy emotions and a balanced outlook.” 21 Indeed,
sport is “the natural proclivity of a virile race.” “Long live sport,” proclaim
Meg Lemonnier, André Luguet, Jean Murat, Albert Préjean, and Jean Ga-
bin in Ciné Miroir. “Not only does it transform the body . . . it revitalizes
the spirit.” “I have often pondered on the relation between sport and cin-
ema,” comments the interviewer; “certainly, it is undeniable that most of
 252 | , ,  
our stars are sportifs.”22 In 1933, Pour Vous publishes a double-page spread
on the connection between sport and cinema, noting that both are based
on a certain dynamism. This article is in fact translated from English, and
the commentary makes it clear that the French cinema’s vogue for sports
has been inherited from Hollywood, “the city which, more than any other,
recognizes sporting prowess.”23
This simple enthusiasm for the active life was at its apogee in the years
1929–34, and found its cinematic correlative in such films as Hardi les gars
(Champreux, 1931), Bidon d’or (Christian-Jaque, 1931), Toboggan (Decoin,
1934), Rivaux de la piste (de Poligny, 1933), and later La Grande Passion
(rugby, Kemin, 1937) and Champions de France (Rozier, 1938). To a large
extent, they were building on the extraordinary popularity of La Nuit est à
nous (Roussell, 1929), with its motif of automobile racing. Several articles
regretted the tendency of early sound films to abandon location shooting,
since they were thus sacrificing the expansive sense of liberty that went with
open-air and sporting activities.
So dominant was the sporting personality in these years that any at-
tempt by a star to disclaim sporting capacities was received with incredulity.
When Marcelle Chantal proclaims herself “a swimmer of the fifty-sixth
rank,” the interviewer confides in an aside that she must of course be exag-
gerating out of modesty.24 In the absence of any concrete information,
commentators invent probable sporting scenarios for their stars. “I am cer-
tain,” says a reviewer of Simone Genevois, “that racket in hand and hair fly-
ing in the wind she must enjoy hitting out on the tennis court. As for cars,
well, of course! She probably roars down the highway all day long.”25 The
public seems to have felt a particular affection for those who took the sport-
ing life to death-defying extremes, involving acrobatics of a dangerous or
eccentric kind. The sportif here approaches the “prankster” figure. José
Noguero, an acrobatic sportif, bounds into the interview room, leaps onto
the piano, and performs a tap dance. Roland Toutain and, later in the thir-
ties, Maurice Baquet were particularly notable for the way they exploited
this persona. Toutain, a champion acrobat, a member of the Club des Fous,
and a notorious practical joker, kept himself in the limelight with his ec-
centric appurtenances and physical exploits—his eagle, his boa constrictor,
his auto-giro races, and his aerial acrobatics.
Indeed, as was noted in the introduction, a special place is accorded the
aviator in this sporting pantheon. Many stars in addition to Toutain were
admired for their flying exploits—Marie Bell owns her own plane and at-
tempts to set distance records in it; André Roanne is a “flying ace”; Jean
Murat had been a pilot during the war. “The stars are not content with
reigning on earth, they wish to reign in the heavens as well.”26 In 1936, Ciné
Miroir runs a series of articles on stars who ascend into the heavens, and in
1938 it records the existence of an Aéroclub du Cinéma, so numerous are
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 253
the stars with a passion for aviation. Of course, the aviator figure had long
been established as a popular hero. World War I had seen him come to
prominence for his reputed courage, gallantry, and daredevil aerobatics.
The extension of this technology to civil aviation in the twenties had led
both to a rage for setting long-distance and speed records across oceans and
deserts—hitherto almost impenetrable barriers to communication—and to
the gradual consolidation of regular mail and passenger routes, binding
more tightly the far-flung colonies of empires.
By 1928, L’Herbier’s silent film L’Argent had picked up on this romantic
aviator figure, in the character of Jacques Hamelin, an aviator who under-
takes a dangerous flight to French Guyana. In 1931, commenting on a
Franco-American co-production (L’Aviateur, in its French release), a fan
magazine identifies the aviator as the “supreme representative of the mod-
ern hero, the adventurer figure, who since the first exploits of World War I
has caught the imagination of the whole world.”27 Early in 1939, another
article, entitled “Knights of the Air,” notes, “Aviation, by its sensational
conquests, has conquered all humanity in the space of twenty years. . . . The
human aspect [of this conquest] is as extraordinary as the mechanical as-
pect. Here, science is combined with human courage.”28 The article men-
tions St. Exupéry, Guillaumet, and Guynemer, “that knight of the skies, a
veritable archangel of aerial combat. . . . His culture, his faith, and his hero-
ism . . . have rendered his name immortal, not only in our land but
throughout the whole universe [sic]. . . . Everything in Guynemer’s brief life
evokes irresistibly the stained-glass window—stained in the colors of the
heavens, of blood, of fire, retracing the Stations of the Cross of a warrior
archangel.” Among the many films to pick up on this myth, Courrier-Sud
(1936) was scripted by St. Exupéry himself, but Toutain’s aviator figure in
La Règle du jeu is probably the best known. The war years saw a renewal of
interest in such heroic figures as Andrée Dupeyrou, the aviatrix on whose
life Le Ciel est à vous is based, and Jean Mermoz, “paladin of the skies,
guardian spirit of our childhood fantasies . . . may the young of France, un-
certain of their future in this confusing age, depressed by the heritage of
these recent years of chaos, find in your example the hope for a worthy and
constructive life.”29 In the postwar years, however, the aviator lost his myth-
ic status, becoming simply a pilot.
In 1933, a new myth—that of the actor as sensitive artist—partially
eclipses the sporty figure of the earlier thirties. Actors such as Catelain and
Préjean, hitherto figures of popular vitality and sporty types, are now dis-
covered to have a passionate interest in all the arts. Marcelle Chantal is
noted as having studied painting and being interested in dancing and
singing. “She has a taste for what is restful and comfortable. A vast study
lined with masses of curious objects. Many books on serious and deep sub-
jects—poetry, history, foreign literature . . . but she remains primarily a
 254 | , ,  
musician, and not only on the piano.”30 “I’ve adored music for as long as I
can remember. I was also devoted to dancing. What emotion I would feel
when my mother, a very good musician, sat down to play! My heart quick-
ened, and all a-tremble I would go and sit beside her, to listen with delight.
Then I would get up and, inspired by that divinity, music, I would dance a
few steps. Friends said, ‘This child will be the next Isadora Duncan.’”31
Clearly, the principal public function of this devotion to aesthetics is to lay
claim to a sensitive, responsive nature.
On a slightly less exalted note, Simone Simon is noted as having stud-
ied singing, piano, and sculpture, and Marie Bell, now (1936) no longer a
dashing aviatrix, sits in front of her piano letting her fingers drift over the
keys, “evoking Chopin.”32 Late in the decade, Trénet is reworked as a seri-
ous artist, painter, and singer, with a certain weighty thoughtfulness about
him. All the stars, even the working-class figures, profess a love for music.
You could make up a decent orchestra out of our stars, exclaims Pour Vous,
if you include the accordion (Claude Dauphin), the guitar (Toutain), and
the ocarina (Gravey). And Baroux has always dreamed of being a conduc-
tor!33 Others appreciate painting more. Some, including, somewhat im-
probably, Gabrio, are represented as adept at it. The reporters exclaim that
all the stars want to talk about is Liszt, Chopin, Debussy, Dante, Velasquez,
and El Greco. Many of them, indeed, do not want to talk to reporters at all,
but prefer the privacy of a life far from the public hurly-burly of the media.
Especially after 1936, they flee publicity. Servais, Richard-Willm, Véra Ko-
rène, Jany Holt, Françoise Rosay, Lisette Lanvin, Henry Garat—all develop
a reluctance to talk about themselves or allow the public gaze to intrude on
their affairs. Pierre Fresnay becomes so shy of the media as to strike one
over-insistent reporter.
An extreme version of this sensitive artistic soul was the tormented in-
trovert, anguished, alienated, even suicidal in moments of despair. This
persona tended to accrete around Pierre Blanchar, Jean-Louis Barrault, and
Pierre Richard-Willm. It began as early as 1933 and provided the kick-start
for the sensitive romantic myth, which can be seen as its paler echo.
Richard-Willm is its most vocal (most taciturn?) representative, repeatedly
informing interviewers that he does not find life very interesting and is
merely trying to get through it with as little trouble as possible. In moments
of lassitude and depression, he dreams of peace for the world and for him-
self, but the former is not possible, and the latter cannot exist without the
former.34 Playing the piano and a contemplative reclusive life are his tech-
niques for enduring the pervasive ennui of contemporary existence. This
modish angst is echoed by Marie Bell, who (as she evokes Chopin in the
privacy of her study) groans, “I am so tired of it all.”35 Interviewing Dita
Parlo, the critic mentions having seen her on the screen, her melancholy
face lost in dreams, and insist that she’s not like that in reality; yet he can’t
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 255
resist adding that “those eyes of hers, so reluctant to open, always reflect
some indefinable nostalgia, some wistfulness in her soul.”36 Barrault, typi-
cally characterized as an alien, a creature from Mars, because of his gangling
physique and contorted acting, is recognized as another such “soul in search
of itself,37 “destined by his physique to incarnate characters tested to the
limit by life, suffering, with a tormented soul.”38 Pierre Blanchar is “typical
of these cerebral heroes driven or haunted by a passion nobler than love, or
a strange obsession baser and crueler than love; he is perfect for those dis-
quieting heroes, fascinating and tormented, of Russian novels.”39
Among female stars, this myth of the doomed aesthete appears most
commonly as a limitless melancholy, a sensation of loss and of abandon-
ment—an indefinable gravity which renders the actress unforgettable and
her performances poignant in the extreme. This discourse engulfs Made-
leine Robinson for some years,40 but its field of delectation is Michèle Mor-
gan, who in the years after 1938 triggered a reworking of the discourse pe-
culiar to herself. An extended discussion of that persona can be found in
the final section of this chapter.
These two discourses—the sporty type, which was present from the be-
ginning of the thirties, and the melancholic aesthete, which appeared in
1933–34 to compete with it—seem irrevocably opposed, and an awareness
of this opposition is apparent in certain articles appearing around the be-
ginning of 1934. Mireille, who composes, has now become an enthusiastic
skier. “Believe it or not, I almost prefer the ivory of the ski-slope to the ivory
of my piano keys. Being creative with my hands was easy. . . . Now I have to
learn to be creative with my feet, which is much harder.”41 Even more
specifically, an article published a month earlier had asserted that women
prefer real men, strong, silent, and self-contained. “That’s why ambitious
young men struggle to master themselves. They play sports not simply be-
cause they enjoy bashing balls about, or pulling on oars, but because they
know that women love strong-willed, well-muscled men, with simple but
strong souls—not the intellectuals and snobs who are always fawning on
them.”42
But if the two discourses were sometimes contrasted, they were also
often applied to the same stars, and at the same time. Moreover, they found
a common meeting ground in the discourse of nature, which gained
prominence in commentaries from 1935 on. Essentially, this discourse was
one of simplicity, of innocence, and of sincerity. One could retreat from
the artifice, hypocrisy, and superficiality of contemporary life into a com-
munion with nature, viewed as a source of harmony and tranquillity, and
“be oneself.” The sporty discourse was readily reconcilable with that of na-
ture, since most of the relevant sports involved the open air and were pre-
sumed to produce a healthy mind in a healthy body. The romantic myth
was equally reconcilable, since sensitive aesthetes could hope to find true
 256 | , ,  
happiness only far from the madding crowd, in the privacy and calm of a
country retreat where they could be themselves.
Although there are sporadic appearances of a nature myth from 1930
on, it is pervasive by 1935. The evolution of the sporty discourse toward a
nature myth is first evident with respect to Jean Murat, who is revealed in
1934 as enjoying various sports, primarily in pursuit of healthy emotions
and a balanced life. “Between roles, he has only one desire: to immerse him-
self once more in nature, to experience the fresh mountain air and the
warm sun of our flower-garlanded coasts.”43 This “one desire,” to find a se-
cluded country retreat where the cyclic rhythms of timeless nature take
over from the relentless linearity of the contemporary urban world, is a
constant theme thereafter. Growth, harvest-time, and the ephemeral sen-
sual joys of sun, sea, and sand transformed the dynamism of the sporting
myth into something more passive, more contemplative. All the stars sud-
denly discover that they have a fundamentally rustic soul. Mona Goya
“loves the healthy freedom of country life, in the fields and woods.”44 Pré-
jean knows no better way to relax after a tough day’s work: “I plant, weed,
dig, prune, water . . . it’s so restful.”45 “Whenever possible I escape to the
Marne to fish . . . or to the mountains.”46 “Fishing, but not catching any-
thing, solely for the pleasure of hours passed on the water, with the smell of
sea salt and the warmth of the sun’s rays.”47
Every summer thereafter, a routine special report in Ciné Miroir shows
the stars getting away from it all: “What humanity loves most of all is lib-
erty—losing oneself in the vastness of nature.”48 Marie Glory, like a young
animal, values the freedom she finds in her country retreat—forests, fields,
rivers, valleys, hills, pheasants, rabbits, hares. She hunts, but “walking in the
open air, the wind in my hair, with the rustle of the trees and the grasses, is
what attracts me, rather than killing animals.”49 Lilian Harvey has her farm-
house in Provence, Colette Darfeuil spends every weekend at her place in
the country, Marie Glory lives there full time. At the other extreme, Jean
Gabin finds true happiness in “my little property at Berchères sur Vesgue,
hunting, fishing, just wandering about,”50 as do, at their various country
houses, Vanel, Bach, and Préjean.
In line with this modulation toward passivity and contemplation, the
stars now have pets that they cuddle rather than horses to gallop about
on—pets that they prefer to humans, because they are more faithful. They
devote themselves to gardening, sunbathing, reading beside a lake, camp-
ing, and wandering through the fields, emoting as a hare starts up or a
squirrel leaps from branch to branch. For Richard-Willm, lover of solitude,
mountain and forest are friendly companions: “I need to be by myself, and
I can only be so in the midst of nature.”51
The move toward location shooting encouraged this discourse, and
with her Provençal background, Orane Demazis was a particularly ap-
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 257
propriate focus for it. In 1934, when she is interviewed about her role as
Angèle, the interviewer knows to ask her if she feels at home in nature. “In-
finitely,” she replies. “It’s only when you enter its embrace that you can re-
ally grow. All true artists draw on its wellsprings for the best part of their
genius. For genius consists of simplicity, and what is simpler and truer than
Nature? In life today, we have, alas, lost any real contact with it. We live in
an artificial world.”52 Not long afterward, in an article inspired by the loca-
tion shooting of Angèle and Toni, Altman (of all people) publishes an arti-
cle in Pour Vous prefiguring Bazin and Rohmer’s realist defense of the
glories of nature:
The greatest triumph of the cinema is not sound, not the talkie, nor color,
nor eventually 3D, nor any other technical achievement, it’s fresh air. . . .
What a source of revitalization, of eternity is provided by a natural setting,
by the open air. You soon get bored with [those all-too-conventional artifi-
cial sets], but it would be hard to get tired of the open sky, of fields, of the
movement of clouds, of the tides, the river’s flow, or the trembling of a tree’s
leaves, since they are there forever. . . . In such moments the cinema is prac-
tically a living thing, even more alive than living things, since it surprises na-
ture in its own domain, as one captures a dream or a mystery and fixes it on
a canvas.53

This adulation of the simplicity, purity, even divinity of nature persisted

throughout the late thirties. An interesting description in 1939 of Henri
Decoin and Danielle Darrieux swimming and lazing away their days at
their cottage on the Côte d’Azur speaks of Danielle as “without a speck of
powder on her shiny nose; her lips are naturally red; on her smooth fore-
head, a glint of reflected light plays; but her eyelashes, without cosmetics,
have lost none of their length—they have become all blond, and give her
face the look of a young girl; she places in her hair a big bunch of meadow
flowers.”54
In March 1940, apparently oblivious to the declaration of war, the an-
nual report describes the stars as disporting themselves in nature, just as in
preceding years. “After winter comes the hope of summer days, the irre-
sistible call of the countryside . . . of wandering through woods and
fields.”55 Even more incongruously, the following month, Gaby Morlay is
portrayed in her country house overlooking the Seine, her garden “lumi-
nous with all the fairyland of spring. . . . ‘Can you imagine! I lost fifteen
hundred rosebushes to the frost this winter; and I was greatly saddened to
see so many trees and plants dying, especially the flowers.’”56 Not to men-
tion human beings, one is tempted to say! This perpetuation of a discourse
of nature and of the annual cycle of the stars’ lives, as readers had been
taught to know them, could, however, be read as an attempt to reassert a
degree of normalcy during the “phony war.”
 258 | , ,  
In the period under discussion, there were two discourses that were
omnipresent in French political and social commentary, as they were in the
films of the day, but which are distinct from all others of the thirties in that
they did not obtain as significant a purchase in the discourses surrounding
stars as one might expect—the discourses of patriotism and of moral re-
generation. The nationalist or colonial discourse was particularly strong in
certain films, yet scarcely impinges on the persona even of those actors who
most regularly played the role of soldier of empire (notably Victor Francen
and Pierre Fresnay). Those who had served in the forces (Murat), been to
naval school (Vanel), or done military service (Gabin) are occasionally rec-
ognized for this, while Garat’s reluctance to serve is received with in-
credulity, as yet another reason to doubt his manhood. Murat, as a wartime
aviator, bestrides several mythic roles and is often portrayed in uniform:
“Every Frenchman is naturally a soldier, and the uniform is his most nat-
ural clothing.”57 And both Fernand Gravey and Pierre Blanchar are men-
tioned as having the souls of salt-sea sailors, the latter as a result of a spell
in the École de Hydrographie. “He yearns for his boat and for those long
sea voyages . . . the sea beckons to him.”58
Aside from their relative lack of purchase on stars’ images, these two ba-
sically right-wing discourses are distinguished by a second major factor:
they emerge not from the general run of often anonymous and impression-
istic articles that make up the bulk of the fan magazines, but rather from the
editorial pages. That is, they are the most conscious and programmatic of
the thirties discourses, foreshadowing those of the wartime and immediate
postwar years. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that they are the only ones
that overflow into the “serious” press, emerging in editorials in Cinéopse and
La Cinématographie Française, as well as in the more popular press.
There is a close connection between the two discourses, since the na-
tional civilizing mission of France, which is the central focus of the one, in-
variably leads to the invocation of the moral virtues inherent in the French
character, which it is the duty of the armed forces, nurses, missionaries, and
administrators to communicate to, if not impose on, other peoples. Where
the nationalist discourse has no real negative, except divisive (because left-
ist, classist) representations of France, the moral discourse has an increas-
ingly urgent negative as the thirties progress, in the debility which it sees
Jews and other “degenerate subversives” as introducing into the very heart
of French society.
In the early thirties, instances of either discourse were rare, and when
they occurred they tended to focus on the representation of France overseas.
“One could get the impression from our frivolous films,” protests Ciné-
monde in 1930, “that France consists of two equally unlovely groups—the
sophisticated and superficial wealthy, seen in comedies of manners, and the
squalid perverts, lay-abouts, and degenerates of the underworld.”59 More-
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 259
over, the foreign legion was being slandered by (often foreign) films that
represented legionnaires as the dregs of the gutters, hiding from a criminal
past, maltreated and even tortured by vicious officers, when in truth they
were knights-errant of idealism, united by their oath to the flag that they
served in a devotion to military honor. Films must be made glorifying “the
poetic force of these adventurers—their self-sacrifice, their self-denial, their
heroism.”60 Ciné Miroir calls for a rectification of the too-prevalent view
that the French are oppressing and enslaving the blacks of Africa; rather, the
cinema should show “those strong young [doctors] who have abandoned
our facile ways of life to undertake their campaign against death beneath a
murderous sun. Dr. Jammot, that great man of learning who is at the head
of our sublime teams of young white doctors and black aides, can best be
seen as a saint.”61
All publications agreed that what France needed was something closer
to an authoritarian national cinema, like Hitler’s vision of a German cin-
ema or the USSR’s effective propaganda machine. A particular admiration
was frequently expressed in the later thirties for Mussolini’s program for the
Italian cinema. La Cinématographie Française quotes approvingly his view
of the cinema as the strongest of a nation’s weapons, and Ciné Miroir goes
so far as to regret that France does not have a dictator as they do in Italy,
who might introduce more fascist (i.e., “co-operative”) methods. Cinéopse
notes that the cinema is also a propaganda arm of the nation, and praises
the progress of the Italian cinema under Mussolini: “Doubtless, Mr. Mus-
solini, as head of government, is himself primarily responsible for this, but
he has managed to surround himself with competent collaborators . . .
which is far from the case in France. This is where you must seek the reason
for Italy’s superiority among the Latin nations.”62
As was noted in connection with the war genre, a corresponding enthu-
siasm was expressed on those occasions when French authorities moved in
the same direction. In 1932, Cinéopse rejoices that M. Chaumet, Adminis-
trator of the Colonies, is devoting a series of evenings to talks, illustrated by
documentaries, in the interests of “colonial propaganda.”63 In 1933, a
Committee for Colonial Propaganda through the Cinema is set up, and
Cinémonde hopes for fewer frivolous operettas and a greater place for the
works of French engineers.64 Cinéopse notes approvingly the efforts of the
navy minister in support of such documentaries as La Marine française, La
France est une île, Branlebas de combat, and such fiction films as Veille
d’armes, La Porte du large, and later Alerte en Méditerranée: “All ministers
should support such national propaganda.” It also reports complacently on
the introduction of censorship laws banning films that might bring ridicule
on the military.65
As the war approaches the tone of these editorials becomes more stri-
dent and the moral outrage more explicit. Quai des brumes attracts general
 260 | , ,  
invective for “exploiting the lowest tendencies of human nature.”66 What is
needed is “a colonial film that will prove to the adversaries of colonialism
that the white—administrator, engineer, teacher, agronomist—has not
proved unworthy of this great nation; that, quite the contrary, wherever he
has passed, water, power, work, and wealth have burst forth.”67 “Wherever
the Tricolor has fluttered, slavery has given way to liberty, ignorance to
knowledge, barbarity to civilization. . . . Immense progress [has been]
achieved by our administrators, our doctors, our teachers, our missionaries,
and our soldiers.”68
The end of 1938 saw a climax to this campaign for a cinema embody-
ing “the French colonial spirit,” when La Cinématographie Française pub-
lished a manifesto drawn up by a number of cultural groups, including the
Société des Gens de Lettres. Entitled “Le Redressement moral du pays,”69 it
evoked the spiritual strength of France and the true qualities of the race,
“those which have made it great, strong, and respected in the world.” It put
forward a five-point program aimed at

(1) Schools, which should teach “the moral value of man, which has as its
basis work, discipline, respect for the human individual, the cult of one’s
native land, and submission to the laws of the land.”
(2) Villages, where folklore and local history should be cultivated, because
“traditions which link the young to their ancestors create within them a
love and pride for their native soil.”
(3) Political and social élites, which have a duty to collaborate to create social
harmony “so that a feeling of trust and friendship should reign between
classes endowing the nation with a moral unity.”
(4) Radio and cinema, because “the spirit of France must not be distorted or
demeaned”; “serious problems of the day must be treated with that sin-
cerity that is the due of a virile people.”
(5) Propaganda services abroad, which must be organized “with the collabo-
ration of spiritual and moral leaders whose only aim and reward must be
the greatness of our country.”

The editor associates himself with these sentiments, only advising that they
be achieved by the carrot and not the stick. He reminds his readers of the
French ambassador to Poland’s recent embarrassment at certain French
films screened in Poland—“what a strange atmosphere of vice they em-
anate, seen outside France. . . . I fear we have lost our sense of morality;
while waiting to regain it, let’s at least retain our sense of caution.”70
Naturally, these anxieties proliferate during 1939, with articles rejoicing
at the release of colonialist and triumphalist films and much talk of a new
genre, the “national film.”71 For instance, the review of Trois de St. Cyr talks
of the Military Academy as a place where one finds
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 261
a total lack of self-interest or self-importance, because there is a thirst for
open spaces and . . . a soul ready to devote itself to the greatness of our na-
tive land; St. Cyr forms those virtues of uprightness, courage, and honor
which throughout history have been those of the French officer. It is good
that the cinema should exalt the finest qualities of our race. . . . This St. Cyr
way of life, with its harsh discipline and stoic young men, is a wonderful les-
son in energy; it shows all those who see us as degenerate that our race re-
tains the virtues which made it great throughout history.72

With the declaration of war, these national and moral discourses

reached a climax and had practical consequences in the banning of many
films. As Borel said, explaining the more aggressive censorship, “We wish to
avoid, in those countries where we have numerous friends but where we
also have to cope with the insinuations and distortions of the German pro-
paganda machine, the screening of a representation of our country, our tra-
ditions and our race which is not just diluted but deceptive, distorted as it
is through the prism of an artistic personality which may well be original
but is not always healthy.”73
Although these two related discourses from the late thirties did not be-
come attached to specific actors, their more visible popular counterpart was
the discourse of maturity, which certainly did. This was one of three gen-
dered discourses to dominate the late thirties, and the only one of the three
to apply to males. Essentially, it promoted as admirable the strong, silent
patriarchal figure who imposed his will by sheer force of personality. Murat,
Vanel, and Gabin, but also Baur, Raimu, and occasionally Jean Servais were
its most common embodiments. Sober, dense, and substantial, they were
seen as having the bulk that goes with moral authority, the forcefulness of a
man of action, the solitude, austerity, and integrity that befitted an almost
monklike commitment to a self-imposed mission. The link with the two
previous discourses is apparent in the description of Vanel (on the basis of
Légions d’honneur, L’Occident, Bar du sud, and S.O.S. Sahara) as having
“that grim, clean-cut face of a man of action—a solitary man . . . who finds
within himself the strength to outface the hostile, torrid, and featureless
desert.” He is one of that race of men who are forces of nature, “living in
their remote outpost like men of religion in their monastery.”74
Such a discourse of authority could accrete only around more mature
actors, whose physique spoke of an ability to endure, to cope. These figures
were the antithesis of the handsome but superficial young men who had
competed with them for lead roles earlier in the decade. All referendums
and surveys in the late thirties reflect this audience preference for unhand-
some mature male actors who can serve as father figures. Gabin, Raimu,
Baur, Jouvet, and Vanel figure alongside Fernandel at the top of the popu-
larity tables. In the case of Gabin (and to a lesser extent Vanel), this dis-
 262 | , ,  
course occasionally comes into embarrassing conflict with a series of roles
in which he played the deserter, the caïd, the murderer—roles which, with
the advent of war, were to see Gabin in particular identified as responsible
for the degeneracy of the French populace and for France’s humiliating de-
feat. During the thirties, however, they signify not degeneracy and failure,
but a toughness and humanity that refuse to admit defeat. This image of the
rough diamond, of the worthy individual alienated by the injustices of soci-
ety, is most frequently associated with Gabin precisely because he selected
(and, if necessary, modified) his films to conform to this mythic identity.
Vanel, however, is almost as often characterized in similar terms. Indeed,
the first occurrence of the discourse that I have identified relates to him:
When you think of Vanel, two qualities inevitably come to mind—natural-
ness and simplicity. . . . Watch him approach, steadily, with a slowness that
speaks of strength. His body solid, but not bulging with ostentatious mus-
cle. His voice sober, steady, without any of those motile flourishes of into-
nation that even modest men might use. It is the voice of a man sure of
himself, not given to bragging. It is a voice that never needs to be raised in
order to be heard and obeyed. And don’t forget his eyes . . .75

Subsequent articles emphasize his roles as a sailor, when his broad chest
constitutes a sort of rampart thrust out against the fog, the tempest, the salt
sea spray.76 He is a figure of power, “a virile actor, who embodies on the
screen a rugged type of man, masculine, commanding, reveling in action,
but at the same time very human and compassionate.”77 So is Harry Baur,
who has a “ great, slow, but powerful body . . . that voice of rusted iron,
marinated in alcohol, suffering, joy, and bitterness . . . and behind it all, a
powerful life-force, multiple, secret, and terribly human.”78 In all descrip-
tions of these sober, mature, and powerful figures there is the implication of
a brutality that can easily veer toward the criminal.
Two female stereotypes developed in the later thirties which contrasted
with this male stereotype and with each other: the flighty elegant and the
sensual seductive. Earlier, female stars had tended to be described in some-
what varied terms, as delightful, gay, vivacious, or capricious, but by 1937
the adjectives have become more distinctive, and the interests, tastes, and
appearance of the stars are described in ritualized terms. On the one hand
are “feminine” stars, flighty, frivolous, and somewhat superficial, whose
main interest is their self-presentation to the world; on the other hand are
sensual, mysterious, somber, and potentially dangerous women, who had
initially been termed “vamps,” but who are soon refashioned as “femmes fa-
tales.”
It is the latter discourse—that of sensuality—that appears first, reach-
ing a peak of intensity in 1937 and 1938. A number of stars are found,
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 263
largely on the basis of the roles they play (spies, adventurers, two-timing
vamps), and partly on the basis of their (reputed) private lives (possessions,
clothing, behavior, relationships), to be vortexes of sensuality, wild and ap-
parently uncontrollable, sulky, sultry, tempestuous, treacherous, but irre-
sistibly fascinating. Simone Simon and Viviane Romance are represented as
carrying this personality into their behavior on set, where their presence in-
evitably provokes passionate altercations. But it is Edwige Feui-llère’s early
performances that first seem to have foregrounded this discourse, in 1936.79
Subsequently, Mireille Balin (interviewed in her home, amidst Oriental
ivories and North African drapes), Suzy Prim (whose recurrent role “is that
of the seductive woman, sensual, a little perverse”), and Viviane Romance
are all enveloped in it. Romance “represents a sort of woman called ‘fatale’
because of her beauty, at once aggressive and mysterious, her somewhat am-
biguous sex appeal, and her self-confidence, full of double meanings and
suggestiveness.”80 She is attracted to the role of vamp, “which barely exists
in the French cinema but is embodied in Marlene Dietrich.”81 Indeed, it
had been applied to Dietrich as early as 1930, and not long afterward to
Vanda Gréville, who evokes “poeticized desire, constructed of a mix of
provocation and modesty, perversity and innocence, which arouses in us a
higher form of sensuality.”82 Marlene herself is “a secretion, a concretization
of sexual attraction, and acts like a sweet poison, penetrating and drugging,
which spreads throughout the body and overcomes all one’s resistance.”83 In
the early thirties, however, the term is most often applied to foreign ac-
tresses, particularly blonde Nordic vamps. Only in the latter half of the
decade are sultry French brunettes incorporated into the sisterhood of the
vamp.
With the war and the occupation, femmes fatales became politically in-
correct, and all references to them are historical, as when the term is referred
to as a prewar character type or emploi, or when stars are seen as having
been “trapped” in such roles, and are now trying to break out.84 In this
more distanced, reflective environment, Ciné Mondial can outline in some
detail the nature and history of the femme fatale during the thirties. Com-
plete with illustrations of Balin, Manès, Marchal, and Negri, it talks of the
sort of woman who by her mere appearance on the screen disrupts the har-
mony of true love. “Better known for some years as the vamp . . . she is typ-
ically a beautiful brunette with green eyes . . . an imposing presence, per-
verse, cruel, provocative, without a trace of humanity in her.” In the late
thirties, “her malevolence was simply a form of revenge on life for its injus-
tices, her indifference a sort of barrier that she erected to protect a too frail
body.” Now, however, “she often really loves the hero, and if at first she
seems a flighty creature, she redeems herself at the end, and lays her fatal
charms at the feet of the man of her life.”85
 264 | , ,  
While these accounts were in part motivated by the roles and private
lives of the respective stars, they were also derived from certain racial stereo-
types. Sensuality and passion were already well established as characteristic
of the southern or Mediterranean stereotype, and a slightly different blonde
voluptuousness was associated with the Eastern European seductress. Elvire
Popescu’s Romanian origins are considered relevant to the persona she pro-
jects, as is Véra Korène’s Slavic birthplace to her recurrent role of seductive
spy. Maria Casarès is Spanish, Marie Déa is Basque, Mireille Balin is half
Italian, and “Edwige Feuillère has Italian blood, which explains many
things.”86 In the absence of any such foreign origin, Viviane Romance nev-
ertheless “gives the impression of being a mixture of races,” because of her
heavy, lush body.87 So if the femme fatale enters French cinematic dis-
courses rather earlier than is usually claimed, she is not seen as wholly
French: it is partly her very foreignness which makes of her a mysterious
creature, threatening to the status quo.
The other female discourse, that of frilly femininity, tends to be pri-
marily oriented around fashion and the home. Women are seen as inter-
ested above all in talking about ornaments for the house, make-up,
manicures, frocks, and all the little elegances that speak of feminine taste, “a
woman’s touch.” Such women are “all woman.” As early as 1935, female
stars are interviewed at home and seen as surprisingly domestic in their
tastes. They are homebodies, and their favorite activity is cooking up some
tasty delight for their man, or rearranging the furniture.88 Gradually, how-
ever, the emphasis turns to forms of dress—to appearance rather than ac-
tivity. Although this discourse is applied to most female stars at one time or
another, it gradually coalesces around Edwige Feuillère. Attempting, in
early 1938, to escape the vamp/femme fatale image, both Feuillère and
Mireille Balin tell interviewers about their love for dresses with trains, made
with fourteen meters of muslin, and their preference for roles that allow
them to wear thirty or more different costumes. A prime virtue becomes
the ability to display these wardrobes to best account. A 1939 article spells
out the contradictions involved in the Feuillère transformation. She is at
once a femme fatale and a homebody—although she often plays vamp, ad-
venturer, and diabolical spy, this has come about “inadvertently.” “At heart
she is all woman, loving pretty things—her house, her knick-knacks, her
luxurious armchairs, her friends.”89 By 1939, this discourse of frilliness has
largely displaced that of the sensual vamp. Such stars as Anne Vernay,
Lisette Lanvin, and Yvette Lebon speak exclusively of their make-up, their
dresses, their appearance, and their femininity.90 Danielle Darrieux, inter-
viewed at her dressmaker’s, talks lovingly of Battement de cœur, “in which
she wore a different dress for each sequence.” Female stars have become pri-
marily fashion models, and a principal function of their films is to display
the fashion designers’ latest collections.91
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 265
With the advent of war, this representation of women as pretty, charm-
ing creatures tied to the home was uncontroversial, and it survived. Even
Arletty (!) is momentarily engulfed by it. Indeed, even in the climactic dis-
ruptions at war’s end, with the world collapsing about their ears, Ciné Mon-
dial ’s reporters cling to this vacuous discourse, writing of such important
matters as Micheline Presle’s new flat and new frocks.92 As in the case of
earlier discourses, the perpetuation of such gossip can be seen as a way of
maintaining one’s bearings in a disintegrating world.

An overview of the thirties would see a distinct periodization emerging

from the jostle of discourses, in which those involving forms of fantasized
fulfillment gradually give way to those figuring forms of fantasized disrup-
tion and distress, accompanied by the desire for a strong leader.
Certain absences are striking. In a resolutely Catholic country, that not
the faintest trace of an overtly religious discourse was mobilized around any
of the actors or actresses of the decade is quite astonishing. While several of
the films themselves, including some of the most popular, foregrounded
star roles involving exemplary religious (and, even more often, exemplary
moral) figures, and while religious organizations repeatedly called in their
“house” journals for a more moral orientation of the industry, the calls for
“moral regeneration” in editorials and elsewhere never resulted in overt reli-
gious propaganda in the popular magazines. Likewise, given the immense
popularity of films involving martial figures or promoting France’s civiliz-
ing mission in the colonies, it is remarkable how seldom the patriotic and
martial discourses were attached to stars. In general, any discourse appealing
to trans-individual allegiances or systems was weak, whereas discourses re-
lating to personality were strong.
The main fields of predilection of such discourses were gender and
class. In particular, as might be expected, several discourses dealt with gen-
der. It was in the nature of woman to be “feminine,” or to be dangerously
seductive, or to bubble over with childlike gaiety. It was in the nature of
man to be strong and responsible, or to live dangerously, or to prefer larks
with his mates to life with a wife. Two of the discourses presented the work-
ing class in a particularly favorable light—most obviously that of popular
vitality, but also that of the substantial mature male, often embodied in
Gabin. The father figures of the thirties never embodied middle-class val-
ues and attitudes or bourgeois respectability; indeed, far more often than
not they explicitly rejected such values as symptomatic of an unjust social
system.
So the discourses dealt with a fairly narrow and changing set of person-
ality orientations; nevertheless, they all proposed types of human being
which they constructed as ideal and as timeless. Those who approximated
 266 | , ,  
these types in their stage roles or personal lives constituted an elite of excep-
tional human individuals who were beyond criticism. Incredulity was the
only proper response to those who derided sport, or art, or nature; scorn the
only proper response to those who, out of season, decried femininity, matu-
rity, sensitivity, or childlike innocence. The myths underlying the discourses
invariably made universalist claims, even when dealing with apparently
local and ephemeral issues. And it was precisely because they situated these
attributes confidently within a notionally permanent universe of unassail-
able values that they provided a solid framework for the fantasized identities
which their readership craved in a turbulent political and economic age.

8.2 THE MOST POPULAR STARS

This set of mythic discourses was, of course, closely related to the mythic
stereotypes repeatedly acted out by the various actors and actresses in the
films of the period, and the global image of each actor and actress as regis-
tered by the French movie-going public consisted of an accumulation of
knowledge about him or her acquired from these two principal sources (to-
gether with other lesser sources). As a result of this evolving knowledge,
and in response to “referendums” organized by certain film magazines,
French audiences felt able to rank those actors and actresses in order of
popularity. Such polls of readers and/or industrial personnel provide a use-
ful supplementary source of information as to the status of the different
mythic stereotypes.
As in so many other spheres, the French cinema became much more
systematic in chronicling the popularity of stars in the postwar years. From
1947 on, quasi-official referendums (“Les Victoires du Cinéma Français”)
were conducted by Cinémonde among its readers and by Le Film Français
among theater managers (and later by Le Figaro among other prominent
film personnel) to identify the most popular French stars, both male and fe-
male. These contests were clearly influenced from year to year by the release
of specific films. For instance, Jouvet’s popularity in 1949 resulted from a
series of successful films over the previous eighteen months, including
Quai des Orf èvres and Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde, and particularly
Entre 11h et minuit, and Bardot’s in 1957 was related to the success of three
of her films in 1956—Cette sacrée gamine, En effeuillant la marguerite, and
Et Dieu créa . . . la femme. The appearance of Blier on the list in 1950 was
related specifically to the popular success of L’École buissonnière in 1949,
and of Fernandel in 1953 to the popular success of Don Camillo in the pre-
vious year. Beyond that, however, the tables allow us to track certain stars
who were consistently popular over a number of years, and who might
therefore be assumed to correspond to certain mythic stereotypes. They
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 267
also allow us to recognize differences of perspective between theater man-
agers and spectators. For instance, Martine Carol was consistently appreci-
ated by theater owners, but never achieved top placing with spectators, who
always preferred Michèle Morgan.
For the years preceding inauguration of the “Victoires,” the evidence
concerning star popularity is more fragmentary. From 1936 to the outbreak
of war and again after it, the industry journals conducted an annual poll of
theater managers, which gives data of less certain reliability for the years
1936–38 and 1946–48; in 1945, an IFOP poll of the movie-going public
provides equivalent information. Extended lists of runners-up in the “Vic-
toires” give us further useful data. For the war years themselves, the only
recorded data result from a referendum among film critics conducted by
Ciné Mondial in 1942, which saw Raimu designated as best actor and Mi-
cheline Presle designated as best actress, followed by Michèle Morgan;
Odette Joyeux and Bernard Blier designated as rising stars; and Blanchette
Brunoy and Jean Tissier as “best loved.” Table 8.3 indicates overall trends in
star popularity between 1936 and 1948, leaving out these more enigmatic
war years.
The least reliable data come from the early sound years, when fandom
was as dominant as it ever was to be in the French cinema, and surveys were
conducted by the popular magazines rather than by industry journals, and
in terms which confuse rather than enlighten. Some surveys included males
and females, others one or the other; some included both French and for-
eign stars, others exclusively French stars; most were designed to identify
such factors as the best young lead, the best smile, the ideal couple, or the
ideal husband/wife. Table 8.2 provides all the material that seems most use-
ful, except for a 1930 poll of its readers by Cinémonde designed to identify
three male and three female stars for inclusion in a foreshadowed Académie
du Cinéma Français (the six stars designated were Dolly Davis, Gina Manès,
and Louise Lagrange, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Angelo, and Jean Murat) and
a 1931 poll of its readers by Pour Vous designed to identify the most photo-
genic stars (the five top stars were, in order, Suzy Vernon, Henri Garat, Lil-
ian Harvey, Ramon Navarro, and Jeanette MacDonald).
While in many ways inadequate until 1947, the tables nevertheless out-
line a number of trends in star popularity in terms of nationality, gender,
and age. First, they serve to remind us of the internationalism of the silent
film, the subsequent rivalry with Hollywood, and the progressively greater
dominance of the popular imagination by local stars. In 1929, all the fa-
vorite (male) stars are foreigners, with the leading French actors being
Blanchar, the immigrant Mosjoukine, Angelo, Catelain, and Vanel. A poll
concerning young leading men the same year confirms these rankings,
though Ramon Navarro is still more popular than any French star and
 268 | , ,  
Table 8.2. Popularity Polls 1929–35

Ciné Miroir Cinémonde Ciné Miroir Ciné Miroir

Top Actors Best in World Prince Charming Nicest Smile
1929 1933 1933 1935

Charlie Chaplin Charlie Chaplin Henri Garat Jeanette McDonald

Ramon Navarro Greta Garbo Jean Murat Annabella
Douglas Fairbanks Marlene Dietrich Charles Boyer Gaby Morlay
Emil Jannings Charles Boyer Pierre Blanchar Suzy Vernon
Adolphe Menjou Ronald Colman André Roanne Marie Glory
Lon Chaney Mae West Jean Véber Marlene Dietrich
Pierre Blanchar Ramon Navarro Fernand Gravey Claudette Colbert
Ivan Mosjoukine Annabella Richard-Willm Lilian Harvey
Jean Angelo Pierre Blanchar André Burgère Edwige Feuillère
John Gilbert Claire Brooks Roland Toutain Renée St Cyr
Harold Lloyd Cohan Norma Shearer
Jacque Catelain Irene Dunne Gina Manès
Charles Vanel Fernandel Colette Darfeuil
Ronald Colman Florelle Madge Evans
Conrad Veidt Cary Grant Gloria Swanson
André Roanne
Buster Keaton
Jean Murat
Lucien Dalsace
Léon Mathot
Georges Biscot
Ivan Petrovitch
Antonio Moreno
Ric Cortez

Notes: The first column results from a poll to which 200,000 readers responded, covering
French and foreign male actors; the second from a survey of readers to identify the best ac-
tors and actresses in the world; the third from a contest set up by the Almanach Ciné Miroir
to identify the most loved French young leading men; the fourth from a poll in which
16,398 readers voted, nominally to identify the most beautiful smile, but effectively to rank
French and foreign young leading ladies. Where both French and foreign stars are listed, the
French stars are underlined.

Valentino, Petrovitch, and Charles Rogers outrank all except Catelain. The
1933 Cinémonde poll shows foreign stars still occupying ten of the top
fifteen places and underlines the improvement of American rankings. Jen-
nings, Veidt, and other Europeans have disappeared, and only Marlene Die-
trich remains. Of French stars, only Pierre Blanchar has survived into the
sound era, though Jean Murat and André Roanne continue to figure as
“Prince Charmings.”
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 269
Table 8.3. Most Popular Film Stars 1936–48

La Cinématographie française IFOP Cinémonde

1936 1937 1938 1945 1947 1948
Male actors
Boyer (1) Fernandel (1) Gabin (1) Raimu (1) Blanchar (3) Fresnay (1)
R-Willm (2) Gabin (3) Fernandel (3) Fernandel (2) Marais (5) Philipe (3)
Fernandel (3) Raimu (4) Jouvet (5) Jouvet (3) Jouvet (7) Blanchar (6)
Baur (4) Boyer (5) Raimu (6) Blanchar (4) Noël-Noël (9) Jouvet (11)
Baroux (5) Rossi (6) Fresnay (7) Gabin (5) Gabin (10) Marais
France (6) R-Willm (9) Boyer (9) Barrault (7) Fresnay (12) Meurisse
Rossi (8) Guitry (10) Guitry (12) Chaplin (9) Raimu Bourvil
Berry (11) Baur (11) von Stroheim Fresnay (11) Boyer Vanel
Chaplin (12) Francen (12) Rossi R-Willm R-Willm Gravey
Raimu Gable M Simon Boyer Gravey Ledoux
Gabin Taylor Berry Vanel Larquey
Blanchar Berry Vanel Barrault R Dary
Larquey Larquey Baroux Coëdel Dauphin
Bach von Stroheim Cooper Ledoux M Simon
Guitry Blanchar Blanchar Rossi Noël-Noël
Murat Murat Baur Périer Marchal
Gravey Vanel R-Willm
Female actors
Morlay (7) Darrieux (2) Romance (2) Darrieux (6) Feuillère (1) Presle (2)
Darrieux (9) Annabella (7) Darrieux (4) Morlay (8) Morgan (2) Feuillère (4)
Annabella (10) Garbo (8) Printemps (8) Feuillère (10) Romance (4) Morgan (5)
Temple Temple Morgan (10) Romance (12) Darrieux (6) Darrieux (6)
Garbo Feuillère Luchaire (11) Presle St. Cyr (8) Morlay (8)
Popesco Morlay Annabella Morgan Sologne (11) Robinson (9)
Dietrich Dietrich Popesco Presle Maffei (10)
Rosay Popesco Garbo Ducaux St. Cyr (12)
McDonald Korène Feuillère Morlay Casarès
Renaud Rosay Rosay Rosay Pascal
Chantal Durbin Ducaux J Dary Brunoy
Moréno Colbert S. Simon Joyeux Ducaux
Vernon Romance Temple Renant Romance
St. Cyr Balin Morlay Joyeux
Feuillère Crawford Renant
Note: Underlined names were favored by fans rather than film directors; italicized names
were favored by theater managers rather than fans. The Cinémonde referendums (“Victoires
du Cinéma Français”) relate exclusively to French stars; other columns include foreign stars.

As succeeding lists make clear, the tendency toward dominance of

French stars continues throughout the thirties, more rapidly in the case of
males, but steadily in the case of females, until only Greta Garbo, Shirley
 270 | , ,  
Temple, and Gary Cooper can compete, and then only in lower rankings.
Of course, the relative absence of American films from French screens dur-
ing the war contributed to this progressive decline, with only Chaplin sur-
viving the war. I know of no poll that measures the popularity of foreign
actors alongside that of French actors after 1945, which in itself is interest-
ing given their statistically equal presence on French screens throughout the
period 1945–60. This was, of course, a period of intense international ri-
valry between the two cinemas, with the French filmmaking community
fighting to preserve the government subsidies on which it had arguably
come to depend, and the Americans bringing intense pressure for an open-
door policy in which the two industries would compete for the French mar-
ket on a (supposedly) equal footing. In these circumstances, it would have
been surprising if industry journals had done anything at all to promote an
awareness of Hollywood stars, but it is equally interesting that popular fan
magazines avoided any explicit comparison.
In terms of gender, the deduction to be drawn from the available evi-
dence is that French audiences preferred male actors to female actors for the
greater part of the period, and certainly throughout the thirties, though a
peak in the popularity of actresses was to occur just after the war. Early ref-
erences to actor preferences seem to be related almost entirely to males. It is
not that actresses are not mentioned as popular—quite the contrary, they
are constantly referred to in those terms—but simply that their acting abil-
ity is not considered relevant. They are objects to be looked upon with de-
light, rather than professionals to be admired for their competence. From
1936 on, moreover, when the surveys of theater managers begin to allow di-
rect comparisons between male and female actors, it is males who predomi-
nate. From 1936 to 1945, all polls show a higher regard for male actors,
though the margin of preference is diminishing steadily in the immediate
prewar years. This change in gender preference can be measured. In 1936,
the men outscore the women by more votes than even the simple list order
suggests, and in 1937, when Fernandel tops the poll with over 11,000
votes, Darrieux, who comes second, receives only 6,330. If one sums the
votes for the male and female actors in the top twelve places, the proportion
is 5:1 in favor of males in 1936, 3:1 in 1937, and less than 2:1 in 1938
(6,965:4,270). However, only in 1947, when Edwige Feuillère and Michèle
Morgan outscore all males, and 1948, when, though not topping the poll,
actresses occupy eight of the top twelve places, do females demonstrate a
higher degree of popularity with spectators. In 1949, Michèle Morgan
again tops the poll, but overall honors are about even, and from 1950 on
there is no great discrepancy between the sexes, though the Stock Exchange
of the Stars published annually by Le Film Français suggests that the pres-
ence of a male star was more likely to attract viewers to a film than was the
presence of a female star, especially in the mid-fifties.
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 271
If there were identifiable box-office trends both in national popularity
and in gender, there was an even stronger one in terms of age. In the early
years of sound cinema it was clear from the terms in which the various
magazines conducted their polls that they expected their readers to be in-
terested primarily in younger stars. It is romantic leads who are the focus of
the majority of polls, and Ciné Miroir had published a lengthy article in
1929 categorizing the types of young leading men—the sporty type (such
as André Roanne), the whimsical (such as Albert Préjean), and the more
mature [sic] leading man (such as Angelo, Mathot, and Murat). It had also
run a competition to identify which of them was the most popular. It was
not a French star, but Ramon Navarro, who came out on top, with over a
third of the votes, followed by Jacque Catelain, Petrovich, Valentino,
Charles Rogers, Jean Angelo, Pierre Blanchar, John Gilbert, Mosjoukine,
and Pierre Batchef.93 What the magazines do not seem to have noticed for
some time is that it was already the more mature and solid leading men
who had the highest ratings in polls. It is Chevalier, Murat, and Angelo who
enter the Académie; it is Jean Murat who is recognized early in 1933 as “in-
contestably our best young lead”;94 it is Murat and Boyer who rate second
and third in the Almanach Ciné Miroir’s poll later in the same year (topped
by Garat, to the chagrin and bewilderment of Ciné Miroir);95 it is Boyer
who is the Toulouse favorite;96 it is Murat, Boyer, and Chevalier (again with
Garat) who are the male half of Ciné Miroir readers’ ideal couple.97
In the latter half of the thirties, this preference for more mature, un-
handsome male leads rather than young leading men becomes even more
apparent. Baur, Gabin, Raimu, and Jouvet rise to dominance in the rank-
ings, along with Baroux, Berry, Vanel, and Guitry. It is certainly not glam-
our and romance that is motivating people to vote for these actors in refer-
endums, but something closer to the desire for a father figure, a responsible,
confident, passionate, compassionate, and perhaps even ruthless male pro-
tector or role model. As we have seen, the discourse surrounding such stars
in the fan magazines of the period represented them as solid, substantial
men of authority—strong, silent, yet charismatic patriarchal figures, able to
impose their will by sheer force of personality. They are not, of course, a
homogeneous group. One of the few concrete indications of different au-
diences with differing tastes arises from the 1945 IFOP poll, in which
Gabin and Fernandel are recorded as appealing particularly to the working
class, whereas Barrault and Jouvet appeal more to the middle classes. At the
level that concerns us here, however, it is their common characteristics
which are striking.
The dominance of this mature masculine persona from 1937 to 1947
has as its correlative a tendency to see young leading men in much the same
light as actresses were earlier seen—as depending on a gratuitous and tran-
sitory beauty, a superficial accident of fate that made them photogenic but
 272 | , ,  
had nothing to do with the art of acting or the ability to embody a mythic
persona. It is perhaps significant that Marais, Barrault, and Philipe, who
were to soar to the top of the charts in the postwar years, were all estab-
lished theatrical actors before becoming film stars. Perhaps, also, we should
recognize a relationship between the rise of the mature male persona and
the parallel rise of the drama as a popular generic type. Both were more ap-
propriate to the exploration of a range of situations extending beyond the
sentimental and interpersonal, which constituted the normal sphere of ac-
tion of the young leading man.
During the 1950s, it is still primarily mature male actors, such as
Gabin, Boyer, Vanel, Fernandel, and now Eddie Constantine, who appear
in the top ranks. Indeed, what strikes one most about the sequence of
charts is the consistency of certain names over the years. Gabin, who enters
them in 1936, is still near the top in the late fifties. Similar observations
could be made regarding Boyer, Fernandel, and Vanel. Blanchar, who was
already rated most popular French actor in 1929, is still at the top in the
late forties, as were Baur and Raimu until their deaths in 1943 and 1946,
respectively. Among females, Edwige Feuillère is progressively more popu-
lar from 1935 to 1947, when she tops the poll, and is still high on the lists
in the late fifties. Michèle Morgan’s popularity is even more amazing, given
that she had long outlived her cult persona, and Danielle Darrieux rates
not far behind in consistency. The French film-going public was far from
fickle in its preferences.
This is most remarkable in the IFOP poll conducted in the immediate
postwar period. Gabin, Boyer, Morgan, and Rosay all rate a mention, yet
Gabin had been largely absent from French screens during the war, except
in Remorques (though admittedly he benefited from his postwar aura as a
conquering tank commander entering Paris with the Free French forces).
Boyer had in fact lived in the U.S. since 1934, had become naturalized,
and had acted in no French films since that time. Michèle Morgan had
been scarcely more visible than Gabin over the preceding years, and Fran-
çoise Rosay had gone into exile during the occupation. Yet they still appear
in the ratings lists in 1945 and after. So while to some extent the lists bear
witness to the popularity of specific films, they also bear witness to the fact
that French audiences remained faithful to their stars even when they sel-
dom saw them in films. A measure of this loyalty in the fifties was the new
rule that had to be introduced into the “Victoires”: after three such “victo-
ries” a star became a permanent divinity and no longer needed to com-
pete—indeed, was no longer allowed to compete. This rule was introduced
to exclude Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin, Gérard Philipe, Martine Carol,
and later Danielle Darrieux, who otherwise seemed likely to dominate in-
definitely.
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 273

8.3 TWO MYTHIC STEREOTYPES OF THE THIRTIES:

“GABIN” AND “MORGAN”

Certain of these more popular stars exercised an obsessive fascination over

audiences and critics alike, and thus became the object of endless com-
mentary designed to identify the source of their fascination. Among these
much-noted stars, three stand out—Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan in
the thirties, and Brigitte Bardot twenty years later. They are the clearest in-
stances of actors or actresses who came to embody mythic stereotypes,
which they subsequently brought ready-made to each new film. These were
not, as we have seen, the only such stereotypes circulating within the
French cinema, nor were they the only myths to attach themselves to these
three actors over the years, but they are the only instances in which a
stereotype came to be associated almost exclusively with a particular actor
or actress.
As tables 8.2 and 8.3 show, other actors or actresses were as popular as
these three in certain years, or even more so. Some were even as popular for
almost as long as Gabin and Morgan—notably Jean Marais, Fernandel,
Gérard Philipe, Danielle Darrieux, and Micheline Presle—yet their appeal
was more transparent and less troubling. Other stars were recognized as bet-
ter actors than these three, notably Barrault, Raimu, Blanchar, and Fresnay,
but their acting ability was precisely the factor that allowed them to assume
radically different roles from film to film. Yet others were as consistent in
the persona that they projected from film to film, notably Tati, Fernandel,
and Arletty. Yet neither professional competence nor consistent persona re-
ceived the level of obsessive analysis which surrounded the performances of
Gabin, Morgan, and Bardot. What follows is an attempt to summarize the
commentary that surrounded Gabin and Morgan at the time, and to iden-
tify the source of the trouble they caused.
Of the two, Jean Gabin was the first to impose his cinematic persona
on critics and the public. Commentators recognized this developing per-
sona surprisingly early. Several discourses had played over him in the first
half of the thirties, and certain phrases, such as “un rude gars” and “un chic
type” were to recur for many years, as was mention of his love of boxing,
hunting, fishing, football, and his place in the country. Yet from 1935 on,
commentators feel these terms and phrases are inadequate to encapsulate a
phenomenon which clearly has wider significance. It was La Bandera, re-
leased in September 1935, which triggered this awareness, reinforced in the
following year by a series of prominent roles in La Belle Équipe, Les Bas-
Fonds, Pepe le Moko, and La Grande Illusion. Pour Vous published a series of
six articles in September–October 1935, in which Gabin is represented as
 274 | , ,  
reflecting on his life, and which serve to summarize the discourses that at-
tached to him at that time.98 They mention his working-class background,
his distaste for school and tendency to play hooky, his laboring jobs, his
love of earthy and violent sports, his entry into theater through the Folies
Bergère, and the importance of friendship in his life.
But it is an article in Ciné Miroir that year which first begins to explore
the complexities of the persona which Gabin was developing. It notes the
diversity of roles that he has played up to and including the legionnaire’s
role in La Bandera, and asserts,
No one is better fitted for this role of a black sheep who is transformed into
a superbly courageous soldier. Indeed, Gabin has preserved from the com-
pany he kept as a young man and from his military service the impression of
being a man of the people. He likes to assume the air of a freethinker, he
speaks slang, he shrugs his shoulders, he’s simple, frank, and open . . . and
when the occasion calls for it, he knows how to send trouble-makers uncer-
emoniously about their business. Jean Gabin could be said to have created
on screen a character type that didn’t exist before his arrival—the bad lad
with the heart of gold, mocking, sardonic, sensitive, and generous, all of a
piece, conscious of his strength but capable of putting it to use in the name
of something higher.99

If there were relatively few references to this persona before the war,
there were even fewer during it because of Gabin’s physical and political
distance, though Malraux in 1940–41 noted his persona as one of those
mythic character-constructs, like “Marlene,” “Garbo,” and “Charlie Chap-
lin,” that had evolved out of different but convergent scenarios.100 But it
was in the postwar years, between 1949 and 1957, when Gabin’s persona
was beginning to show its age, that commentators were most fascinated by
it. In a review of Au-delà des grilles, Écran Français summarized the prewar
archetype—fatalism, cages and grills, the glimpse of an impossible love,
ports, departures, and the dream of a new life “over there”—only to point
out that this latest film undermines that myth by humanizing and particu-
larizing it, anchoring it too closely to a specific time and place.101 The same
film inspired Bazin to explore the fatality that seemed to grip the Gabin
persona. Likening those outbreaks of rage that often seemed to seal his
fate to the rage of Oedipus on the road to Thebes that led him to kill the
charioteer who was his unrecognized father, Bazin talks of the now-
conventionalized elements of the persona and of the modifications they
were undergoing as the actor aged. While he refers to the possibility of a
profound significance lying behind “Gabin,” the nearest he comes to defin-
ing that significance is his parting reference to “a world without God.”102
Some years earlier, Bazin had developed notes for use in a cine-club dis-
cussion of Le Jour se lève in which he explored the myth at greater length.
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 275
After an interrogation of the iconographic elements of the film, worthy, as
he himself remarks, of Sherlock Holmes, he devotes three pages to summa-
rizing the myth—essentially a malevolent fatality which hounds “Gabin,”
his stoic and solitary endurance of it, the glimpse of a possible salvation in
the form of a woman, the disillusion caused by her impurity/betrayal, the
outburst of anger that places him in thrall to a fatality he thought he had
outdistanced, as personified in “that secular arm of contemporary destiny:
the law, cops,” and his final submission to that destiny. But here again, no
clear interpretation of the myth is provided; the story and the persona
caught up in it are seen as having “primarily metaphysical” significance,
though Bazin does speak of the setting as a “suburban working-class Thebes
where the role of the gods is displaced onto the blind but no less transcen-
dental imperatives of society.”103
For Duvillars, whose 1950 book is devoted exclusively to myth in the
cinema, and specifically to those stars who in Malraux’s formulation have
given rise to convergent scenarios, “Gabin” is the principal mythic con-
struct of contemporary French cinema. Recapitulating Bazin’s error, Duvi-
llars also is misled by the traditional connotations of the term “myth” to see
in “Gabin” a trans-historical archetype, whose social and historical specifics
are written off as “incidental.” For him, as for Barkan a few years later, the
greatness of the Gabin myth is to have endowed the everyday existence of
the common man with a universal significance. No historical specificity is
relevant in a myth.104 Finally, although the title of Claude Mauriac’s essay,
“Jean Gabin, or the death of a myth,” might suggest some awareness of the
fact that myths are born and die for social and historical reasons, in fact the
emphasis is on the aging of the Gabin persona itself and the failure of the
central heterosexual relationship; henceforth, as in Touchez pas au grisbi, it
is male friendships which will bear the weight of any external symbol of
transcendence. Rather than having any wider meaning, the myth is seen as
tied exclusively to the aging of the actor who embodies it.105
At least at first, the Michèle Morgan persona was dependent on the
Gabin persona, but it acquired an autonomous fascination for some years.
Remarked on briefly in the immediate prewar years, it experienced an even
greater disruption on the advent of war, and was ultimately of briefer du-
ration than “Gabin,” partly (but only partly) because of reports incompat-
ible with it concerning her private life which appeared in fan magazines in
the fifties. Ciné Miroir, ever a useful source of commentary on the stars, be-
gins to notice her in 1938. Her face is described as “young, yet it seems al-
ready touched by bitterness . . . she has a look about her that one does not
easily forget . . . a shadow passes from time to time, then clears, and some-
thing almost childlike lights up her face, only to be rapidly replaced by an
indefinable gravity.”106 The following year, an extended attempt to articu-
late her significance describes her as
 276 | , ,  
a mysterious artist, never completely fulfilled . . . despite her youth and
beauty, she bears within her a secret melancholy . . . her climate is one of
pervasive anguish, for as she says happiness is out of the question for her.
. . . She seems to long for the inaccessible, the unattainable. [She has] a soul
that is extremely sensitive, and little gestures that are most poignant. She has
a child’s face. She is frail, and scarcely uses make-up at all. And she has gray-
green eyes that seem unreal. . . . She represents, in fact, that mystery which
every woman bears within herself, every predestined creature; and this is
what constitutes her charm, this is what troubles those who approach her. O
mysterious feminine.107

Regretting her absence during the war, Roger Régent notes various roles
that would have suited her, and expands on the narrative to which she is
coming to be seen as central: “That character, always a little conventional,
but which she renders not just convincing but overwhelming, of a woman
about whom one knows nothing, who appears all of a sudden, and for
whom you are willing to abandon everything, to risk everything. . . . She is
the unknown, appearing out of the storm and leaving behind her an indeli-
ble image. Who could take the place in our cinematic mythology of that
face, that look, that voice, so unforgettable that one can easily believe in
their ability to utterly transform one’s world.”108
When he recapitulates these traits in 1950, Duvillars acknowledges in
her persona something he had been unable or unwilling to recognize in
other mythic types—its peculiar historicity. Reflecting on the lack of dis-
tinguishable character types in the young women of classical theater, he sees
“the catastrophic young woman” whom Michèle Morgan in his view per-
sonifies as “a mythic being who is specifically modern,” analogous to the
young women of Anouilh’s plays. He still speaks of the fatality that hounds
her as “age-old,” but notes that “there is something fresh, something spe-
cific to our century in her.”109
Cinémonde’s homage to her at the end of 1951 marks the end of the
“Morgan” myth. More than any other commentary on her, it makes plain
in a series of almost untranslatable phrases the tension between opposing
principles which constituted much of her fascination. She is “a creature of
extreme modesty, shy and distrustful, who tries at times to temper her daz-
zling physical presence by a distant reserve” (“pudeur ombrageuse . . . cette
réserve hautaine . . . cet éclat qu’elle s’applique parfois à voiler”).110 Already,
however, this report notes that she has had a son by a recently terminated
marriage to an American, and in 1952, when she marries Henri Vidal, she
becomes enmeshed in a quite banal discourse of the age, that of the happily
married bourgeoise, with a much-loved family, a comfortably furnished
flat, and ultimately an ivy-covered chateau overlooking the Seine (not to
mention visits to Duvivier on the Riviera). The distinctive qualities which
 The Stars in Their (Dis)courses | 277
critics and spectators alike had once read into her performances are no
longer evoked.
The early fifties saw, then, the termination or radical transformation of
the only two truly mythic stereotypes which the thirties French cinema and
its audiences had seen fit to embody in specific actors. A principal element
in the fascination exercised by their personae, as later by that of Brigitte Bar-
dot, is captured by the incessant oxymorons that appear in articles about
them—each has a persona constituted of incompatible or even contradic-
tory elements. “Gabin” is of humble origins yet inherently noble, guilty of
more or less serious social misdemeanors yet intrinsically innocent, a rough
diamond with a heart of gold. “Michèle Morgan” is at once familiar and in-
accessible, dazzling and reserved, pure yet bearing some obscure guilt, de-
pendent on a man to whom she is committed, yet apart, mysterious. These
two figures seemed troublesome to contemporary commentators precisely
because their personae were not readily definable in a simple term or phrase,
as was the case with the discursive personae listed earlier. Their more com-
plex images made them stand out from the more readily definable types that
other actors assumed and discarded in the course of their careers. It was also
this sense of internal complexity and contradictoriness which rendered
them suitable for the task of representing some of the more problematic as-
pects of contemporary reality. Other actors might represent one aspect of a
problematic, or even several in the course of successive roles, but these three
embodied the problematic as a whole, allowing the spectator to recognize
his or her own anguish, his or her own tension and indecision.
Whereas in general it is clear that for “Gabin” this ambiguity was played
out at the level of class (and later for “Brigitte Bardot” at the level of inter-
generational conflict), it is not quite so clear how to place “Michèle Mor-
gan,” though possibly she simply embodied a move to revise the stereotypes
surrounding the term “woman.” If so, we can say that, in a period of in-
tense social and historical crisis, the three key mythic personae of the clas-
sic cinema worked to question and revise key assumptions about the three
principal thematic fields of the time—class, gender, and age.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that Renoir used Gabin three times in
the 1930s, and was in fact disposed to exploit the leading stars of the day in
the normal course of his filmmaking. He had used in turn Michel Simon
(three times), Fernandel, his brother Pierre Renoir (three times), Max Dearly,
Larquey, Valentine Tessier, Jules Berry (twice), Florelle, René Lef èvre, Jouvet
(twice), Pierre Fresnay, Simone Simon, and Suzy Prim, not to mention von
Stroheim. All of these would have been well known to audiences of the day,
highly rated by them in popularity polls, and a key attraction in the public-
ity campaigns. Yet of the seven leading roles in La Règle du jeu, not one was
a “star” in the terms of the day. That Nora Grégor was an unknown is a
widely recognized fact, and Renoir himself had only played minor roles in
 278 | , ,  
a few of his own films (plus one silent film and one German sound film).
Of the other five actors, none had ever appeared in any of the popularity
polls as an audience favorite except Toutain, who had been rated tenth as
Prince Charming back in 1933! Of course, Carette, Gaston Modot, Dalio,
and Paulette Dubost were well-known supporting actors, useful for charac-
ter roles, comic off-siders and stooges, whose presence had invigorated
many thirties films, including several of Renoir’s own, but none was a lead
actor of the sort to appear in large print on a playbill. Of the seven, only
Toutain had ever figured so prominently in the popular imagination as to
have a discourse woven about him: the slightly comic discourse of the acro-
batic sportif. In its aviator form, that discourse is, of course, exploited by the
film, but Toutain’s presence was scarcely sufficient in itself to carry the film
as Gabin, Jouvet, von Stroheim, and Fresnay had recently carried Les Bas-
Fonds, La Grande Illusion, and La Bête humaine. In fact, the only other Ren-
oir film of the thirties to resemble La Règle du jeu in its absence of “stars” is
Toni, which takes this tendency to extremes. When one considers this fact
in conjunction with the way Dalio is used against the grain and the volatile
Toutain is killed off at the end, a degree of confusion in the reception of
the film becomes more understandable.
 NINE

Box-Office Success in the Thirties:

Films “debased by popular taste”?

Future historians will only have to look through a group of box-office

successes and will need little critical judgment for their work. There
they will see our pitiful gestures, our current mannerisms, our false
sentiments—an unmistakable reflection of the poverty of the era.
—Bardèche and Brasillach (1936)
The cinema is debased in its very essence, condemned irrevocably by
its dependence on popular taste.
—Varlet

9.1 AUDIENCES AND EXHIBITION PRACTICES 1929–39

A s another way of focusing attention on the films which spoke most in-
tensely to French audiences of the thirties of matters central to their
identity, this chapter attempts to isolate those French films screened during
the thirties which attracted the largest audiences. While this might seem the
only logical way to deal with the problem, at least one alternative strategy
exists: to isolate films which returned the highest receipts.
The two measures could differ significantly, especially in the thirties,
when formal regulation of entry prices was minimal. There was always a
considerable difference in status and in entry price between different first-
release movie theaters, as there was between these theaters and the larger
array of local theaters, so a film which excelled in exclusive release could
earn far higher returns from the same number of entries. This was to be all
the more true in the late forties and the fifties, when prices were regulated
and certain films were accorded the right to charge a supplement on top of
the regular ticket price, primarily for reasons of production cost (color,
large casts, length, etc.). It was always the case, therefore, that the same
number of tickets sold for two different films could generate a markedly
higher or lower return, depending on the supplement charged and the re-
lease trajectories of the films. Table 9.1 provides a concrete illustration of
this problem from the fifties, when all the relevant data are available. When
 280 | , ,  
Table 9.1 Top First-Release Films, Paris, 1954

In order of returns (millions of francs) In order of entries (thousands)

1. Si Versailles m’était conté (S) 274 1. Si Versailles m’était conté (L) 685
2. Tant qu’il y aura des hommes (S) 136 2. Tant qu’il y aura des hommes (L) 413
3. Vacances romaines (S) 107 3. Vacances romaines (L) 407
4. Désert vivant* 98 4. Les Femmes s’en balancent 343
5. Touchez pas au grisbi (S) 96 5. Papa, maman, la bonne et moi 274
6. Les Femmes s’en balancent 91 6. Désert vivant* 267
7. Papa, maman, la bonne et moi 89 7. Les Temps modernes 266
8. Monsieur Ripois 85 8. Touchez pas au grisbi 265
9. Le Rouge et le noir (S)* 85 9. Pain, amour et fantaisie 262
10. Le Blé en herbe 77 10. Escalier de service* 243
11. Les Temps modernes 76 11. Un grain de folie 241
12. Pain, amour et fantaisie 71 12. Le Blé en herbe 212

* First release not yet finished

(S) Price supplementation
(L) Longer than normal
Italics Foreign film
Source: Le Film Français (31 Dec. 1954)

box-office returns rather than entry numbers are the focus of attention,
Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Rouge et le noir rise, respectively, from eighth to
fifth and from off the table to ninth, largely on the basis of price supple-
ments. Clearly, other price differentials were also operating to promote
Monsieur Ripois from off the table to eighth, and to demote Modern Times.
There are different arguments for adopting entries and for adopting re-
ceipts as the measure of a film’s mythic status. Possibly, within a capitalist
society mythic status is most readily measured by the amount of money
that the population as a whole is willing to spend in order to participate in
the mythic experience. The alternative argument is that a myth is quantifi-
able in terms of the proportion of the social group affected. The more peo-
ple drawn to a film, and the more often, the more significant is the myth.
The latter viewpoint is the one on which the present calculations are based.
Therefore, all figures given in this chapter are based on the number of en-
tries for each film, and tend to measure the extent of reach of the myth
through the population rather than the monetary value that those specta-
tors implicitly assigned to it.
Whether the focus is on entries or returns, however, the task of ranking
the films of the thirties in order of popularity can never be anything but
controversial, because of the lack of reliable data. Audience numbers are, if
anything, harder to ascertain than returns, since trade papers of the day,
which constitute the primary source of information, were preoccupied
Figure 9.1. French Audiences 1930–60
 282 | , ,  
with profitability rather than with the procedures used by distributors and
exhibitors to obtain those profits. Certain basic parameters are available,
however, and they allow us to recognize the relative size of thirties audi-
ences in the wider contexts both of the classic French cinema and of other
national cinemas.
The size of the total French audience from 1930 to 1960 is known with
some degree of reliability, and within that global total the size of the audi-
ence for French films has been fairly accurately documented. Figure 9.1
records the accepted figures. One unavoidable conclusion is that the cin-
ema in France never achieved the levels of attendance achieved by the cin-
ema in America, Britain, Italy, or even Germany. One cannot speak of it in
quite the same confident way as a mass medium, a “people’s cinema.” Audi-
ences of 220 million were regularly achieved in the thirties; the numbers
surged briefly past 300 million in the “protected” environment of the war
years, then rose again in the postwar years to their highest level ever—about
380 million. These figures represent about 5.8 entries per head in the thir-
ties, and 9 entries per head in the fifties. Such figures pale beside 30 entries
per head in Britain, and 40 per head in America. Even in 1957, half of the
French population never went to the movies as much as once per year. Ef-
fectively, only 50 percent of the French population have ever been “movie-
goers.”
Several explanations have been proposed for these low attendance levels,
not least the lack of penetration of the cinema into rural areas. As Ginette
Vincendeau notes, if we can make any claim for the cinema in France as a
popular medium, “we have to remember that we mean a popular urban (not
to say metropolitan) spectacle, excluding an unusually large proportion of
the population.”1 Among urban centers, Paris always recorded the highest
attendance. At its peak, the city recorded twenty-eight entries per movie-
goer per year, against twenty-one in larger provincial cities and ten in small
towns.2 Indeed, Paris always recorded about three times the national average
of entries—at least 20 percent from about 6.3 percent of the population,
and, if my calculations are correct, over 30 percent at times in the thirties—
because of the more up-to-date equipment, the wider range of films on
offer, and easy access to large numbers of movie theaters.
These variations need to be borne in mind since, as we will see, until
the mid-fifties the preferences of Parisian and provincial audiences differed
markedly, and the preferences differed from province to province. Discrep-
ancies between Paris and the regions gradually became less important dur-
ing the fifties, and it is reasonable to see this slow homogenization of French
movie audiences as part of a wider homogenization of the nation, due
partly to economic and political factors and partly to consequent social and
cultural factors. Communications became more rapid, TV joined radio to
provide a simultaneous cultural experience for the whole nation, rural areas
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 283
were integrated into the road network, car ownership increased signifi-
cantly, and tourism drew the population into a common experience of the
different regions of “their” nation. In fact, by the end of the fifties, France
was beginning for the first time to become a coherent cultural community.
But throughout the classic period 1930–60, audiences were differenti-
ated almost as much by class as by region. The cinema was never predomi-
nantly a working-class medium in France, even in the urban environment
where it was strongest. By the thirties, it was primarily the middle classes—
or at least the lower-middle classes—who went to the movies, possibly in
part because they took over so much of the theatrical repertoire which these
audiences had patronized. Going to the movies, or at least to a certain sort
of movie, could constitute a cultural experience which directly substituted
for those “legitimate theater” experiences, which were rapidly becoming be-
yond the financial reach of even middle-class audiences. The industry jour-
nal Cinéopse returned to this topic several times in the early thirties,3 and
Durand reports a 1937 survey confirming that it is “the rising social class,
working in the centers of big cities, and above all in Paris, [that] has become
the prime target for the new theaters. Movie houses on the Champs Élysées
and the boulevards, where the highest concentration of office workers is to
be found, multiplied starting in the early thirties.”4 A series of studies by the
Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) in the fifties produced sim-
ilar results. Indeed, by 1957 and 1958, the CNC is contrasting England,
where the working class go to the movies most often, with France, where it
is the middle classes who do so, while the upper and upper-middle classes
are less frequent movie-goers and the poor the least frequent of all.5
A series of surveys in the sixties and seventies related theater attendance
directly to education level and found that the more highly educated went
proportionately more frequently.6 A significant proportion of these well-
educated movie-goers were students. Indeed, at least as much as by region
or by class, audiences for the classic French cinema can best be defined by
age. In the fifties, a detailed survey noted that those aged fifteen to twenty-
four went more often than anyone else—about thirty-two times per year, or
twice as often as those aged twenty-five to forty-nine, and over four times as
often as those aged fifty and above. The same survey noted in passing that
the total number of English spectators under fifteen years of age was greater
than that of all French spectators put together. It also began to break down
audiences according to taste: up to the age of twelve, fantasy prevailed;
from then on there was a greater demand for “realism,” and the tastes of
male and female audiences began to diversify according to traditional gen-
der roles—male spectators (the majority) preferred sporting themes, fights,
patriotic themes, Westerns, adventures, and exotic locations, whereas fe-
male spectators preferred artistic themes, luxurious settings, charm, love,
and historical and social themes.7 Courting couples significantly increased
 284 | , ,  
the numbers in the fifteen-to-twenty-four age group, though there is some
suggestion that this category of spectator still “went to the movies” rather
than going to see specific films. In sum, young, well-educated, middle-class
spectators constituted a core of movie-goers on whom, according to Bon-
nell, the French cinema came to depend and still depends for its existence.
He notes that at the beginning of the sixties about 42 percent of movie-
goers (i.e., about 21 percent of the population) provided 80 percent of en-
tries, with the rest recording irregular and fairly sparse attendance.8 While a
great number of these intensive movie-goers have always been students,
they never constituted an absolute majority.
However rudimentary as sociological data, the above observations do
serve to remind us that there was no single coherent audience for the classic
French cinema; there were a number of different audiences, presumably
with different ideological needs. Any attempt to identify mythic elements
in the relevant films must take into account the difficulty of correlating a
given mythic image or narrative with “its” audience. This problem is only
exacerbated by the widely recognized tendency throughout most, if not all,
of this period for some audiences to attend their local movie theater regard-
less of the film that was screening. Although the CNC survey in 1958 af-
firmed that this was still largely the case at that point, there is evidence to
suggest that the progressively greater proportions of moderately wealthy
and young spectators who made up audiences in the fifties were becoming
more selective in their choice of film and ranging more widely in their
search for a theater that screened the specific films and genres that suited
them. Of course, if the tendency for audiences to attend local theaters re-
gardless of what film was screening had been uniform, all films would have
succeeded equally, and we know that this was not the case. The figures con-
firm that a high degree of choice was being exercised by a large proportion
of spectators in all periods.
This choice did not always favor French films. Theater managers noted
that in the prewar period such American super-productions as Sign of the
Cross, King Kong, Cleopatra, and Snow White were more popular than most
French releases of their year, along with Chaplin’s Modern Times and Capra’s
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Lost Horizons. Similarly, in the postwar years, at
or near the top of the (now more reliable) tables are such super-productions
as Gone with the Wind, Cinderella, Samson and Delilah, King Solomon’s
Mines, The Tunic, Quo Vadis, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, The Ten Com-
mandments, and Around the World in Eighty Days, together with Hitchcock’s
Rebecca, To Catch a Thief, and The Man who Knew Too Much. Indeed, in
terms of the number of films being screened, American films had a 50 per-
cent share of the market in the thirties, whereas French films never had sig-
nificantly more than a 30 percent share. On average, however, American
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 285
films attracted fewer spectators than French films, so that both national cin-
emas attracted the same total audience.
During the occupation, of course, American films, and indeed those of
most other countries, were banned from much or all of France, so French
films enjoyed a significant advantage, and the proportion of spectators
which they attracted grew from 50 percent to 75 percent and perhaps even
85 percent in a momentarily larger market. In terms of sheer profitability,
the prospects for French producers during the war were even better than
this suggests, since the number of films produced was limited by wartime
shortages to between 30 and 75 per year, as opposed to about 120 to 160
per year before the war and 100 per year after it. The industry was well
aware of the paradoxically beneficial effect of the war on profitability.
“Commercially,” Ciné Mondial noted at the end of 1941, “the cinema is
becoming an excellent financial proposition, since covering the cost of a
film is no longer, as it was only yesterday, a hypothetical possibility, but
rather a certainty.”9 As always more than courteous toward the occupying
forces, the magazine attributed this to the opportunity currently being pro-
vided to produce a truly original and national cinema, free at last of Amer-
ican influence.
It was not, of course, free of German influence, nor was it free of com-
petition with German and Italian films. Several of these were extremely
popular with French audiences. Face au bolchevisme played in thirty-eight
theaters in the occupied zone in September 1941, and the long runs of
Hitlerjunge Quex and Le Juif Süss are well known. In Paris, the latter played
simultaneously in eight theaters in German and five in French, and it is
mentioned as having been particularly successful in a wide range of provin-
cial cities. To some extent, these long runs were due to the presence in
France of occupation troops, viewing films in their own language, yet this
cannot in itself explain the outstanding success of two German color spec-
taculars—La Ville dorée and Baron Münchausen—which were far more
popular than most French productions in 1943 and 1944, respectively, the
former playing continuously for forty weeks—not far short of Les Enfants
du paradis at war’s end.
After the war, with the return of American films, the share of audiences
watching French films decreased again to 50 percent. Because of the post-
war market boom, this proportion translated into numbers almost as high
as the wartime 80 percent, though from twice the number of films. Taking
all this into account, we can say that for French films, the audience stood at
about 110 million in the thirties, then jumped briefly to about 240 million
during the war, then stabilized at 200 million from 1947 until the final cat-
astrophic years of the fifties. Moreover, if we allow for the considerable
fluctuations in the number of French films released onto the market, we
 286 | , ,  
Table 9.2. Changes in French Film Industry in the Thirties
1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939a
Gross receipts
(millions fr)
All France 801 938 934 879 832 (840) (875) (1,045) (1,205) (995)
Paris 305 361 359 338 320 313 336 395 452 373
Gross audience
(millions)b
All France (200) 234 233 219 208 (210) (224) (245) (254) (160)
Paris (61) 72 72 68 64 63 67 (75) 78 48

Films produced 94 148 154 150 115 127 143 124 119 92

Films released 48 124 162 146 150 127 126 125 127 66
Spectators
per film
(thousands)
All France 2,000 940 700 750 700 830 890 980 1,000 (1,200)
Paris 625 290 222 233 227 248 266 300 307 364
Sound theaters
All France (552) 1,215 1,797 2,537 3,228 3,450 3,650 3,979
Paris (100) (160) (190) (220) 249 284 296 320 345 364
Weekly audiencec
All Paris 9,999 8,654 7,287 5,944 4,942 4,265 4,352 4,668 (4,559) (4,348)
General release 7,000 5,219 4,312 3,377 2,845 2,413 2,467 2,550 2,508 2,380

a. Some parts of this column calculated for the eight months from January to August.
b. Gross audience for French films: approximately 50% of these figures.
c. Average weekly audience for each theater. French films averaged approximately 10%
above, U.S. films 10% below.
Figures in parentheses, and for 1930 and 1939, contain some degree of uncertainty, for a
variety of reasons.

can say that, in very general terms, wartime films were approximately twice
as likely as postwar films and four times as likely as prewar films to be prof-
itable. To put this more concretely, the average national audience for each
French film was seven hundred thousand in the early thirties, rose to 1 mil-
lion in the late thirties and to 4 million during the war, and settled at 2 mil-
lion in the postwar period.
Though the overall figures suggest that both the thirties and the fifties
were periods of relatively stable audience numbers, it did not seem so to the
industry at the time, and for good reason. Contemporary accounts implied
that there was a significant slump in 1933, which lasted until 1936, and a
further slump in 1950, which produced a period of uncertainty lasting per-
haps five years. It is possible to show that these periods when the market
seemed depressed were periods of transition, when, although audience num-
bers were unchanged, tastes were changing, and filmmakers were struggling
Figure 9.2. Monthly Entries 1937–41
 288 | , ,  
to identify the direction in which they were turning. Consequently, during
these periods there were relatively few really successful films and/or large
numbers of unsuccessful films.
If we focus specifically on the thirties, we find that the overall French
audience fluctuated more than is generally believed, the number of films
coming onto the market fluctuated enormously, and the number of the-
aters equipped for sound increased throughout the decade, at first relatively
rapidly, then more steadily. This affected the average audience available per
French sound film released, and the average audience available per sound
theater. It therefore affected both producers and exhibitors. Table 9.2 illus-
trates the extent of these fluctuations and of their effects on the industry.
The first thing to note is that after two years of relatively high audience
numbers in 1931 and 1932, a steady decrease occurred, but that from 1936
on a quite rapid rise saw audiences at their highest for the decade. Detailed
figures available from 1937 on (see figure 9.2) indicate that December 1937
was almost certainly the best month of the whole decade, and that during
the period from August 1938 to April 1939, and perhaps even right
through to August (except for December 1938, when many theaters were
closed as a protest), Paris theaters, and no doubt those in the rest of France,
experienced a boom unparalleled since 1930.
This fluctuation begins to explain the sense of crisis that seized the in-
dustry toward the middle of the decade, as the unimaginable wealth that
the first sound film releases seemed to promise began to fade visibly before
its eyes. Sound had abruptly generated increased audiences for entrepre-
neurs who had risked investing in the “new” technology, as autobiographies
such as those by Richebé and Braunberger indicate.10 Despite pressure not
to mention box-office returns, Harlé, the editor of La Cinématographie
Française, made an exception in 1930 because of the remarkable figures
coming in for the first sound feature films.11 In July of that year, reports
from certain Paris theaters suggested that sound films were grossing be-
tween 30 percent and 130 percent more than silent productions had grossed
the year before. Again in 1931 La Cinématographie Française exults in the
profitability of the industry, despite the depression (which in fact did not
hit France with full force until the following year).12 The relatively cheap
device of transferring to the screen a mass of successful theatrical comedies
prolonged and broadened the euphoria. It was clear, however, to all ob-
servers that 1933 was a bad year. In January 1934, the returns for provincial
towns for the previous year were noted as being down by 10 to 15 percent,
and La Cinématographie Française (somewhat inaccurately) bemoaned the
fact that even the big money-earners of that year had seldom passed two
weeks in first release, whereas in the preceding years five weeks had not been
uncommon.13Later in 1934, an 8.1 percent drop for Paris theaters was an-
nounced, and a further nationwide drop was predicted. The tone of alarm
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 289
sharpened in early 1935, when final figures for 1934 confirmed these ap-
prehensions with a decrease of about 11 percent for both Paris and the
provinces.14 The slump in confidence lasted for over two years, and was seen
by many as related not just to the depression but to general socio-political
disarray.15
In fact, the crisis in audience numbers had been exacerbated for pro-
ducers by the dramatic increase in the number of films coming onto the
market, as more studios were equipped for sound production and more
producers sought to exploit the boom in profits generated by early sound
films. The number of films produced in France rose rapidly to a maximum
of about 150 in the years 1931 to 1933, and the subsequent release of these
films onto the market in 1932 to 1934 saw average audiences per sound
film fall from about 2 million in 1930 to seven hundred thousand in 1932.
It was in 1933 that this unexpectedly abrupt decline in receipts impacted
most forcefully on production companies, with the result that 1934 saw the
lowest production figures for the decade. This dramatic reduction consti-
tuted a form of involuntary self-regulation which was effective in stabiliz-
ing, then slowly improving, the average returns (i.e., the likelihood of
profit). Consequently, for producers the sense of crisis was already dimin-
ishing even as the 1934–35 season began. Tentative evaluations of the qual-
ity of the past year’s output were positive, and producers seemed reassured
about the financial basis of the industry.16 As a result of this restored confi-
dence, producers again “over-produced” in 1936, though the number of
films actually released onto the market each season remained remarkably
stable up to the declaration of war.
During the slump in mid-decade, many of the less professional direc-
tors and production companies fell by the wayside, and the films that were
produced thereafter were perceived to be of noticeably higher quality.
Commentators speak of “the dramatic recovery of the French cinema” and
call 1935 “the year of fine films . . . with grand and sumptuous sets.” In its
annual summary, La Cinématographie Française considers that the industry
can look forward to 1936 with confidence: “Never has the French cinema
been so able to rely on the beauty of its productions and its currently well-
deserved reputation.”17 A large proportion of the next two years’ reduced
output was successful at the box office, and commentators attributed this in
large part to more lavish sets and costumes, and more generally to a greater
attention to the visual elegance of the image. The idea that quality was
preferable to, and incompatible with, quantity was beginning to take hold
of the industry’s financiers, and the experience of the war years was only to
confirm their belief in this dictum.
By the end of 1937, several commentators in Cinéopse are expressing
the view that the current season’s films are quite exceptional, and that the
French cinema is entering a period of glory. It is not just the new blood
 290 | , ,  
(Marc Allégret, Carné, Chenal, etc.), whom Feyder talks of as bringing
about “a renaissance of the French cinema,” but international recognition
in the form of awards and record-breaking runs in America. “There can be
no doubt that the French cinema now takes pride of place in the interna-
tional marketplace, after the American cinema.”18 This renewed confidence
can be measured materially, both in the industry’s willingness to undertake
costly costume dramas and in its production of costly promotional
brochures inserted in industry journals over the following years to promote
those productions—in color, on glossy paper, and featuring elaborate fold-
out sections. To judge by their continuing presence, the period of confi-
dence lasted right through 1939 to the outbreak of war.
Interestingly, this resurgence of profitability and confidence took place
in parallel with a number of political disturbances associated with the Pop-
ular Front which had potentially damaging effects on both production and
exhibition. At the beginning of 1934, political disturbances had already
cost the industry an estimated 7 million francs, and the industry’s conser-
vative journal expressed the hope that they would not further exacerbate
what was then a worsening industrial situation.19 Then, in June 1936, there
was a series of strikes in all the studios, which La Cinématographie Française
attempted to write off as of no importance. Further “social movements” in
the second half of the year were again written off as “transient,” barely de-
flecting “the common purpose of all sectors of the industry.” Strikes, or
threatened strikes, characterized as “useless” by the journal, also marred the
first half of 1937, causing chaos and further losses.20
Yet the fact that the tone of the industry’s organ remained so relatively
benign in the face of such disruption is some indication of the fundamen-
tally healthy state of the industry’s economy in the years 1936–37. It is a lit-
tle difficult to estimate exactly what proportion of production showed a
profit in those expansive times, because no clear figures exist indicating ei-
ther the true costs or the actual returns to French producers, and opinions
differed as to what multiple of a film’s cost had to be taken in at the box of-
fice before a producer cleared his expenses. Nevertheless, I would estimate,
as did certain commentators at the time, that two thirds of the annual pro-
duction in the late thirties cleared a profit, and only about five films failed
catastrophically each year. A good dozen films each year, or about 10 per-
cent of production, were outstandingly successful, both justifying their
producers’ policy of quality production and permitting its expansion. Most
of the box-office successes were large-scale productions with elaborate sets,
a technical finish rarely apparent earlier in the decade, and a narrative econ-
omy more typical of American films.
A producer’s view of the thirties would therefore see the decade as
neatly divided into two periods of profitability, interrupted by a crisis due
almost exclusively to over-production of cheap, small-scale films. Once
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 291
that error had been rectified, the industry looked set to satisfy all the ex-
pectations raised at the beginning of the decade. An exhibitor’s view of the
same decade would be less sanguine, seeing it as opening on a note of wild
optimism to which events would subsequently give the lie. The principal
source of their misfortune was a gradual increase in the number of theaters
equipped for sound—or, rather, the source of their misplaced optimism in
1930 and 1931 was the relatively small number of theaters so equipped,
such that the large sums generated by the first sound films released were
channeled through the box offices of relatively few exhibitors. Their widely
reported delight instantly encouraged others to attempt to participate in
the bonanza. Although the rate of conversion of French theaters to sound
was relatively slow by international standards, nevertheless an average of six
hundred theaters was added to the total each year between 1930 and 1934.
By that time, almost all the silent theaters that could justify the cost of
equipment for sound had been so equipped, while many music halls and
other public venues had also been converted and a large number of new
theaters had been built.
This process was more rapid and extensive in Paris than in the rest of
France. The number of theaters in the capital had been stable during the
twenties, fluctuating between 185 and 190. On the introduction of sound,
over 100 of them were equipped in the first year, and as well as equipping
the rest over the next few years, the industry engaged in a hasty construction
program. From 123 (out of 190) theaters equipped for sound by March
1931, the total rose to 364 by 1939. While various sources give slightly dif-
ferent figures, it is clear that an average of 20 new theaters were built each
year in Paris, with peaks of 33 new and newly converted theaters in 1933,
and 39 in 1935.
For exhibitors, in the context of relatively stable audience numbers, the
consequences of this steady expansion in numbers of theaters were very se-
rious. The exorbitant profits of 1930, when 800 million francs was shared
between the (rather less than) 490 French sound theaters available in the
course of that year, rapidly dropped as 900 million francs was shared in
1931 and 1932 between about 1,200, then 1,800, theaters. By 1934, the
take had subsided to 832 million francs, now shared between about 3,200
theaters. Within four years the average annual take per theater had fallen
from about 2 million francs to about 250,000 francs, and was to fall even
further. These figures begin to explain the sensation of having hit the jack-
pot that the industry experienced in the first heady years of the thirties,
with both producers and exhibitors sharing in the bonanza. But equally the
rapid drop in receipts that occurred thereafter explains the progressive anx-
iety that overtook this side of the industry in 1933 and 1934. The drop was
to some extent visible to exhibitors in falling attendance, as the average at-
tendance per theater per week fell from well over ten thousand to under five
 292 | , ,  
thousand, and in suburban theaters to under twenty-five hundred. Under
these circumstances, competition for customers became intense, commen-
tators begin to emphasize the fragility of the exhibition sector, and a series
of strategies was explored over the middle years of the decade to counter
the deteriorating returns to exhibitors.
One such strategy was the double program. It is well known that certain
theaters explored the possibility of offering not just two films for the price
of one, but three, four, or six, together with the provision of food as an
extra inducement. This strategy pitted exhibitors against distributors and
producers, since in any multiple screening the same box-office take was di-
vided among two or more films. A glance at weekly program guides for the
time confirms the results of a survey of theater managers which, while
identifying a wide range of variation, suggested that the normal length of a
program was 150 to 170 minutes, and that many exceeded three hours.
While a large number of those surveyed adopted the tactic of not respond-
ing to these questions, some 257 acknowledged that they regularly screened
two full-length films, and another 287 that they screened a full-length and
a mid-length film. The suspicion that this represented simply the tip of the
iceberg was voiced by La Cinématographie Française in June 1933. “Will the
somber effect of the double program darken our skies as it has darkened
those of America, Germany, and England?” it asked. “Our films have diffi-
culty covering costs as it is, and as receipts fall in all theaters, spreading the
producers’ share of those receipts over two or more feature films seems a
dangerous experiment.”21 Yet by the end of 1934 the journal was forced to
acknowledge that double programs were becoming the norm.22
Producers did not, however, stop campaigning for regulations to put an
end to the practice. This was just one of several instances in which the en-
trepreneurial independence which the industry so valued, and defended so
vociferously, came into conflict with the desire of one or another part of
that industry to impose industry-wide norms and regulations that could
only have been effected by government legislation of the sort imposed in
Germany and later in occupied France. By September 1937, over two
thirds of theaters were screening two or more films per program (67.43
percent, compared to 31.16 percent single features, the rest being programs
of shorts or news23). Even second-run exclusive-release theaters were screen-
ing double programs. One incidental effect of this practice was to increase
significantly the audience for many B-grade films which otherwise might
not have recorded so many screenings. If Parisians recorded 78 million vis-
its to the theater in 1938, they actually saw well over 100 million films, and
perhaps even 150 million, many of which they were not really interested in
seeing.
Another strategy that exhibitors explored to attract customers in an un-
regulated market was to undercut the entry price of competitors. This was
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 293
Table 9.3. Recommended Minimum Prices, 1936, 1938, 1939 (in francs)
1936 1938 1939

First exclusive release 10, 8, 6 12, 10 12, 10

Second exclusive release 8, 6, 5 10, 8 10, 8
Third exclusive release 7, 6 8, 7
Pre-general release 6, 5 6, 5 7, 6

First general release 4, 3 5, 4 5, 4

Second general release 4, 3.50 4, 3
Suburban theaters 3, 2.50 3.50, 3 3.50, 3

News and documentary 4, 3

a potentially self-defeating measure, but the pressure to implement it was

only exacerbated by the increasing penury of the potential clientele. Entry
prices, which had been relatively stable in the early years of the decade, were
in 1934–35 reduced (in some theaters) to two or three francs. Certain of
them, even in Paris, advertised entry at one franc—indeed, one new theater
even called itself the Ciné Un Franc. The undercutting of entry prices was
not confined to local theaters. Reductions were bringing down the entry
price even of first-run theaters on the Grands Boulevards and Champs-
Élysées, normally between ten and twenty francs, to six or seven francs. The
industry immediately instituted a campaign to establish minimum prices,
resulting in a uniquely effective form of internal self-regulation. The Ciné
Un Franc was induced to change its name to the Ciné Deux Francs, and
others were likewise forced into line. For the rest of the decade, a table of
(unofficial) minimum prices was published and widely observed. Table 9.3
provides an indication of these entry prices for the various categories of cin-
ema in the latter half of the decade. The prices were minimums, and had to
apply to not more than 30 percent of seats in a theater, the rest being at least
0.50 franc more expensive.
In fact, the average entry price for most of the decade was four francs
nationwide, and five francs in Paris. The entry price seems to have increased
by about 10 percent in the summer of 1937, so that in 1938 and early 1939
it was 5.80 francs in Paris,24 with a further increase in March 1939 bringing
the average Paris entry price to 6.8 francs. This still left the cinema a rela-
tively cheaper form of entertainment than earlier in the decade, and it did
little to placate exhibitors.
Given that the principal source of the exhibitors’ problem was the ex-
panding number of theaters, one logical strategy would have been to pro-
ceed as had producers in the face of an increase in films produced—to
contract, or at least stabilize, the number of theaters which they themselves,
 294 | , ,  
after all, were building. From the middle of the decade on, a campaign to
this effect was waged by spokesmen for some exhibitors, with little or no
success. Even in 1934, commentators were noting that the 262 Paris the-
aters then equipped for sound already provided 3.7 million seats for 2.8
million Parisians.25 Surely, a saturation point had been reached; yet by 1938
an article in an otherwise upbeat review of the industry, entitled “Danger:
Too Many Theaters,” noted that the proportion had now increased to two
seats per inhabitant per week, when each inhabitant attended only eighteen
times a year.26 “The construction of new theaters is an aberration,” pro-
claimed the industry journal, “especially when so many of those that al-
ready exist are experiencing such difficult times.”27 Yet the previous year had
seen another 24 theaters opened in Paris alone, and the same was to occur
in 1938, with a further 20 opened before the outbreak of war. “Should we
have a statute limiting the construction of theaters?” asked the journal,28
conveniently forgetting that the industry’s principal anxiety for some years
had been the fear of government intervention in the industry’s affairs. The
threat then, however, had been of nationalization by a left-wing govern-
ment. Now the industry could hope for more “constructive” intervention.
Throughout the last year before the war, the industry continued its
campaign for the licensing of theater ownership and construction, without
any effect. It is noticeable that these preoccupations of the exhibition sector
ran parallel to and were in marked contrast to the renewed vigor and opti-
mism of the rest of the industry. As one set of headlines proclaimed the vi-
tality and drive of the French cinema, another set of headlines reported
that the general assembly of the industry was anxiously calling for a formal
maximum to be set on theater numbers and a six- to twelve-month mora-
torium on all construction. Ironically, it called at the same time for the gov-
ernmental regulation of entry prices and receipts, which it had so long
resisted.29
It may seem hard to understand why a sector of the industry should be
so unable to control a process for which it was itself responsible. The main
reason is that the exhibition sector was far from coherent as a body. It con-
sisted, at one extreme, of a few large corporations which dabbled in pro-
duction and/or distribution, and which had a number of exclusive-release
theaters in all the main cities, and at the other end of a multitude of own-
ers of local suburban, provincial, and rural theaters whose organizational
base was weak. Not all suffered equally, because the relationship between
exclusive-release and general-release theaters was unequal and constantly
evolving throughout the decade.
Because this set of relationships affects our ability to recognize which
were the most popular films of the decade, it is worth outlining the
changes in institutional practices that took place in the course of the dec-
ade. In the late twenties, there had been few exclusive-release theaters (salles
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 295
d’exclusivité ), and those that existed were all on the Grands Boulevards—
the Gaumont Palace, of course, and the Madeleine, but also the Cameo,
the Marivaux, the Aubert Palace, and the Max Linder. Several of these were
independent (for instance, the Marivaux, the Cameo, and the Max Lin-
der), and it was not the case that all films were released through them. They
did, however, have the pick of the more prestigious films, which com-
monly ran for several months each, while the rest of the available films
were released directly into suburban theaters (salles de quartier), some of
which belonged to the big firms but most of which were independent.30
There was therefore effectively a grading of output into A films, which had
exclusive release, and B films, which went straight into the suburban the-
aters. Only the A films received the extensive publicity that went with ex-
clusive release.
By contrast, the first sound films all qualified as “cinematic events,” so
they received exclusive releases whether their quality justified it or not. Per-
haps because of this, but also because the paucity of sound films on the
market in those early months gave the prestige theaters no choice—they
had to take whatever sound film was on offer, whether good or bad—it sub-
sequently became normal for all sound films to be released into one or more
exclusive theaters, before general release into suburban theaters. Although
not necessarily advantageous to the exhibitors in the long run, this system
benefited the producers and distributors, since it tended to maximize prof-
its for all films. All their films had the high visibility that went with exclu-
sive-release publicity, and the exclusive-release audiences paid more per
seat. But one consequence was that exclusive release no longer carried with
it the expectation of a run of several months; it quickly became common
for films to last no more than a week or two in exclusive release. Exhibitors
were not pleased at committing funds to an advertising campaign for a film
which lasted only a week in their theater.
This problem was exacerbated by the boom in theater construction that
took place in the years 1930–32, when new first-release theaters were con-
structed on the Champs Élysées and in the Clichy-Barbès area. But within a
two-year period the problem was reversed: the number of French films
being released increased from about a dozen in the first season to about a
hundred in the second and a 150 in the third, while the rate of conversion
of theaters to sound was relatively slow. Consequently, by 1932 almost any
Parisian theater equipped for sound might be called on to act as a first-re-
lease theater. A short list of about fifteen were regularly used in this way (no-
tably the Paramount, Marivaux, Colisée, Aubert Palace, Impérial, Caméo,
Olympia, Madeleine, Capucines, and later the Rex and the Gaumont
Palace), but at least fifteen others were commonly used, and another forty
on occasion. Commentators began to express doubts about the financial
sanity of this “system,” asserting that “exclusive release” needed restricting
 296 | , ,  
to fewer films, and that the number of first-release theaters needed to be re-
duced correspondingly.
During the 1932–33 season, there were signs that this was happening.
Some of the first-release theaters, such as the Caméo, were used as second-
run theaters, taking films over from the Gaumont Palace or the newly con-
structed Rex, which were too large to maintain a film for more than two
weeks. The Artistic, Victor Hugo, Lutetia, Royal, Impérial, Gaumont Thé-
âtre, Carillon, Max Linder, Moulin Rouge, and Folies Dramatiques all
began to assume this character of second-run theaters, ensuring successful
films a longer run in exclusive release, at a price between that of first run
and general release. The hierarchy never became total, with second-run
theaters occasionally being used for first release, and the Gaumont Palace
and the Rex being used more and more often not so much for first runs but
rather to give a final week of high-profile first release to a film whose suc-
cessful run was nearing its end.
This system survived throughout the decade, modified by a tendency to
release films not into a single theater but into a cluster of two or more, fol-
lowed by progressively larger and larger clusters. Under this system, a film
might be released simultaneously into several smaller first-run theaters,
such as the Agriculteurs, Biarritz, Bonaparte, César, and CinéOpéra, disap-
pearing from one after the other as first-run audiences for the film de-
creased, whereupon it would be released into seven to ten second-run
theaters. The theaters in these clusters tended to be all owned by one chain,
and some of them, such as the Demours, the Sélect, and some twenty oth-
ers, came to be used regularly as third-run theaters. The first formal men-
tion that I have found of this latter category occurs in 1936. In addition,
when, for some reason, such as a summer break, a long gap arose between
this first series of releases and a film’s general release, one of the lower-
ranked exclusive-release theaters might feature it again, and thus serve to re-
mind the public of its successful earlier runs just before it entered general
release (“pre-general release”). A break of at least a few weeks between ex-
clusive and general release was thought desirable in principle by the indus-
try, since it signaled a clear separation in status between exclusive release
and general release, and also made customers feel that it was worth spend-
ing the extra money to see a film in exclusive release rather than wait up to
several months for general release.
Several instances can serve to illustrate the way this system worked. Ac-
cord final, a moderately successful film, was released in the Colisée, and
after five weeks it was given a final high-profile week, first in the Rex, then
in the Gaumont Palace. Subsequently it went to the Ermitage and the St.
Didier (second-run), then the Vivienne-LaScala-Panthéon-Régent (third-
run), before its general release into thirteen suburban theaters. L’Affaire La-
farge, released in the Aubert Palace, was given a final boost in the Rex, then
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 297
the Gaumont Palace, before going to the Gaumont Théâtre and the Victor
Hugo for a second run. The summer dead season intervened, so it resumed
eight weeks later in the Pagoda and the Panthéon before its general release.
Claudine à l’école was released into four small first-run theaters, disappear-
ing from one of them in the sixth week and from two others the following
week. After two weeks’ complete absence, it reappeared in three second-run
theaters for a single week, then went into general release in week 13.
To complicate these release patterns even further, in 1938 general-release
theaters also began to be formally sub-categorized as first- and second-screen-
ing theaters, both of which were superior to the uncategorized suburban
theaters. The evolution of these patterns of exclusive and general release can
be glimpsed in table 9.3, where “third-run” and “second-screening” theaters
appeared between 1936 and 1938. In general, of course, the reason that this
elaborate hierarchy of theaters developed was to maximize the number of
weeks in exclusive release, and thus to maximize returns. It was flexible
enough to adapt to evolving audience response to any given film, and con-
tained a series of graduated entry prices in order to tempt interested specta-
tors to pay the maximum they could afford to pay for entry to each film.
One consequence of the system was, however, that the graduated hierarchy
of more and more numerous exclusive-release theaters tended to merge al-
most imperceptibly into general release, which itself assumed a lesser role as
the decade progressed. This tendency, together with the fact that from sec-
ond release onward a film might be teamed up in a double or multiple pro-
gram with one or more films at a quite different stage of release, made the
division of a film’s release into “exclusive” and “general” less and less clear-
cut. While the global figures given in the tables later in this chapter for each
film are reasonably reliable, the distinction between exclusive and general-
release figures is not always as certain as it may seem.

9.2 CALCULATING BOX-OFFICE SUCCESS

It would be useful to be able to supplement this knowledge of global atten-
dance figures, release practices, and average audience sizes with detailed data
on the relative box-office success of specific films, and thus also of the vari-
ous genres. Unfortunately, very little work has been done on this aspect of
the classic French cinema. There is a very good reason for this: the lack of
readily available and reliable data. From late 1948 onward, the CNC pub-
lished some details of film entries and earnings in Paris and key provincial
cities in first-run theaters, and also the accumulated attendances over the
first three to four years for leading films (by the end of which time a film’s
returns to its producers were largely complete). Using these data, it is possi-
ble to identify with some degree of accuracy what postwar audiences
wanted to watch. For the years preceding the war, however, the researcher is
 298 | , ,  
faced with a total lack of reliable information, since no official data on at-
tendance were ever collected, let alone published. One reason that they were
never collected is that producers, distributors, and exhibitors were always
adamantly opposed to their publication. During the silent period, La Ciné-
matographie Française had provided some data of this sort, but noted that it
had not been able to do so for 1928–29 because of express prohibition by
the Service des Finances.31 The early figures for the talkies were so astound-
ing that Harlé risked the wrath of the authorities to publish them and in the
face of industry opposition fought a running battle over several years to see
how much data he could publish without being prosecuted. In 1933, when
the magazine published a particularly interesting, though still largely sub-
jective, set of figures based on a survey of theater managers, one owner
brought a case against it which prevented even such impressionistic data
from being published again. The matter was finally settled, on appeal, in the
magazine’s favor, in 1936.32 From then until the war, and again after it, a
somewhat chastened La Cinématographie Française conducted annual sur-
veys of theater managers to identify and rank each year’s most successful
films, though the resultant tables have no claims to be authoritative and
contain patent inconsistencies.
However, even had the industry been willing to release, or allow the re-
lease of, the data available to it, the evidence given to the Renaitour inquiry
in 1936 suggests that at least for the prewar period they would have been
totally unreliable. The representative of “intellectual workers” at that in-
quiry complained that the producers, and thus the filmmakers, never actu-
ally knew how well their films did and never received the returns due to
them, because it was the distributor, not the producer, who monitored the
returns on each film and who passed this information on to the producer.
“But it seems that these operations were often conducted according to a
somewhat whimsical method of accounting, or at least one difficult to ver-
ify, so that in general producers had a genuine reason to complain that even
they had no way of knowing what their film had returned.”33 Only the dis-
tributors could know with any degree of certainty, and many of them saw
good reason to keep everyone else in the dark. To further complicate mat-
ters, Jarville claimed to the inquiry that even these distributors were kept in
the dark by the theater managers, who were striving to keep returns secret
not just from the rest of the industry but, primarily, from the taxation of-
fice.34 It is not surprising, then, to find Ciné Mondial at its conspiratorial
best explaining in 1942 why theater managers were fighting the monitoring
of ticket sales proposed by the occupiers: “The truth is that more than one
of them enjoyed playing the petty tyrant, and used to tell the tax collector
whatever suited them—that is, the least possible.”35
If this explains the absence of data for the thirties, entry numbers
should in principle be known for all wartime audiences, since after much
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 299
procrastination a prewar decree designed to institute detailed documen-
tation of entries and returns was drawn up. It was to enter into effect on
16 August 1939; unfortunately, it got lost in the turmoil of the times. A
year later, one of the first acts of the occupying forces was to implement a
system for monitoring and documenting all entries and receipts. Although
these data were definitely collected, as an article in Ciné Mondial on the ac-
tivities of COIC made clear, they were never published, and they no longer
seem to exist in any of the likely archives. Recent research suggests that
they were destroyed at war’s end, perhaps once again by interested parties.
Certainly, contemporary commentators were unaware of them, since the
CNC’s initiative in 1948 was greeted enthusiastically by La Cinématogra-
phie Française, which expressed the hope that at last some light would be
shed on “the almost total obscurity prevailing since 1940” (much longer, in
fact, but the journal wished to imply that the Germans were at fault) about
box-office receipts.36 While some light was indeed shed, there remained
isolated areas of darkness due to industry pressure. Even in 1956, the offi-
cial data collected by the CNC could not be published in full, because that
bureau was considered bound to secrecy by professional obligations.37
Indeed, as soon as detailed data concerning box-office receipts began to
appear in the postwar years, theater managers again tried to have them sup-
pressed. They had always claimed that the figures were unreliable and mis-
leading, and their anxieties were most clearly expressed in a letter to the
editor of La Cinématographie Française in 1952,38 concerning the publica-
tion of Parisian first-release figures, which were described as inaccurate,
short term, and local, and thus giving no indication of long-term national
success or profitability; they were also said to be of a private nature and pro-
tected by professional agreements. Indeed, one of the more defensible ar-
guments for suppression was that the progressive publication of such data
would detrimentally affect the career of a film which began its run badly,
for whatever reason. Harlé published a long reply, defending publication of
the data and pointing out that they should be reliable, since they were pro-
vided by the theater managers and producers themselves. Yet there was
some justification for theater owners’ anxiety: at least until the fifties, as var-
ious surveys show, there were enormous local and regional differences in
profitability and success, especially between Paris and the provinces, and (to
some degree related to this) there were also enormous differences between
the short-term and long-term success of different genres. First-run Paris au-
diences were indeed not a totally reliable guide to the long-term overall suc-
cess of a film.
As a result, and whatever the justification, one element or another of the
industry succeeded in suppressing all or much of the necessary information
for a third of the thirty-year period under discussion, records for a further
eight years were lost or destroyed, and data available for the remainder are
 300 | , ,  
Table 9.4. Best Box Office according to Theater Managers, 1932, 1936–38
1932 1936 1937 1938
239 La Ronde des 3,020 César 12,500 La Grande 3,750 Snow White
heures 2,718 L’Appel du si- Illusion 2,498 Quai des
235 Le Roi des lence 9,810 Ignace brumes
resquilleurs 2,200 Le Roi 7,125 Un carnet de 2,050 Katia
217 Marius 2,009 Mayerling bal 1,927 La Femme du
194 En bordée 1,695 Veille d’armes 2,970 Les Perles de la boulanger
151 La Bande à 1,665 Modern Times couronne 1,900 Alerte en
Bouboule 1,504 Marinella 2,340 Abus de Méditerranée
129 Croix de bois 1,474 Les Bas-Fonds confiance 1,700 Robin Hood
128 Mam’zelle 1,470 La Porte du 2,280 Double Crime 1,670 Barnabé
Nitouche large sur la LM 1,260 La Maison du
121 Le Congrès 1,319 Un de la légion 1,870 Pepe le Moko Maltais
s’amuse 1,197 L’Équipage 1,840 Naples au 1,160 Trois Valses*
120 Il est charmant 1,170 Mioche baiser du feu 1,060 Prison sans
119 La Petite 1,023 Kœnigsmark 1,540 Trois Artilleurs barreaux
Chocolatière 1,000 Baccara en vad.. 970 Prison de
113 Accusée, levez- Au son des gui- 1,020 Les Rois du femmes
vous tares sport Entrée des
106 Le Chemin du Messieurs les 858 Le Roman de artistes*
paradis Ronds de Cuir Marguerite L’Étrange M.
104 L’Aiglon Les Deux Gautier Victor
101 Un soir de rafle Gosses Marthe Le Schpountz
97 Trader Horn Le Roman Richard, au Gibraltar
91 Le Roi du d’un tricheur service de la Mon curé chez
cirage La Fille du bois France les riches*
88 Le Chanteur maudit Ces dames au Légions
inconnu Michel Stro- chapeau vert d’honneur
87 Après l’amour goff Nitchevo Adrienne
84 Princesse à vos Jim la Houlette Regain* Lecouvreur
ordres Bichon La Mort du Marie
77 Capitaine Samson cygne* Walewska
Craddock Mutiny on the L’Homme à Orage
76 L’Atlantide Bounty abattre Éducation de
70 All Quiet on the Les Loups L’Alibi prince
Western Front entre eux L’Habit vert Le Révolté
69 Les Gaietés de Charge of the Le Messager Toura
l’escadron Light Brigade La Dame de Ramuntcho
64 L’Affaire Les Hommes Malacca Un de la
Blaireau nouveaux# Gribouille Canebière
62 Sergent X L’Amant de Le Coupable Lumières de
59 Quatre de Mme Vidal# Gueule Paris
l’infanterie Port Arthur# d’amour Belle Étoile*
58 City Lights Jenny Courrier Sud Quadrille
49 Le Champion (Etc.: total 75 films) La Citadelle du Ultimatum
du régiment silence Conflit*
41 Le Chant du Les Hommes (Etc.: total 55 films)
marin nouveaux#
39 Atlantis Ramona
Hula
Le Fauteuil 47
(Etc.: total 64 films)
# Listed in two different years.
* Still on first release at time of survey.
Italics: non-French films
Sources: La Cinématographie Française, no. 760 (27 May 1933) (column 1); no. 960 (26 Mar. 1937)
(column 2); no. 1012 (25 Mar. 1938) (column 3); no. 1065 (31 Mar. 1939) (column 4).
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 301
Table 9.5. Best Films according to Readers of Pour Vous, 1932–34
1932 1933 1934

1,227 Fanny Il était une fois 679 Le Grand Jeu

932 Croix de bois La Maternelle 311 La Bataille
644 L’Atlantide Un soir de réveillon 290 Les Misérables
342 Poil de Carotte* L’Épervier 281 Angèle
310 Ariane Théodore et Cie 207 Maria Chapdelaine
201 Il est charmant 14 juillet 178 Lac aux Dames
180 Gaietés de Le Maître de forges 150 La Maison dans les
l’escadron La Robe rouge dunes
113 Tumultes L’Agonie des aigles 131 Les Nuits
Belle Marinière L’Ordonnance moscovites
La Femme nue Simone est comme ça 54 Jeanne
Mélo 43 Toboggan
Le Fils d’Amérique Plus (alphabetically): 40 Liliom
Allô Berlin, ici Les Ailes brisées 40 La Dame aux
Paris La Bataille camélias
La Petite Cette vielle canaille Scandale
Chocolatière Colomba Si j’étais le patron
Hôtel des Étudi- Les Deux Orphelines La Flambée
ants Une femme au volant Sidonie Panache
Paris-Méditerranée L’Héritier du Bal Madame Bovary
Un rêve blond Tabarin Zouzou
Mater Dolorosa Adémaï aviateur
Roger la Honte Rapt
Une vie perdue Ces messieurs de la
santé
La Banque Nemo

* Paris only

Sources: Pour Vous, No. 219 (26 Jan. 1933) (column 1); No. 276 (1 Mar. 1934) (column 2);
No. 326 (14 Feb. 1935) (column 3).

selective. The nearest that journals of the thirties came to publishing lists
ranking the decade’s films according to popularity was the occasional survey
of theater managers undertaken by La Cinématographie Française relating to
1932, then 1936 to 1938, and the surveys of their readers undertaken by
Pour Vous relating to 1932 to 1934, and La Dépêche de Toulouse relating to
1933 to 1935 (see tables 9.4, 9.5, and 9.6). The numbers of votes for each
year varied widely because different voting systems were in use, but they
have been retained because they indicate relative success within a given year.
As with any poll, however, there are numerous potential flaws in such
tables. Aside from the built-in subjectivity, the date of the polls was usually
aimed at surveying the previous calendar year, but the release of films
was based on a quite different annual cycle. Moreover, release in Paris and
 302 | , ,  
Table 9.6. Best Films according to Readers of La Dépêche de Toulouse, 1933–38
1933 1934 1935 1938

1,826 Fanny 10,673 Lac aux 14,477 La Kermesse 11,832 Quai des
1,771 The Sign of Dames héroïque brumes
the Cross 10,431 Les 13,392 La Bandera 11,475 Les Trois
1,650 Marius Misérables 9,437 Deuxième Valses
1,562 L’Atlantide 9,782 Caravan Bureau 10,693 Snow White
1,397 La Mater- 8,484 Angèle 8,289 Pension 9,299 La Bête
nelle 6,922 La Bataille Mimosas humaine
1,232 Le Chanteur 4,084 Le Maître de 7,461 Maria 9,197 Alerte en
inconnu forges Chapdelaine Méditer-
1,210 Croix de 3,875 Le Grand 7,449 Les Nuits ranée
bois Jeu moscovites 7,582 Hôtel du
1,122 All for Love 3,270 Cleopatra 7,038 Crime et Nord
1,023 Les Deux 2,137 L’Or châtiment 7,429 Entrée des
Orphelines 1,928 IF 1 ne 6,875 La Dame artistes
990 La Petite répond plus aux camélias 7,225 Katia
Chocolatière 6,721 The Bengal 7,055 Lumières de
968 Jocelyn Lancers Paris
924 Il est 5,797 Les Yeux 6,562 La Maison
charmant noirs du Maltais
891 L’Agonie des
aigles
858 Violettes
impériales
847 La Nuit est à
nous
803 Poil de
Carotte
715 Topaze
660 Atlantis
660 Maurin des
Maures
649 L’Homme à
l’Hispano
616 Mam’zelle
Nitouche
605 Sergent X
605 Les Trois
Mousque-
taires
500 La Chanson
d’une nuit

Italics: non-French films.

Sources: La Cinématographie Française, no. 795 (27 Jan. 1934); no. 847 (26 Jan. 1935); no.
901 (8 Feb. 1936); no. 1074 (2 June 1939). 1933: 5,205 votes cast; 1935: 24,784 votes cast;
1938: 22,821 votes cast.
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 303
leading provincial cities quite commonly occurred in a different year or
season from release in provincial towns, and a fortiori from provincial
general release. Consequently, several films reappeared in successive polls
(should totals be summed?), or did not appear in the poll for either year, or
were “still in release,” so the estimates are unreliable. Moreover, the opin-
ions of viewers and theater managers, where they can be compared, were
by no means identical, partly because they were answering slightly different
questions. Yet given that these inadequate tables are the best information
available in published sources of the day, when later commentators on the
thirties remark on the relative popularity of specific films it is normally on
the basis of this sort of unsystematic, subjective material, or on the promo-
tional claims of producers—which, as Jeancolas observes, were no more
than the product of fantasy, publicity, and drunken guesses.39
It would obviously be desirable to begin to build a more reliable basis
for estimates of relative popularity, especially when, as here, those estimates
are going to lead to the attribution of a quasi-mythic status to the most
popular among them. The only surviving source for such work is the
weekly theater programs of the day, as published in La Semaine de Paris and
various dailies or weeklies. From such programs it is possible to identify,
first, how many weeks each film ran in exclusive release and in which the-
ater(s), and second, how many local theaters subsequently screened it dur-
ing its general release.
Once this is known, the problems posed by exclusive release and by
general release are somewhat different. In the latter case, since average gen-
eral-release audiences are known for each year, all that is necessary to esti-
mate the total general-release audience for a film is the normal range of
variation in audience size for successful and unsuccessful films, as measured
by the number of local theaters in which they were screened. The average
number of general-release theaters in which any given French film would
be screened in Paris rose steadily throughout the decade, from about
twenty-eight in 1931 through about thirty-seven in 1937, as more theaters
were built in each neighbourhood, and films had to be screened in more
theaters to have a hope of reaching the total Parisian audience. To some ex-
tent, this steady increase in general-release screenings compensated for the
gradual decrease in audiences per screening, though it remains the case that
general release dropped in significance in Paris with respect to exclusive re-
lease as the decade progressed.
The problems posed by attempting to calculate audience size in exclu-
sive release are of a different order of complexity because of the enormous
range of variation in the size of exclusive-release theaters. At one extreme,
the 6,000-seat Gaumont Palace might attract from 50,000 to 60,000 spec-
tators in a single week, while the Paramount (1,903 seats) quite commonly
attracted even more, and the Rex (3,500 seats) 40,000 to 50,000. In most
 304 | , ,  
weeks it was in fact the Paramount that recorded the highest figures. Other
large theaters, such as the Alhambra and the Moulin Rouge (2,000 seats),
the Marignan (1,800), and the Marivaux (1,250), might attract from 15,000
to 25,000 per week, while mid-sized theaters such as the Colisée (650 seats),
the Aubert Palace (750), and the Madeleine (800) might attract from 8,000
or 10,000 to 12,000 or 15,000. At the other extreme, art theaters such as
the Pigalle, the Panthéon, the Ursulines, and the Vieux Colombier, with about
250 to 400 seats and less regular screenings, might attract from 1,000 to
5,000. In general, first-run theaters attracted more than second-run, and all
exclusive-release theaters tended to attract more than general-release the-
aters because nearly all of the former ran continuous screenings every day,
while the latter would normally have a maximum of one screening a day
and a weekend matinée. Fortunately, all the necessary data concerning the
capacity of the various theaters in Paris and the normal range of audience
size can be assembled or calculated from a disparate set of sources published
at the time. Consequently, the exclusive-release audience for any given film
can be estimated, based on the theaters in which it ran and the number of
weeks in which it ran in each of them. Occasional specific figures for spe-
cific films mentioned in trade journals allow for cross-checking, though
their reliability is always questionable.

9.3 ANNUAL TABLES OF FILMS ATTRACTING OVER

THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND SPECTATORS
It is on the basis of such calculations that the tables of top box-office films
below are based. They include every film of the decade which, by my cal-
culations, attracted over three hundred thousand spectators in Paris within
two years of its release. The task of compiling the tables was an arduous
one, since it involved following the release patterns of over thirteen hun-
dred films for a period of some twelve years in some 150 to 350 theaters,
while allowing for the differences in capacity between different theaters and
for the different average size of audience in each of these theaters for good,
average, and bad runs. Inevitably, some errors will have crept into calcula-
tions of this magnitude, but I have tried to keep them to a minimum. For-
tunately the results can be, and have been, globally cross-checked by
verifying that the accumulated attendance figures calculated for all the films
of a given year correspond to the known figures for French films released
in Paris in the respective year. In fact, the figures given turn out to be about
7 percent below this, possibly because of a tail of unnoticed screenings in
suburban cinemas that most films experienced outside the first period of re-
lease and any subsequent major re-release.
The tables are organized not according to calendar year but according to
the industry’s seasonal cycle. Tables published in French journals have al-
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 305
Table 9.7. The 1929–30 season by order of release (week/year)
9 out of 12 (75%)
La Nuit est à nous (3/30) 350 162 512 (3)
La Route est belle (4/30) 285 150 435 (4)
Le Mystère de la Villa Rosa (14/30) 130 174 304
Sous les toits de Paris (17/30) 232 318 550 (2)
Mon gosse de père (18/30) 172 186 358
Le Spectre vert (18/30) 255 156 411 (5)
La Tendresse (20/30) 116 186 302
Un trou dans le mur (23/30) 144 210 354
La Grande Mare (29/30) 503 390 893 (1)
Numbers listed in Tables 9.7 through 9.16 are for exclusive release (1st column), general release
(2nd column), and total Paris audience (final column).

ways hesitated between these two procedures, but the seasonal pattern
seems most desirable not just because it corresponds to the industry’s own
screening practices but also for the practical reason that it better allows for
the release of the first talkies in late 1929 and for the last prewar films in
1939. The seasonal low point in the annual cycle was summer, when Pari-
sian audiences left the city en masse, and its high points were the feast days,
such as Mardi Gras and Easter, and the holiday period at Christmas and
New Year. These seasonal patterns are very apparent in figure 9.2, which
charts the fluctuations in attendance over the yearly cycle, and are even
more vividly illustrated in figure 9.3, which charts the response to these
fluctuations by the industry, since it indicates the total number of films re-
leased each week of the annual cycle over a six-year period. Producers were
very reluctant to see their films released during or just before the summer
break and tried to have them released either in the new season, to returning
audiences, on saints’ days (holidays) or at a high point in the season such as
late December or early January. Each film in the following annual tables
(9.7 to 9.16) is dated by week of release, with calendar week 30 corre-
sponding to the low point in early August. Exclusive release figures are given
first, then general release, and finally the total Paris audience. The top forty
films of the decade are listed in the final table of the chapter (table 9.17).
Finally, in the annual tables the rankings of the leading ten films of
each season (only five in the first season, because so few were released) have
been indicated in parentheses. This has been done because it might be ar-
gued that there is no direct comparability of films across years in which
viewing conditions, industrial practices, and audience numbers varied so
much. According to this line of thinking, a film which scored an audience
of 350,000 in the 1933–34 season had demonstrated an appeal comparable
to that of a film which scored 450,000 in the 1931–32 season or 550,000
at the end of the decade, since it had won that smaller audience under more
trying institutional conditions.
Figure 9.3. Seasonal Releases, August to July
(new year = week 24)
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 307
While all the figures in these tables are less precise than they seem, I
have included many of the assumptions on which they are based so that
other researchers, interested perhaps in a particular film, director, year, or
genre and inclined to check that specific film or group of films in greater
detail, may be able to identify invalid assumptions or figures, and thus im-
prove on them.
During this first season of sound film releases (see table 9.7), the figures
given for both exclusive and general release are a little more uncertain than
for subsequent years. A number of factors make it difficult to estimate nor-
mal audience sizes. On the one hand, the total audience for sound films (as
opposed to the residue of silent films that continued to be screened, though
in diminishing numbers) can only be conjectured, since I have not seen any
reliable figures for it. This problem rapidly decreases in importance, and by
the 1932–33 season it has largely disappeared. On the other hand, Paris the-
aters were being equipped for sound at a relatively rapid rate, so the number
of theaters available for general release was escalating rapidly throughout
the season. It is therefore difficult to know by what figure to divide that total
audience in order to get the average audience size in local theaters, which in
turn is needed to calculate general-release figures for each film.
The first feature-length 100 percent talkies that can justifiably be called
French are La Nuit est à nous and La Route est belle. The two that preceded
them do not technically qualify because the first, Le Collier de la reine, was
produced as a silent film then partially sonorized with music and some dia-
logue, while the second, Les Trois Masques, was under an hour in length.
Both were successful, especially Le Collier de la reine, which benefited from
being the first (partially) French-speaking film to be released. In this it re-
sembles The Jazz Singer, which likewise was not 100 percent dialogued, but
became notorious primarily because it was the first to be released. La Route
est belle, filmed in Britain, was released next, but only in Marseille; in Paris,
it was preceded by a week by La Nuit est à nous. While both were enor-
mously successful at the time, they clearly benefited in the same way as did
Le Collier de la reine from the timing of their release, since neither of them
experienced the repeated revivals over the following years that went with
deep popular affection for a specific film. The only film in the first season to
experience such a revival was Sous les toits de Paris, which, like Le Million,
was to keep René Clair’s name alive in France long after he departed for
England in 1934. Yet, on its initial general release Sous les toits de Paris reg-
istered relatively low figures, appearing in a desultory way in only a few of
the theaters equipped for sound. The same low-key general release was to
befall L’Opéra de quat’sous two years later, though in that case it was more
clearly due to the fact that audiences had already seen it in a cheap first-re-
lease art theater.
 308 | , ,  
Of the twelve films released in this first season, only one failed cata-
strophically—Quand nous étions deux. Several other shorter sound films,
forty to sixty minutes in length, were released. Some of them did very well,
and perhaps because of their prominence in reviews and advertisements of
the day they have found their way into filmographies. Chiqué, which is
often so listed, was only about half an hour long, and Une femme a menti
seems to have been substantially less than an hour long. The demand for
sound films was so great, and French facilities still so inadequate, that sev-
eral films had to be made in Britain (La Route est belle), the U.S. (Le Spectre
vert), or Germany. In the meantime, and indeed for some years to come,
producers tried to generate pseudo-sound films by dubbing silent films.
Several films were progressively upgraded over the following years until they
could be presented to the trade as 100 percent sound films. Le Requin was
noted even by contemporaries as being primarily a silent film, sonorized
and at best partially dialogued. Chomette withdrew his name as director be-
cause the producer had totally re-edited the silent film he had made, and he
felt that only the final dialogued scene was at all true to his intentions. The
status of La Bodega as a 100 percent talkie is in doubt, and the mid-length
Trois Masques largely avoided the synchronization of voices by having im-
mobile masks “speak.” Les Saltimbanques, screened near the end of the sea-
son, was also categorized at the time as not a true sound film.
Finally, the demand for product was so great in this first season that La
Grande Mare was released right at the end of the season (as was L’Enfant de
l’amour soon afterward), when potential audiences might be expected to be
departing on holiday. It justified its producers’ faith by running right
through the summer months in the Paramount theater, going into general
release during the Christmas/New Year high season.
During the 1930–31 season (see table 9.8), 101 feature films were re-
leased, together with a very large number of mid-length films which the in-
dustry did not at the time distinguish from feature films. A number of the
“true” feature films experienced a high degree of success, not solely, as had
been the case in the preceding year, because of their novelty value but be-
cause of a genuine popular appeal which was to see them prove enduringly
popular throughout the decade. In order of release, the most popular were
Accusée, levez-vous, Le Roi des resquilleurs, Le Chemin du paradis, La Ronde
des heures, Jean de la lune, Le Million, and Un soir de rafle. Of these, Le Roi
des resquilleurs was the most startling box-office success of the decade. It
opened in November 1930 at the Moulin Rouge, a two-thousand-seat
music hall/theater, and ran for thirty-four weeks uninterrupted in exclusive
release. It then moved, under the “second-run” system which was just de-
veloping, to the five-hundred-seat Impérial, where it ran for a further
twenty-six weeks. Exclusive release had lasted for sixty weeks and attracted,
by my estimate, nearly nine hundred thousand spectators, many of them
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 309
Table 9.8. The 1930–31 season by order of release (week/year)
25 out of 101 (25%)

L’Enfant de l’amour (32/30) 236 (102) (338)

Accusée, levez-vous (37/30) 268 273 541 (4)
Atlantis (39/30) 210 210 420
Lévy et Compagnie (43/30) 81 325 406
Le Roi des resquilleurs (46/30) 888 299 1,187 (1)
Le Chemin du paradis (46/30) 113 342 455 (8)
Cendrillon de Paris (47/30) 110 273 383
Arthur (1/31) 82 231 313
Le Chanteur de Séville (7/31) 167 176 343
La Ronde des heures (7/31) 90 318 408
Jean de la Lune (9/31) 324 445 769 (2)
David Golder (10/31) 108 202 310
Le Tampon du capiston (12/31) 161 180 341
Le Million (14/31) 202 270 472 (7)
Le Dactylo (14/31) 148 274 422
Ma cousine de Varsovie (15/31) 65 245 310
Princesse, à vos ordres (15/31) 73 352 425
Le Petit Café (19/31) 246 234 480 (6)
Le Rêve (19/31) 190 202 392
Grock (19/31) 124 (192) (316)
Big House (20/31) 298 148 446 (10)
Autour d’une enquête (23/31) 128 176 304
Un homme en habit (27/31) 260 191 451 (9)
Un soir de rafle (28/31) 217 349 566 (3)
En bordée (29/31) 178 305 483 (5)

no doubt second- and third-time viewers. Yet there was still a large public
for the film: on general release in February 1932, it screened in about forty-
one theaters in suburban Paris. Moreover, it became one of the standard
“revival” films, to be reintroduced several times in brief exclusive releases
and further general releases in later years, whenever films were lacking or
audiences falling off. Its title inspired a host of imitations hoping to capi-
talize on the original’s popularity—Le Roi, Le Roi des palaces, Le Roi des fac-
teurs, Le Roi des galéjeurs, Les Rois de la flotte, Les Rois du sport, and many
other shorter films, not to mention a 1945 remake with the same title. It
launched the comedian Milton in his role as Bouboule on a series of comic
adventures in Le Roi du cirage, La Bande à Bouboule, Bouboule 1er, roi nègre
(notorious for representing France at the 1934 Venice film festival), and fi-
nally Prince Bouboule. In addition, it was influential in determining a swing
away from dramas, which had dominated the first season of French pro-
duction, and toward the comedy genre. In this it was aided by the parallel
success of the romantic comedy Jean de la Lune, which stayed in exclusive
release less long but reached many more spectators in general release, and
 310 | , ,  
which was, if anything, re-released even more often than Le Roi des res-
quilleurs. The preference for comedy was no less underlined by the extraor-
dinary (indeed, incomprehensible by modern lights) success of the military
vaudeville, instanced here by two films starring Bach—Le Tampon du capis-
ton and En bordée. These launched Bach’s sound career, generating fifteen
more comic films in which he starred during the decade, six of them mili-
tary vaudevilles, and twelve of them (like En bordée) directed by Wul-
schleger, who “managed” Bach’s films much as Colombier managed several
of Milton’s. At least three more of Bach’s films were among the big suc-
cesses of the decade—Bach millionnaire, Le Train de 8h47, and Mon curé
chez les riches, finally resulting in a 1939 compilation called Bach en correc-
tionnelle which organized the highlights of his previous films within a per-
functory frame.
This outline of the comic successes of the 1930–31 season has not even
mentioned René Clair’s Le Million, which, after a substantial success at the
Olympia, was used to open the Ambassadeurs, or the musicals Le Chemin
du paradis and Princesse, à vos ordres, whose immense popularity established
Henri Garat and Lilian Harvey as the heartthrobs of the early thirties and
generated further successes in Le Congrès s’amuse, La Fille et le garçon, Une
heure près de toi, Un rêve blond, and Les Gais Lurons. Add to these Maurice
Chevalier’s Le Petit Café and it is easy to see how lighthearted films featur-
ing Milton, Bach, Michel Simon, René Lef èvre, Maurice Chevalier, and the
Henri Garat–Lilian Harvey couple could come to seem the route to effort-
less profitability for the French cinema.
These comic successes should not, however, overshadow the two dra-
mas—one a crime story, Accusée, levez-vous, and the other recounting the
fall and rise of a sporting hero, Un soir de rafle—not to mention La Ronde
des heures, which the survey of theater managers in May 1933 reported
(and the general-release audience figures go some way to confirm) as the
most profitable film they had screened in 1932. Altogether, given that
1929–30 had been a foreshortened year with few sound film releases, the
1930–31 season can be considered the first, and arguably the greatest, year
of French thirties cinema, heralding a renaissance of the national cinema,
establishing certain patterns for at least the first half of the decade, and
promising producers limitless profits from a delighted public. If this picture
needs qualifying, it might be by recognizing that a disproportionate num-
ber of these successful productions were, in some commentators’ eyes, not
French at all, in that they were “merely” French versions of foreign films
shot in Germany and America. This was not true of Le Roi des resquilleurs,
La Ronde des heures, or Jean de la lune, but Atlantis, Le Chemin du paradis,
Princesse, à vos ordres, and Salto mortale (just off the chart) were originally
German films by Dupont, Thiele, and Schwarz reshot in Germany by
French (sub)directors using a cast consisting predominantly of French
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 311
Table 9.9. The 1931–32 season by order of release (week/year)
40 out of 148 (27%)
Azaïs (32/31) 186 230 416
Rive gauche (34/31) 172 160 332
L’Aiglon (35/31) 122 335 457 (7)
Le Bal (37/31) 140 165 305
Rien que la vérité (37/31) 201 175 376
Atout-cœur (38/31) 112 205 317
Faubourg Montmartre (38/31) 93 230 323
Le Juif polonais (38/31) 90 225 315
Pas sur la bouche (39/31) 128 180 308
Gagne ta vie (41/31) 210 160 370
Marius (41/31) 428 226 654 (1)
L’Opéra de quat’sous (45/31) 192 115 307
Le Parfum de la dame en noir (45/31) 160 230 390
Le Roi du cirage (46/31) 272 180 452 (8)
La Chienne (47/31) 168 260 428 (10)
Le Chanteur inconnu (49/31) 150 160 310
Après l’amour (49/31) 118 270 388
Le Capitaine Craddock (49/31) 130 290 420
Mam’zelle Nitouche (49/31) 150 255 405
Mistigri (49/31) 149 165 314
À nous la liberté (51/31) 117 185 302
La Bande à Bouboule (51/31) 348 245 593 (2)
Le Rosier de Madame Husson (5/32) 146 188 334
La Tragédie de la mine (5/32) 145 155 300
La Petite Chocolatière (7/32) 220 230 450 (9)
Cœur de Lilas (7/32) 94 206 300
Paris-Méditerranée (8/32) 268 210 478 (4)
Il est charmant (9/32) 202 208 410
Ariane, jeune fille russe (9/32) 180 184 364
Sergent X (11/32) 81 235 316
La Femme en homme (11/32) 203 112 315
Monsieur, Madame et Bibi (11/32) 88 220 308
L’Affaire Blaireau (11/32) 176 172 348
Croix de bois (12/32) 356 196 552 (3)
Le Vainqueur (13/32) 112 215 327
Au nom de la loi (16/32) 223 114 337
Tumultes (17/32) 194 276 470 (5)
Un fils d’Amérique (23/32) 112 192 304
Une heure près de toi (23/32) 183 124 307
L’Atlantide (24/32) 262 196 458 (6)

actors, while Le Chanteur de Séville, Le Petit Café, and Big House (like La
Grande Mare before them) were French versions of films shot in America
for MGM and Paramount.
 312 | , ,  
The 1931–32 season was clearly another highly profitable season for the
French cinema as a whole (see table 9.9). Although there were no outstand-
ingly profitable films in the category of Le Roi des resquilleurs, there were a
greater number of well-made films scattered throughout the year, which
must have returned significant profits within their first year of release—
Marius, Croix de bois, Paris-Méditerranée, Au nom de la loi, Tumultes, and
the fascinating, though rather clumsy, L’Atlantide. But then, it was not only
good films that succeeded. Several films which now register as clumsy to the
point of incompetence attracted large audiences. L’Opéra de quat’sous is a
case in point. It ran almost continuously at the Ursulines or the Pagode for
the next few years, though because these were small art theaters and were
not screening continuously (en permanence) (and, indeed, alternate screen-
ings were in German), the global audience figures are not enormous. Four
weeks at one of the larger theaters would have generated the same audience.
Nevertheless, this film’s continuous presence in the weekly programs made
it an inescapable element of the Parisian cultural scene during these years,
and the degree of its success seems to have taken everyone by surprise. An-
other clumsy film, Le Rosier de Madame Husson, benefited from the fury of
local censorship, which provided excellent publicity, but it is hard to see
how technical or narrative competence (let alone Fernandel’s acting) could
have been relevant to its popularity. Even more remarkable was the relative
success of Un chien qui rapporte. Like Le Rosier de Madame Husson, this is a
one-joke comedy offering slightly scabrous titillation, but it is so incompe-
tently assembled as to be largely incomprehensible at times. Thus, if Ren-
oir’s La nuit du carrefour and Prévert’s L’Affaire est dans le sac failed in this
same year, it was not solely because of their undoubted narrative and tech-
nical incompetence, since many worse-made films did much better. The
same was to be true for the next several seasons, as films like L’Escale, La Rue
sans joie, Les Bas-Fonds, and even La Bandera succeeded apparently on the
basis of the inherent interest of their stereotypes and situations rather than
efficient story-telling. They corresponded, that is, to certain contemporary
French preoccupations—the needs, desires, anguishes, and aspirations of
the audiences of the day.
On the other hand, a large number of films did fail quite badly. This
was the first season in which more French feature films arrived on the mar-
ket than were needed to satisfy demand, and, while there can be no doubt
that the top quarter (those listed in table 9.9) would have readily returned a
profit, some seventeen films made only the most marginal appearance on
the market before disappearing from sight. Some of these, indeed, though
formally presented to the trade, may never have been accepted by a distrib-
utor for release, since I have been unable to find any record of them in the-
aters, in this or any subsequent season. Another twenty-five failed so badly
in their Paris release, whether exclusive, general, or both, that it is impossi-
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 313
ble that the producer could have recouped his investment, even in the long
run. Since most of these forty to fifty flops were produced by the smallest of
the production companies, it is easy to see why so many companies went
bankrupt in this and succeeding years. It is less easy to see why certain di-
rectors who already in this year were establishing a reputation for cata-
strophic losses should have been able to continue making films for the rest
of the decade. Some didn’t, of course—Dini, Boudrioz, Daumary, Mourre,
Jean Godard, Torre, Perojo, and Reichmann either gave up or were unable
to find further funding after early flops, and the same is true of one of the
few female directors of the decade, Solange Terac/Bussi. Vernay’s career was
arrested for five years by a series of flops. Jaeger-Schmidt ran a remarkably
unsuccessful production company from Lille for some years, which his own
repeated lack of success as a director helped bring to ruin. A few directors,
however, having almost inexplicably managed to find further funding, went
on to justify this faith—Forrester, Mittler, and Guarino, all of whom made
at least one successful film, and, more dramatically, Joannon, Choux, and
Vernay.
Yet a surprising number, having failed initially, persisted, only to fail re-
peatedly throughout inexplicably long careers. Pierre Weill’s Mardi gras
flopped, his Cure sentimental disappeared without a trace, and even his mil-
itary vaudeville was unsuccessful, yet he was able to find funding for four
more films in 1935 and 1936, all of which bombed. Astonishment is
equally appropriate at the persistent career of Sévérac and Pallu, despite re-
peated losses. Sévérac’s one late success, Les Réprouvés, can scarcely have
been sufficient to counter the catastrophic career of Sirocco (except perhaps
for Arab audiences), Razzia, Le Crime du chemin rouge, Colomba, Le Mystère
Imberger, La Boutique aux illusions, and Adieu Vienne, yet he was still mak-
ing films in 1960. Such a record speaks of the chaotic financial situation of
the industry at the time, which so many commentators have mentioned—
the wild hopes of unlimited gain aroused by certain early sound successes,
the lack of alternative investment in a period of depression, and the unreg-
ulated nature of the industry. It also raises interesting questions about the
career of better-known directors. Of course, Renoir was fortunate in hav-
ing a large inheritance, much of which he “squandered” on a series of films
that failed—On purge bébé, Boudu sauvé des eaux, Chotard et Cie, and La
Nuit du carrefour—and while the last three were not total catastrophes at
the box office, and while we may well find it difficult to understand why
Boudu and Chotard were not better received, it is still interesting to specu-
late what might have happened to Renoir’s career without the inheritance
and his one unqualified success in these years, La Chienne, to bolster his
standing, his finances, and his self-esteem.
It is not easy to generalize about the films of the successful 1931–32 sea-
son. They ranged from a film evoking the experienced chaos of combat
 314 | , ,  
Table 9.10. The 1932–33 season by order of release (week/year)
24 out of 150 (17%)

Quick (35/32) 108 220 328

Les Vignes du Seigneur (38/32) 143 184 327
Les Gaietés de l’escadron (38/32) 250 320 570 (4)
Une petite dame dans le train (39/32) 159 148 307
Le Congrès s’amuse (43/32) 240 365 605 (3)
Embrassez-moi (43/32) 191 220 411 (9)
La Femme nue (43/32) 102 220 322
Fanny (44/32) 454 210 664 (2)
Maurin des Maures (49/32) 178 240 418 (7)
Sa meilleure cliente (51/32) 135 220 355
Topaze (2/33) 140 270 410 (10)
Quatorze juillet (3/33) 136 210 346
La Chanson d’une nuit (6/33) 92 330 422 (6)
La Tête d’un homme (6/33) 118 189 307
IF 1 ne répond plus (9/33) 220 260 480 (5)
Le Chasseur de chez Maxim’s (10/33) 158 185 343
Les Deux Orphelines (10/32) 138 167 305
Le Martyre de l’obèse (13/33) 200 159 359
La Dame de chez Maxim’s (14/32) 149 202 351
Théodore et Cie (15/33) 539 291 830 (1)
Mademoiselle Josette, ma femme (15/33) 87 260 347
Nu comme un vers (19/33) 210 114 324
Moi et l’impératrice (20/33) 131 189 320
Le Margoton du bataillon (24/33) 148 270 418 (7)

(Croix de bois) to a historical melodrama (L’Aiglon), a comédie dramatique

(Marius), a romantic comedy done as a musical (Paris-Méditerranée), and a
riotous comedy acting as a sequel to Le Roi des resquilleurs (La Bande à
Bouboule). On the whole, the number of dramas and comedies at the top of
the table was more nearly balanced than in previous years. In the 1932–33
season, however, comedies were again to dominate (see table 9.10). Théo-
dore et Cie is in a direct line with the riotous prankster comedies mentioned
above, and Le Congrès s’amuse is another romantic comedy done as a musical
and featuring the Henri Garat–Lilian Harvey couple. La Margoton du ba-
taillon is another military vaudeville, as is Les Gaietés de l’escadron, its success
triggering a string of films with analogous titles—Les Gaietés de la finance,
du palace, de l’exposition, and the mid-length de l’escouade.
The list of the top ten films of the season contains only two dramas—
IF 1 ne répond plus and the comédie dramatique Fanny. This became more
and more a matter of critical debate as the season progressed, and com-
mentators remarked on the number of theatrical comedies of a more or less
vulgar sort that were being transcribed into film form (successfully, alas).
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 315
The titles of many of these were clearly intended to tease and titillate—La
Femme nue, Nu comme un ver (and later On a trouvé une femme nue), Em-
brassez-moi, Les Surprises du divorce, Mademoiselle Josette, ma femme, Le
Mari garçon, Le Fils improvisé, Madame ne veut pas d’enfant, Je te confie ma
femme, and Le Coucher de la mariée. Given the profitability of many of
these films, it was natural that producers should have been willing to cater
to a taste that was clearly widespread, though widely considered blamewor-
thy. Toward the end of this season, the French version of the Czech film
Exstase, featuring Hedy Lamarr in fairly explicit scenes as an unfulfilled wife
but a fulfilled lover, had an extended run at the Théâtre Pigalle, then the
Studio Diamant. Twenty-two weeks in small theaters did not generate an
enormous audience, and the nature of the film seems to have precluded wide-
spread general release, but like L’Opéra de quat’sous, if to a lesser extent, it
was highly visible on the cultural scene for a long time. It is not hard to see
why serious filmmakers (and, a fortiori, moralists) might view with dismay
an industry apparently overtaken by frivolity and licentiousness.
To some extent, these anxieties about the nature of the industry’s output
were related to the first signs of a downturn in demand. After the expan-
sionary optimism of the three preceding seasons, this was disconcerting.
Aside from industry statistics, the evidence is visible in table 9.10, where a
smaller proportion of the year’s output appears than in preceding years.
This was the moment when commentators began to emphasize the fragility
of the exhibition sector, in which over one third of French theaters were still
not equipped for sound (and most of those never would be), and two thirds
of those equipped held no more than four screenings a week. Urban first-
run theaters, with their permanence of up to thirty-six screenings a week,
were wildly untypical, and it is easy to see how the nineteen first-run the-
aters in Paris could generate one tenth of the whole country’s receipts.
The crisis of confidence within the industry was exacerbated during the
1933–34 season (see table 9.11). The film list is shorter than for previous
years and contains the smallest proportion of the year’s releases. It is tempt-
ing to correlate this with the marked change in direction that is apparent in
the output. The list of most successful films was dominated by social and
psychological dramas—La Maternelle, La Bataille, L’Épervier, Le Scandale,
Le Grand Jeu, Le Maître de forges, and Lac aux Dames. There are few comic
successes—the vaudevilles Tire-au-flanc and Le Train de 8h47—and most
are less successful than their counterparts of previous years had been. The
latest Bouboule film, which represented France at Venice, doesn’t come
near to making the table. It is perhaps in this context that we should view
the relative failure of Le Dernier Milliardaire in the following season—a
failure which, after a run of extremely popular comic films, was reputedly
crucial in Clair’s decision to move to England for the rest of the decade.
 316 | , ,  
Table 9.11. The 1933–34 season by order of release (week/year)
19 out of 160 (12%)
La Maternelle (36/33) 276 230 506 (4)
Tire au flanc (40/33) 179 314 493 (5)
L’Abbé Constantin (43/33) 212 180 392 (9)
L’Épervier (47/33) 89 348 437 (7)
L’Agonie des aigles (48/33) 208 135 343
Le Maître de forges (49/33) 150 281 431 (8)
Paprika (49/33) 68 238 306
Bach millionnaire (52/33) 98 221 319
La Bataille (1/34) 230 366 596 (2)
Au bout du monde (5/34) 186 135 321
Trois pour cent (5/34) 101 272 373
Les Misérables I, II and III (from 6/34), each 140 230 370
Ces messieurs de la Santé (12/34) 157 173 330
La Garnison amoureuse (12/34) 156 188 344
Le Grand Jeu (17/34) 197 400 597 (1)
Lac aux Dames (20/34) 247 231 478 (6)
Le Train de 8h47 (21/34) 245 273 518 (3)
L’Or (22/34) 124 130 354
Le Scandale (26/34) 226 149 375 (10)

However, a number of the directors later to be thought of as auteurs

filmed dramas this year, in all cases with mediocre success. Renoir’s Ma-
dame Bovary did better than is generally thought, at least in exclusive re-
lease, and might possibly have broken even. And after Poil de Carotte, which
was a critical success but did no more than reasonably well in general re-
lease, Duvivier’s Le Petit Roi (again with Robert Lynen) and Le Paquebot
Tenacity also figured in the middle range of popularity. Fritz Lang’s some-
what hastily made dramatic fantasy, Liliom, received surprisingly favorable
reviews and did well in exclusive release, but faded in general release. Pabst
and Ophüls had no more than middling success with Du haut en bas and
On a volé un homme, respectively, though the latter’s Liebelei did remarkably
well on its initial release in German, and if one cumulates audiences for
both versions it did better than average. Even Pagnol, directing his first
films, Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier and the mid-length Jofroi, must have
been disappointed with the results after the success of his plays in film ver-
sions directed by others.
Some directors of an earlier (silent-film) wave were beginning to look
fragile in the context of sound cinema, too: Baroncelli directed a series of
unsuccessful films, culminating this season with L’Ami Fritz and Crainque-
bille (though the films he directed later in the decade were to be very popu-
lar), while Cavalcanti added yet another poorly received film (Coralie et Cie)
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 317
Table 9.12. The 1934–35 season by order of release (week/year)
30 out of 120 (25%)
La Maison dans la dune (31/34) 119 191 310
Mon cœur t’appelle (37/34) 148 187 335
Trois de la marine (39/34) 144 169 313
Minuit, place Pigalle (40/34) 190 128 318
Adémaï aviateur (41/34) 449 293 742 (1)
Sidonie Panache (42/34) 55 306 361
Angèle (43/34) 256 408 664 (2)
La Chanson de l’adieu (44/34) 150 278 428
La Dame aux camélias (44/34) 206 269 475 (8)
L’École des contribuables (44/34) 55 283 338
Un homme en or (45/34) 139 234 373
Les Nuits moscovites (46/34) 287 302 589 (4)
Maria Chapdelaine (50/34) 305 307 612 (3)
Dédé (51/34) 151 211 362
Zouzou (51/34) 132 298 430 (10)
Sans famille (52/340 184 180 364
Le Billet de mille (2/35) 97 273 370
Pension Mimosas (3/35) 255 256 511 (7)
La Veuve joyeuse (4/35) 252 120 372
Compartiment de dames seules (5/35) 154 228 382
Le Bonheur (6/35) 198 241 439 (9)
Itto (12/35) 212 108 320
Justin de Marseille (14/35) 192 173 365
Nous ne sommes plus des enfants (15/35) 138 194 332
Tovaritch (18/35) 122 205 327
Folies-Bergère (19/35) 242 281 523 (5)
Quelle drôle de gosse! (20/35) 144 180 324
Crime et châtiment (20/35) 297 220 517 (6)
Un oiseau rare (22/35) 120 302 422
La Mascotte (30/35) 192 187 379

to a list of seven French sound films that included only one moderate suc-
cess, Le Mari garçon. Jean Epstein and the Benoît-Lévy–Marie Epstein team
were, however, at the peak of their popularity with La Châtelaine du Liban
and La Maternelle, respectively. For Jean Epstein, it was to be a brief flirta-
tion with popularity, but Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein were to continue
with a series of amazing successes—Itto, Hélène, La Mort du cygne, and Al-
titude 3200. The Tourneurs father and son seemed equally unable to put a
foot wrong, especially the latter. Even those of their films which have not
survived and which seem to have been based on less than inspiring material
were at least reasonably well received. At this crisis point in the decade, such
an ability to put together a string of successful productions was of ines-
timable value.
 318 | , ,  
The 1934–35 season has already been remarked upon as witnessing the
beginnings of a renewal of confidence, based on a reduction of output and
an improvement in quality (see table 9.12). Very soon, increased audiences
were to bolster that optimism. The major prestige films of the season were
Angèle, Les Nuits muscovites, Maria Chapdelaine, Pension Mimosas, Le Bon-
heur, Itto, and Crime et châtiment. All were dramas, once again, though
there was one remarkable comic success in Adémaï aviateur, which estab-
lished Noël-Noël with the public and led to other Adémaï films. I have not
included Gance’s Napoléon Bonaparte in the year’s releases, since it was
largely a sonorized version of the silent film, and despite further critical ac-
claim in exclusive release it could not have a general release because of its
need for specialized projection equipment. Nor have I included Zéro de
conduite, because of its relative brevity. L’Atalante was released early in the
season, and was about tenth from bottom in the audience it received. Pa-
gnol’s Angèle was his first personal success as a director. It would join Mar-
ius and Fanny, and the later César among the elite of films repeatedly re-
vived in the course of the remainder of the decade, such that (as in their
case) the estimated audience given here is probably somewhat short of the
actual number of spectators who would ultimately have paid to see it by the
time war was declared.
Three more directors could be said with confidence to be establishing a
reputation in the trade as competent and reliable at this stage in the decade:
Feyder, L’Herbier, and Marc Allégret. Feyder had directed a string of popu-
lar sound films, beginning with the French version of Le Spectre vert, and
continuing with Le Grand Jeu and Pension Mimosas. This record was to
reach its apogee with La Kermesse héroïque in the following season. L’Her-
bier’s record was, if anything, even more remarkable. His amiable but
clumsy thrillers in the early years had been surprisingly popular, though not
as much as L’Épervier, Le Scandale, and Le Bonheur; and while L’Aventurier
and Forfaiture did nothing to harm his reputation, La Route impériale, Veille
d’armes, Les Hommes nouveaux, La Porte du large, La Citadelle du silence,
Nuits de feu, La Tragédie impériale, Adrienne Lecouvreur, and especially En-
tente cordiale, all of which figured among the most successful films of their
respective years, did everything to confirm it. Like others, but more success-
fully, in the second half of the decade he consistently exploited a nationalist
sentiment fostered by the approach of war, and he must rank high among
directors who attracted the most spectators to their films in the thirties.
In this he would be closely contested by Marc Allégret, however. If Lac
aux Dames in the 1933–34 season was perhaps his most noted film, as
much for what it said about the state of the national cinema as for what it
said about the director, it must nevertheless take its place in a string of well-
received films interspersed with two more moderate successes. As well as
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 319
Table 9.13. The 1935–36 season by order of release (week/year)
32 out of 132 (24%)
Les Yeux noirs (35/35) 196 224 420
La Bandera (38/35) 366 450 816 (2)
Deuxième Bureau (38/35) 185 405 590 (7)
Les Mystères de Paris (38/35) 102 220 322
Pasteur (38/35) 181 156 337
L’École des cocottes (39/35) 148 177 325
La Route impériale (41/35) 111 324 435
L’Équipage (43/35) 226 396 622 (6)
J’aime toutes les femmes (43/35) 134 174 308
Les Beaux Jours (45/35) 191 132 323
Fanfare d’amour (46/35) 152 174 326
La Kermesse héroïque (49/35) 264 238 502 (10)
Kœnigsmark (49/35) 180 255 435
Veille d’armes (50/35) 270 427 697 (4)
Baccara (51/35) 234 279 513 (9)
La Marraine de Charley (3/36) 97 245 342
Mayerling (5/36) 292 380 672 (5)
Le Secret de Polichinelle (6/36) 237 105 342
Roses noires (7/36) 74 234 308
Le Nouveau Testament (7/36) 178 284 462
Les Mutinés de l’Elsinore (9/36) 221 103 324
La Garçonne (9/36) 204 156 360
Bichon (10/36) 192 328 520 (8)
Samson (10/36) 266 445 711 (3)
Tarass Bulba (11/36) 225 165 390
Les Petites Alliées (13/36) 164 180 344
Marinella (13/36) 300 192 492
La Peur (15/36) 122 264 386
L’Appel du silence (18/36) 660 227 887 (1)
Club des femmes (21/36) 277 138 415
Une gueule en or (24/36) 159 201 360
Moutonnet (28/36) 134 174 308

Lac aux Dames, all the following registered among the top films of their re-
spective years: Mam’zelle Nitouche, La Petite Chocolatière, Les Beaux Jours,
Les Amants terribles, Zouzou, Sous les yeux d’Occident, Gribouille, La Dame
de Malacca, Orage, and Entrée des artistes.
Finally, it is worth mentioning two directors of comedies who would
also rank high in such a list of the consistently popular: Colombier and
Wulschleger. Although Colombier never again obtained quite the comic
success of Le Roi des resquilleurs and Théodore et Cie, neither did anyone else;
he and Wulschleger directed a very large number of films in the course of
the decade, with Bach, Milton, and later Fernandel, and only one of those
 320 | , ,  
seems to have totally failed at the box office (Le Dompteur). Their contri-
butions to this and later seasons helped to stem the swing against comedy,
particularly Colombier’s, with L’École des cocottes, La Marraine de Charley,
Le Roi, Une gueule en or, Ignace, and Les Rois du sport, among others.
The success of La Bandera, coming at the beginning of the new sea-
son, was seen as a highly significant event (see table 9.13). Though not as
popular, the other film of the season noted by critics as significant was La
Kermesse héroïque. La Bandera was followed by L’Équipage, Veille d’armes,
Mayerling, and L’Appel du silence—these five social, psychological, or meta-
physical dramas, most with nationalist sentiments, confirmed for critics the
preeminent place of the dramatic genres in the late years of the decade. Al-
though Samson, Baccara, Bichon, and Marinella were as popular, they re-
ceived relatively little critical attention. The dramas struck commentators as
cumulatively significant in defining a new direction in generic patterns—
the moment when military and nationalistic films appealed to the popular
imagination. Deuxième Bureau can be added to this list, though it was more
a spy story, establishing the fictional Capitaine Benoît as a figure compara-
ble to James Bond in the sixties. He was to reappear in L’Homme à abattre
and Capitaine Benoît, both of which (particularly the former) were im-
mensely popular, as was Deuxième Bureau contre Kommandantur in the
months immediately preceding and following the declaration of war (though
Nadia, femme traquée, also involving the Deuxième Bureau, was less so).
Murat, who played the captain/spy in this series, had played the spy previ-
ously in La Châtelaine du Liban, not to mention numerous captains, but
this series systematically promoted such figures as national heroes. From
this point until the war, French military officers and colonial agents, en-
gaging, as the genre required, in heroic feats of prowess against indigenous
rebels or enemy aggressors, were to be a standard resource of the French
cinema.
La Kermesse héroïque was singled out by critics as indicative of the move
toward quality production, with elaborate and highly aesthetic sets and so-
phisticated camerawork. These characteristics tended to go hand in hand
with the rise of the historical genre, the costume film. Kœnigsmark, Mayer-
ling, and the slightly less successful Lucrèce Borgia confirmed this hypothe-
sis. Prior to this, only Meerson’s work for René Clair had attracted the
critics’ eye to sets, but from now on Trauner and Wahkevitch were much
sought after, and their visual style helped to define the output of the last
years of the decade, and indeed the next decade.
The 1936–37 season produced the rewards consequent on the develop-
ing multiple-exclusivity strategy (see table 9.14). The numbers of specta-
tors attending one form or another of exclusive release, with their higher
entry prices, to see such films as (in order) Pepe le Moko, César, La Grande
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 321
Table 9.14. The 1936–37 season by order of release (week/year)
38 out of 133 (29%)
Les Loups entre eux (35/36) 175 372 547 (8)
Sept hommes…une femme (35/36) 160 147 307
La Belle Équipe (38/36) 161 232 393
Jenny (38/36) 219 138 357
Le Roman d’un tricheur (38/36) 205 198 403
Un de la légion (38/36) 91 273 364
L’Amant de Mme Vidal (40/36) 209 277 486
Les Grands (40/36) 120 213 333
Rigolboche (40/36) 140 162 302
Hélène (42/36) 222 168 390
La Porte du large (43/36) 149 195 344
Au son des guitares (43/36) 161 165 326
Le Roi (44/36) 367 201 568 (6)
Le Mioche (45/36) 91 234 325
Au service du Tsar (46/36) 151 156 307
César (46/36) 550 174 724 (3)
Les Bas-Fonds (50/36) 242 171 413
Port-Arthur (50/36) 176 177 353
Les Hommes nouveaux (51/36) 179 266 445
Nitchevo (51/36) 257 348 605 (5)
Faisons un rêve (1/37) 168 132 300
Le Coupable (3/37) 129 388 517
Courrier-Sud (4/37) 163 238 401
Pepe le Moko (5/37) 562 259 821 (2)
Le Chemin de Rio (6/37) 136 217 353
Messieurs les Ronds de Cuir (6/37) 148 344 492
L’Homme à abattre (9/37) 255 266 521 (10)
Vous n’avez rien à déclarer (9/37) 184 150 334
Les Dégourdis de la 11e (11/37) 260 (150) (410)
Mademoiselle Docteur (16/37) 211 105 316
Marthe Richard (16/37) 249 273 522 (9)
Nuits de feu (16/37) 241 125 366
Ignace (18/37) 302 266 568 (6)
Les Perles de la couronne (20/37) 431 259 690 (4)
La Danseuse rouge (21/37) 239 95 334
La Grande Illusion (23/37) 522 530 1,052 (1)
Troïka sur la piste blanche (25/37) 252 95 347
La Dame de pique (27/37) 255 135 390

Illusion, Les Perles de la couronne, and Le Roi was far higher than anything
seen since the 1930–32 period, when Le Roi des resquilleurs, Théodore et Cie,
Marius, and Fanny had recorded similar figures. If this was sometimes at
the expense of general release, producers were not likely to be disturbed
(though suburban theater owners were). Moreover, La Grande Illusion
 322 | , ,  
followed up this impressive performance by general release into more than
a hundred Parisian theaters in the course of the next year, while both Pepe
and Perles also did extremely well.
In generic terms, however, this season confirmed the rise of war and spy
stories already noted in 1935–36. Les Loups entre eux was followed later in
the year by Marthe Richard, which, together with Mademoiselle Docteur,
shifted the emphasis away from fearless heroes such as Capitaine Benoît in
L’Homme à abattre and toward the sultry female spy. At least four other
popular films had military or marine settings. Several of these were Russian.
Clearly, the importance of Russia in French films of the thirties was not de-
pendent solely on the existence of Albatros Films and Russian emigrants.
For the French, Russia seems to have been a vicarious France through
which they could experience their own preoccupations, very slightly dis-
tanced. Les Bas-Fonds is only the best known of a series that in this season
included Au service du Tsar, Port-Arthur, and Nuits de feu, as well as Troïka
sur la piste blanche, set in Poland.
The other most popular films in general release were, on the one hand,
Ignace and Un de la légion, which, along with Les Dégourdis de la 11e, con-
firmed Fernandel’s place as the leading comic actor; and, on the other, Le
Coupable, which joined Nuits de feu in presenting a magistrate forced to
come to terms with his own complicity in the situation he is judging. Alto-
gether, the proportion of films attracting 250,000 or more spectators ap-
proached half the year’s releases for the first time ever. As table 9.14 shows,
nearly 30 percent exceeded 300,000, and the extent of some of these suc-
cesses, as reflected in regular surveys, justified the industry’s optimism.
This confidence came despite the tense political situation relating to the
Popular Front and its disintegration. The only film in table 9.14 which in-
directly captures something of the political aspirations of the time is La
Belle Équipe, which was perhaps successful not for this reason but rather be-
cause it was based on a number of extremely conventional and proven nar-
rative strategies. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange had not made the previous
year’s table, though it had had an honorable career, and La Vie est à nous was
never intended as a commercial proposition and never released in theaters.
Nor, despite its slightly more conventional form, was Le Temps des cerises.
When it was presented somewhat hopefully to the trade late in 1937, the
trade journal commented acidly that it was a harsh and simplistic film
which did not appear to have any prospect of normal (i.e., commercial) re-
lease.40
In view of the understandable antagonism which faced Sacha Guitry as
a result of his support for recorded theater, it is worth remembering how
popular his films were. This had become apparent in the 1935–36 season,
when all three of his films proved attractive to spectators, but it was even
more apparent in 1936–37, when the remarkable performance of Les Perles
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 323
de la couronne was backed up by another three successes and by that of the
mid-length film Le Mot de Cambronne. Perles, with its overview of four
hundred years of French history, was to lead in later years to a number of
other equally atrocious overviews, based on similar narrative pretexts (Re-
montons les Champs-Élysées, Si Versailles m’était conté, Si Paris nous était
conté ). Pagnol, who occasionally sounded as if he intended to implement a
similar principle, was not proving so consistently successful. César benefited
from its position as the final episode in a trilogy of which all France had
seen the first two, now re-screened in parallel with it, but Cigalon, Merlusse,
and even Topaze had not done very well during the preceding season.
Among other well-known directors, Ophüls had little success in these
years. Divine was not a hit, while La Tendre Ennemie and Yoshiwara, if a lit-
tle more popular, attracted less than the average number of spectators in
Paris. None equaled the greater, though still modest, achievement of Lieb-
elei, which had attracted more than this number in German, even before its
French version appeared. Only in the “phony war” period did Ophüls come
into his own, with the success of Sans lendemain and De Mayerling à Sara-
jevo. In contrast, it is worth restating the degree of success enjoyed by
L’Herbier’s films throughout the decade. Whatever the genre, his films sel-
dom attracted fewer than 300,000 spectators in Paris, and sometimes twice
that figure. In the 1936–37 season, La Porte du large, Les Hommes nou-
veaux, and Nuits de feu all had audiences exceeding 300,000. A similarly
successful run was, as is well known, experienced by Carné’s first film,
Jenny, which appeared in the 1936–37 season. If Drôle de drame was just
short, with about 247,000 spectators, the figures for his five succeeding
films constituted a record the equal of any other director. Even Duvivier,
often mentioned deprecatingly by critics in the same breath as Carné—the
two meticulous craftsmen of their age—could not quite equal Carné’s
achievement despite the striking success of La Belle Équipe and Pepe le
Moko this season and of La Bandera, Maria Chapdelaine, and Un carnet de
bal before and after. Duvivier’s career was, after all, studded with failures,
even ambitious failures, and with modest successes that were sometimes
ambitious, sometimes not. The reception of Le Golem and Golgotha must
have given his producers cause for anxiety.
Finally, among successful directors who have received little recognition,
Litvak and Mirande deserve, in their different ways, our attention. Mayer-
ling and L’Équipage had followed Cette vieille canaille (and the earlier Cœur
de Lilas) as successful films for the former, while the latter, aside from his
scriptwriter’s role in numerous boulevard comedies which were brought to
the screen, directed four successful films in the 1936–37 season, including
Messieurs les Ronds de Cuir, following Baccara in the previous season and
leading to three further successes, the most significant of which was Der-
rière la façade.
 324 | , ,  
Table 9.15. The 1937–38 season by order of release (week/year)
42 out of 122 (39%)
Mademoiselle ma mère (32/37) 189 178 367
Le Messager (36/37) 150 217 367
Un carnet de bal (37/37) 422 446 868 (1)
Gribouille (37/37) 214 190 404
Gueule d’amour (38/37) 312 260 572 (5)
Les Rois du sport (38/37) 168 160 328
La Citadelle du silence (39/37) 198 170 368
Double Crime sur la Ligne Maginot (39/37) 188 229 417
Fauteuil 47 (39/37) 218 153 371
La Dame de Malacca (40/37) 136 185 321
Feu (43/37) 201 150 351
L’Habit vert (45/37) 299 196 495 (9)
Le Mensonge de Nina Petrovna (45/37) 236 113 349
L’Affaire du courrier de Lyon (46/37) 174 155 329
Abus de confiance (49/37) 240 404 644 (3)
Désiré (49/37) 208 159 367
Sœurs d’armes (50/37) 209 93 302
Claudine à l’école (51/37) 186 135 321
Naples au baiser du feu (51/37) 283 289 572 (6)
L’Alibi (52/37) 291 296 587 (4)
Ces dames au chapeau vert (52/37) 234 172 406
Orage (2/38) 188 283 471
Le Puritain (2/38) 168 245 413
Mollenard (4/38) 226 89 315
Quadrille (4/38) 266 223 489 (10)
L’Innocent (6/38) 140 171 311
La Marseillaise (6/38) 248 127 375
Prison sans barreaux (7/38) 255 328 583 (5)
Légions d’honneur (7/38) 298 174 472
L’Occident (7/38) 199 138 337
Ramuntcho (8/38) 189 336 525 (8)
Hercule (9/38) 304 132 436
L’Affaire Lafarge (10/38) 260 165 425
La Tragédie impériale (13/38) 289 165 454
Le Schpountz (15/38) 274 150 424
Les Disparus de St Agil (15/38) 224 110 334
L’Étrange Monsieur Victor (18/38) 289 110 399
Barnabé (19/38) 276 144 420
Quai des brumes (20/38) 554 300 854 (2)
La Présidente (21/38) 199 138 337
Le Petit Chose (22/38) 195 138 333
Altitude 3200 (29/38) 253 75 328

The 1937–38 season must have been even more satisfying for the in-
dustry than the previous one had been (see table 9.15). It contained only
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 325
two outstandingly popular films—Un carnet de bal and Quai des brumes—
but by my calculations nearly 40 percent of the year’s films attracted over
300,000 spectators in Paris. Audiences were spread more generally across
the year’s output. Only about thirty of the 122 films looked, on the basis of
their Paris performance, as if they might lose money, and only about five
failed badly. These figures had been steadily improving over the years, since
1930–31, when, despite immense audiences for some films, at least twenty
failed badly. Quai des brumes, released late in the season, ran all through
summer, with secondary and tertiary exclusive runs taking it up to week 47
of 1938, and immediate general release into thirty-four first-screening the-
aters in week 48. Its general release lasted until about week 10 of 1939, and
it was just being re-released in a further exclusivity as the war began. At first
banned, it experienced another successful re-release in 1941. It was there-
fore the first film whose long-term career was significantly disturbed by the
outbreak of war, and the figures given for its total audience might well have
been greater had its career not been interrupted.
In this season, for the first time, a significant number of successes on
the home market began to translate into festival prizes and export earnings.
Festival recognition came, of course, from the only film festival then func-
tioning, the Venice Biennale (which had first included film in 1932). It
began in 1935 and 1936, with Pierre Blanchar and Annabella winning the
Coupe Volpi for best actor and best actress, and Feyder winning best direc-
tor for La Kermesse héroïque. But in 1937, Un carnet de bal was designated
best foreign film, La Grande Illusion won the jury prize, and Les Perles de la
couronne won the prize for best scenario. Export recognition was most val-
ued when it came from the industry’s great rival, America. Now, for the first
time since before World War I, producers could hope to see most of their
locally successful films exported to the United States. In 1936, the U.S. Na-
tional Board of Review designated five French films among the “ten best
foreign films of the past year”—Crime et châtiment, which came out on top,
La Maternelle, La Bandera, Maria Chapdelaine and Le Dernier Milliardaire.
In that same year, La Kermesse héroïque ran for fifteen weeks in New York
and was designated best film of the year—the first foreign film ever to be so
designated—while La Croisière jaune and Les Misérables made the top-ten
list. In 1937, Les Bas-Fonds and Mayerling also earned high recognition: the
former was ranked second among foreign films, the latter fourth, and Gol-
gotha came sixth. Mayerling ran for twenty-four weeks in New York, and
made $300,000 there alone, which provoked endless analyses in French
trade journals. Again in 1938 the National Board of Review designated a
French film—La Grande Illusion—the best foreign film of the year, with
three other French films following it. Forty copies of La Grande Illusion cir-
culated simultaneously in the United States. And in 1939 Quai des brumes
was designated joint best film of the year with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. In
 326 | , ,  
that year, Regain received the American Press Prize, having initially been
banned there then released uncut.
La Bandera, Veille d’armes, Pepe le Moko, and a dozen other French films
were soon routinely being screened in America, which had previously been
so resistant to foreign-language films. Un carnet de bal ran for thirteen
weeks, and Un grand amour de Beethoven for twelve weeks. The same thing
happened in other countries, which were more open to foreign-language
films. England gave a good reception to all of the above, together with La
Belle Équipe, while Un carnet de bal ran for eighteen weeks and Le Roman
d’un tricheur fourteen weeks, the latter screening in a dubbed version in
four hundred British theaters. In Japan, the 1937 list of ten best films in-
cluded Pension Mimosas (1), Maria Chapdelaine (4), La Bandera (5), Crime
et châtiment (6), and Du haut en bas (8), while in Sweden the 1938 list of
the top ten films also included five from France—Le Roman d’un tricheur,
Les Perles de la couronne, Les Bas-Fonds, La Grande Illusion, and Prison sans
barreaux. Further triumphs followed throughout Europe and in the Amer-
icas. In March 1938, a quarterly review laid particular emphasis on these
export successes, noting that “France incontestably took second place in the
international marketplace in 1937,” after the United States.41 By August
1938, the industry could boast that in the previous year it had astounded
the world: “For the first time, hundreds of American theaters have been
screening French movies.”42 At the Venice Festival that year, France was
awarded the Coupe du Jury for its entire national offering, including a ret-
rospective mounted by the Cinémathèque Française.
This degree of foreign recognition contrasts starkly with the lack of ex-
port success experienced by French producers between 1930 and 1935,
when only René Clair’s films, and perhaps Poil de Carotte, were known
abroad. Other than these, any export success won by production compa-
nies had related primarily to Greece or to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.43
Another measure of the increasing prestige that was beginning to accrue
to French production in Anglo-Saxon countries is the large number of re-
makes of French films that were produced in these years. After the famous
instance of Pepe le Moko, remade as Algiers (and later as Casbah), came Eng-
lish-language versions of Prison sans barreaux, J’étais une aventurière, Café de
Paris, Adémaï aviateur, Les Yeux noirs, La Bataille silencieuse, Alerte en Médi-
terranée, Carrefour, and La Chienne. Not coincidentally, it was also at this
time that large numbers of French film personnel began to be honored by
the nation for services to their country: René Clair and Renoir received the
Légion d’Honneur in 1937; Léon Mathot, Duvivier, Chevalier, and Raimu
in 1938; and Louis Lumière himself in 1939. Previously, only Raymond
Bernard had, to my knowledge, received such recognition, and that due
principally to Croix de bois.
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 327
Table 9.16. The 1938–39 season by order of release (week/year)
38 out of 123 (31%)
Alerte en Méditerranée (35/38) 300 162 462
La Femme du boulanger (36/38) 315 232 547
Le Joueur (36/38) 165 234 399
Le Train pour Venise (37/38) 258 75 333
La Maison du Maltais (38/38) 194 262 456
Adrienne Lecouvreur (39/38) 211 177 388
Éducation de prince (40/38) 333 72 405
Entrée des artistes (40/38) 364 165 529
Lumières de Paris (40/38) 195 156 351
Prisons de femmes (41/38) 254 227 481
Katia (42/38) 263 279 542
Le Révolté (43/38) 231 171 402
Retour à l’aube (46/38) 210 174 384
Gibraltar (48/38) 272 276 548
Remontons les Champs-Élysées (48/38) 338 177 515
Hôtel du Nord (50/38) 375 320 695
Trois Valses (50/38) 472 420 892
La Bête humaine (51/38) 514 (400) (914)
Conflit (51/38) 129 245 374
J’étais une aventurière (51/38) 345 165 510
Mon curé chez les riches (51/38) 127 262 389
Le Capitaine Benoît (1/39) 192 248 440
Trois de St. Cyr (5/39) 259 319 578
Raphaël le tatoué (6/39) 150 (180) — [360]
L’Esclave blanche (7/39) 238 211 449
Le Récif de corail (9/39) 261 — [480]
Les Cinq Sous de Lavarède (10/39) 221 211 432
Derrière la façade (11/39) 262 (290) — [530]
Le Déserteur (11/39) 166 (201) — [360]
La Fin du jour (12/39) 205 (321) — [580]
Entente cordiale (16/39) 168 — [750]
Le Dernier Tournant (20/39) 148 (184) — [310]
Le Jour se lève (23/39) 195 (475) — [850]
Fric-Frac (24/39) 238 (350) — [700]
Deuxième Bureau contre Kommandantur (25/39) 65 (200) — [340]
La Règle du jeu (27/39) 138 (244) — [420]
Circonstances atténuantes (30/39) 120 (238) — [470]
Louise (34/39) 80 (230) — [320]

In these circumstances, it was inevitable that producers should begin to

link large-scale quality productions and a technical finish that registered as
aesthetic sophistication with festival acclaim and export success. Tentative
 328 | , ,  
comments to this effect in the 1935–36 season were consolidated into ac-
cepted wisdom during 1937–38. Interviewed at the end of 1937, a number
of industry executives independently expressed a view that shorter and
more modest productions were becoming commercially nonviable: “It is
less risky to spend three or four million francs to make an ambitious film
than to film small-scale projects on the cheap.” In their view, “too many
smaller films are cluttering up the market.”44 Succeeding quarterly reviews
showed them becoming confirmed in their view that lavish financing of
sumptuous sets and costumes was giving the French cinema success at
home and a reputation abroad, and that in general quality should prevail
over quantity.45 Clearly the “cinéma de qualité” which Truffaut was to at-
tack in the fifties was not, or not solely, a fifties phenomenon, or even a
wartime phenomenon, but was a direct outcome of the economic condi-
tions of the industry in the mid- to late thirties, furthered by the peculiar
conditions of wartime production and profitability.
As indicated above in the case of Quai des brumes, estimates of the de-
gree of popularity that films released in the 1938–39 season enjoyed, or
would have enjoyed, are difficult to make because the war cast its shadow
back on that season’s releases (see table 9.16). Week 35 of 1939 was the last
week in which anything approaching normal programming could take
place. After that point, the chaos attendant on mobilization and the regula-
tions which greatly reduced audience sizes for fear of air raids affected the
performance of films released and discouraged the release of further films
for some months. Perhaps foreseeing these disruptions, and anxious to get
in if possible before they occurred, the industry had continued to release
promising films through the normally bleak period of late July and early
August. Consequently, at the outbreak of war about a dozen promising
films were still in the middle of (or in some cases had just begun) their ex-
clusive release, and estimates of their audience are necessarily more tenta-
tive than in earlier cases. Among these were Deuxième Bureau, Fric-Frac,
Entente cordiale, Le Jour se lève, Circonstances atténuantes, and La Tradition
de minuit, not to mention La Règle du jeu, which had, like some of the oth-
ers, just ended its (reportedly tumultuous) first run but had not yet opened
in second-run or later exclusive-release theaters. It might have been ex-
pected to attract another hundred thousand spectators before its exclusive
release ended.
Some of the films whose release was interrupted resumed their run,
though in dramatically different circumstances, during the following season
(when some runs were again cut short by the German occupation of Paris)
or in later years. A number were banned by one regime or another, and re-
sumed their runs only much later, if they still existed. This makes reliable
estimates of audience numbers for exclusive release well-nigh impossible,
and at least partially invalidates any direct comparison with earlier seasons.
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 329
The actual entry figures obtained by each film before the war began are
given in table 9.16; the figures in parentheses constitute estimates of their
final exclusive-release figure if circumstances had been normal. The general-
release figures for many of these films once war was declared are for the
most part nonexistent or so distorted by prevailing conditions as to be un-
reliable, since there was a disruption in both the printing and the archiving
of sources on which such estimates might be based. As mentioned, the fear
of air raids brought radical limitations to the maximum audience size per-
mitted in all theaters. These maximums were initially so low—some large
theaters were only permitted forty or fifty, and the absolute maximum was
three hundred—that many theaters couldn’t afford to open, despite the au-
thorities’ pleas for them to do so as a public service. By mid-October of
1939, however, half of the Paris theaters had reopened, and by early No-
vember, 243 out of 350 were open. By then, in fact, the requests by theater
managers for a relaxation of the regulations had begun to have effect, and,
as figure 9.2 shows, audiences had crept up toward 50 percent of those ex-
perienced in recent years. In early December, a further relaxation saw several
theater managers for the first time expressing some degree of satisfaction
with receipts and declaring that “the stagnation is at an end.”46 By April of
1940, indeed, receipts were back to normal (though not entries, because
there had been a significant price rise); but almost immediately the threat of
occupation began to drive Parisians out of Paris, and the exodus which ac-
companied the actual invasion in June took attendance to an all-time low
from which it did not recover for years. Even in 1941, the population of
Paris was lower by 400,000 than in 1938, and theater attendance was only
two thirds that of 1938.
Surviving data therefore do not permit accurate estimates for the period
of September to December 1939 (and indeed later, though with decreasing
indeterminacy). What I have done is to apply probabilities based on previ-
ous releases by the same director and/or in the same genre to get a hypo-
thetical figure for total audience, and to base my calculations on the known
proportion of normal audience size, as indicated in figure 9.2, that was ap-
plicable in each of these contentious months. The result is given in brack-
ets, to indicate an even higher degree of uncertainty than is indicated by
parentheses.
Inevitably, these uncertainties affect most profoundly the films released
toward the end of the season. The first of this season’s releases to be directly
affected was La Bête humaine, which was released at Christmas 1938, and
which, after thirteen weeks at the Madeleine, enjoyed a varied second and
third run in nine different theaters, including the two largest, the Rex and
the Gaumont Palace. This was probably about to end when war broke out.
When it reappeared in week 6 of 1940, it was treated as if it were resuming
after a summer break, with a “reminder” release, then a truncated general
 330 | , ,  
release, which offers little guidance as to what would have happened in nor-
mal times.
Any film which was released from February on and which experienced
any degree of success met problems of a similar nature. La Femme du bou-
langer, Entrée des artistes, and Katia, however, which had been released in
the first weeks of the 1938–39 season, experienced something resembling
a normal successful career. A number of promising films were released
around the end of 1938 to capitalize on the seasonal cycle—Gibraltar, Re-
montons les Champs-Élysées, Hôtel du Nord, Trois Valses, and La Bête hu-
maine. Though only the last of these was still in release at the outbreak of
war, nearly all the others, along with those which were at all successful
thereafter, were cut short in ways that require the application of calcula-
tions such as those I have outlined above. In fact, attendance figures were
not as high as they might normally have been at the end of 1938 because of
a protest by prominent theater managers which involved some closures, but
counterbalancing this, attendance in March and April was anomalously
high, and audiences were large right up to the outbreak of war. Ignoring for
the moment the catastrophe that followed, the industry would have had
every reason to be as satisfied with this season as with the two that had pre-
ceded it. Only in June 1939 does a note of pessimism begin to intrude on
contemporary accounts of record attendance and export successes, as Ger-
many and Italy become difficult to deal with commercially, and a number
of countries which had welcomed French films cease to exist.47
Up to that point, the popularity of films such as Les Trois Valses, Katia,
Remontons les Champs-Élysées, Hôtel du Nord, Entente cordiale, and Le Jour
se lève can only have confirmed the industry’s belief in large-scale produc-
tions, technical finish, and elaborate sets, which, when not elegant, at least
aestheticized the squalor they represented. The continuing success of costly
war and spy stories (admittedly subsidized by the Defense Forces) pointed
in the same direction, most notably Alerte en Méditerranée, Gibraltar, Le
Capitaine Benoît, Trois de St. Cyr, and Deuxième Bureau contre Komman-
dantur. Yet there were two more intimate small-scale, bleaker productions
which experienced an unexpected degree of success—Entrée des artistes and
La Fin du jour. Indeed, the surprise expressed by the industry at their suc-
cess was directly related to its growing conviction that such films were no
longer viable. Only two comedies made a real impact this season, both star-
ring Michel Simon and both released just before the outbreak of war—
Fric-Frac and Circonstances atténuantes. If one also takes into account the
two Renoir films and another Jean Gabin–Michèle Morgan film, Récif de
corail, which has apparently been lost, together with Pagnol’s La Femme du
boulanger, it becomes apparent what a rich and varied season the French
cinema experienced just before the catastrophe.
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 331
The contrast with the 1939–40 season could not be greater. Politically,
the latter belongs to the forties rather than the thirties, but since the careers
of films made in the thirties were centrally affected by it a few comments
are justified. Records do not allow any statements about this period to be
made with confidence; I have been able to trace only thirty-nine films re-
leased between September 1939 and June 1940. Of those released before
the end of 1939, only Ils étaient neuf célibataires, Le Bois sacré, and Pièges
looked set for reasonable runs. Many films made in 1939, such as L’Enfer
des anges, La Nuit de décembre, and Rozier’s Espoirs (not to mention Re-
morques, though for quite other reasons) were not released until 1941,
while Macao, l’enfer du jeu and La Piste du nord appeared only in 1942.
Malraux’s Espoir, known then as Sierra de Teruel, and not strictly a French
film, as well as a few lesser-known films, did not appear until 1945. Only
six of the films produced during the phony war found their way onto the
market before the end of the 1939–40 season, including Paris-New York,
Miquette, and La Fille du puisatier (though the latter not in Paris). Out-
standing among releases in the latter half of this confused season was Bat-
tement de cœur, which was in exclusive release at the Madeleine from week 6
of 1940 on, and resumed its exclusive release early in 1941. With its general
release starting in week 40 of 1941, it ran in at least seventy-seven Paris the-
aters before the end of the year, accumulating a total of about 900,000
spectators by that time. It thus ranks as one of the most popular of the
films produced in the thirties.

9.4 REGIONAL AND NATIONAL AUDIENCES

These seasonal tables call for several comments, some of which are relevant
to any attempt to extend them to their logical end, which is obtaining a
long-term and nationwide list of the most popular films of the decade.
First, if the tables for Paris are anywhere near accurate, then it is apparent
that there are gross disparities between the performance of films in exclu-
sive release and in general release. This should not be surprising, since, as
indicated above, the relationship between exclusive and general release was
always unequal, and was constantly evolving over the decade. Even more
important, the performance of a film in these two categories depended en-
tirely on the release strategy adopted by the producer and distributor. In the
extreme, several dozen films had no exclusive release at all, yet some of these
did quite well in general release. Finally, the two categories of release at-
tracted statistically different audiences with significantly different tastes and
preoccupations. Cumulatively, this could mean that success in exclusive re-
lease was not a reliable predictor of success in general release. As table 9.17
shows, a list of the top films in exclusive release does not correlate at all
 332 | , ,  
closely with a list of top films after general release. It compares the forty
films which by my calculations achieved the greatest number of spectators
in exclusive release in Paris with the forty films that achieved the greatest
number of spectators after their general release in Paris.
Foreign films have not been included in either of the columns, though
if they had been there would be about fifteen foreign and twenty-five
French in each list. In the fifties, when Le Film Français conducted a de-
tailed analysis, twenty-five out of the sixty films which attracted over
300,000 viewers in exclusive release were foreign, and thirty-five were French.
Among the former, Bridge on the River Kwai rated highest, at second, with
643,000 viewers, and the only other foreign film in the top ten was Ben
Hur, at fifth with 570,000. In the thirties, a roughly similar proportion
would have achieved that level of popularity, nearly all of them American.
What the tables make immediately apparent is that some thirties films
rose markedly in rank after general release, while others fell. Among the for-
mer are Jean de la Lune, Trois Valses, and Mayerling, while another eight do
not even appear among the top forty in exclusive release yet figure quite
highly after general release. Notable among these “sleepers” are Le Grand
Jeu, Nitchevo, Angèle, Abus de confiance, L’Équipage, and Le Congrès s’amuse,
and above all Deuxième Bureau, which achieved only 185,000 in exclusive
release. Among those that fall after general release are Pepe le Moko, César,
and Les Perles de la couronne, while several disappear completely from the
second list. Among these are Le Roi, Entrée des artistes, Croix de bois, La Nuit
est à nous, J’étais une aventurière, Remontons les Champs-Élysées, and Éduca-
tion de prince.
If these dramatic changes in ranking seem dubious, the analogy of the
fifties can again be cited. At that time, the audiences for all films at all stages
of their career were meticulously tracked and monitored, not just for Paris
but nationwide, and precisely the same sort of disjunction is apparent. Nei-
ther Le Roi Pandore nor Prélude à la gloire would have rated a mention on
the basis of their 1950 exclusive-release figures, yet ultimately they pro-
vided the fourth and tenth best returns for films produced in 1949. The
same is true of Alerte au sud in 1953, a year in which La Belle de Cadix and
Les Enfants de l’amour also improved their ratings dramatically once out
of first release. In 1956, Don Juan, Sans famille, and Christine rose from
anonymity only when out of exclusive release. And these are just the most
marked of a large number of such films identified by CNC long-term data.
It is equally true that a number of films which promised well in that decade
subsequently slumped in the ratings. Perhaps the most dramatic instances
were La Ronde and Monsieur Ripois in 1954, but the tables document many
others.
These more reliable figures from the fifties can reassure us that the dis-
parities noted for the thirties are not unreasonable. Again on analogy with
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 333
Table 9.17. A comparison of exclusive and general-release figures for Paris

After exclusive release After general release

Le Roi des resquilleurs 888 Le Roi des resquilleurs 1,187
L’Appel du silence 660 La Grande Illusion 1,052
Pepe le Moko 562 La Bête humaine (914)
Quai des brumes 554 La Grande Mare 893
César 550 Trois Valses 892
Théodore et Cie 539 L’Appel du silence 887
La Grande Illusion 522 Un carnet de bal 868
La Bête humaine 514 Quai des brumes 854
La Grande Mare 503 Le Jour se lève (850)
Le Jour se lève (475) Théodore et Cie 830
Trois Valses 472 Pepe le Moko 821
Fanny 454 La Bandera 816
Adémaï aviateur 449 Jean de la Lune 769
Les Perles de la couronne 431 Adémaï aviateur 742
Marius 428 César 724
Un carnet de bal 422 Samson 711
Hôtel du Nord 375 Entente cordiale (700)
Entente cordiale 368 Fric-Frac (700)
Le Roi 367 Veille d’armes 697
La Bandera 366 Hôtel du Nord 695
Entrée des artistes 364 Les Perles de la couronne 690
Croix de bois 356 Mayerling 672
La Nuit est à nous 350 Angèle 664
Fric-Frac (350) Fanny 664
La Bande à Bouboule 348 Marius 654
J’étais une aventurière 345 Abus de confiance 644
Remontons les Champs-Élysées 338 L’Équipage 622
Éducation de prince 333 Maria Chapdelaine 612
Jean de la Lune 324 Le Grand Jeu 608
La Fin du jour (321) Nitchevo 605
La Femme du boulanger 315 Le Congrès s’amuse 605
Gueule d’amour 312 La Bande à Bouboule 593
La Maternelle 308 Deuxième Bureau 590
Maria Chapdelaine 305 Les Nuits moscovites 589
Hercule 304 L’Alibi 587
Ignace 302 Prison sans barreaux 583
Marinella 300 La Fin du jour (580)
Alerte en Méditerranée 300 Trois de St. Cyr 578
L’Habit vert 299 Naples au baiser du feu 572
Mayerling 292 Gueule d’amour 572

the fifties we might expect to be able to make certain generalizations about

the long-term popularity of certain genres and actors. In that decade, for in-
stance, general-release audiences favored actors who embodied the current
 334 | , ,  
image of “the common man,” such as Bourvil (Le Cœur sur la main, 1949;
Le Roi Pandore, 1950) and Blier (Sans famille, 1958), as they favored the
comic blundering of Fernandel (particularly in Don Juan, 1956; Le Chôm-
eur de Clochemerle, 1957; and La Loi, c’est la loi, 1958). The same seems to
be true of the thirties, when general-release audiences showed strong sup-
port for the “man of the people”—Milton, Bach, and Fernandel, not to
mention Michel Simon and René Lefèvre. Thus a check of the annual lists
of top films which were “sleepers,” in the sense that they showed little
promise in exclusive release but far greater popularity on general release,
turns up films starring Gabin (Cœur de Lilas), Boyer (L’Épervier), Bach (Si-
donie Panache, Bach millionnaire), Fernandel (Un de la légion), and Lef èvre
(Paprika).
Another predictable tendency was for more intellectual films to do bet-
ter in exclusive release, often to crash on general release (L’Opéra de quat’-
sous, Itto, Altitude 3200, even L’Étrange Monsieur Victor), while those which
aimed for emotional intensity moved in the other direction. Moreover, gen-
eral-release audiences preferred certain specific genres, such as the melo-
drama, whether classic (Les Mystères de Paris, Le Mioche), realist (Faubourg
Montmartre), or relating to artists’ lives (La Ronde des heures, Louise), and
romantic comedy (Atout cœur, Trois pour cent, and Princesse à vos ordres, and
succeeding Garat–Harvey romances). Again, as Louise and La Ronde des
heures suggest, anything dealing with the trials of an artist was likely to do
better in general release than its exclusive release would have led one to ex-
pect. La Chanson d’une nuit was a sleeper of this sort, foreshadowing Entrée
des artistes and La Fin du jour, both of which astounded the industry later
in the decade. Another thematic field, that of suppressed guilt and the re-
surgence of the past, struck a chord with the general public which it had
failed to awaken in the exclusive-release public, as Le Coupable and Le Juif
polonais indicate. Sergent X experienced the same sort of success, working
with an analogous theme. Finally, the farce and the military vaudeville
often scored more favor with the general public, as did anything featuring
the military. Films as different as Sergent X, Un de la légion, and Sidonie
Panache, all foreign legion films set in North Africa, proved more popular
with the general-release public than they had with the exclusive-release
public.
On the other hand, from 1937 on, any tale of spies, smugglers, or gun-
runners proved disappointing on general release, for instance Mademoiselle
Docteur, La Danseuse rouge, Troika sur la piste blanche, Sœurs d’armes, and
even Mollenard. This may have been partly due to an evolving disaffection
for East European, particularly Russian, settings, which had been a main-
stay for some production companies before that point. Certainly, these
films constituted the bulk of the productions that succeeded in exclusive
release but failed in general release in the later years of the decade, as op-
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 335
posed to melodramas, sentimental comedies, and farces, of which the re-
verse was true.
While it is interesting to note these actual or possible differences be-
tween exclusive-release and general-release audiences, a more serious quali-
fication that needs to be introduced to any discussion of the seasonal tables
is the extent to which they provide us with an accurate evaluation of the
long-term nationwide success of the listed films. To what extent, that is, did
regional audiences echo Parisian preferences? If they did so with any accu-
racy, then since Paris audiences constituted about 30 percent of the na-
tional audience all that would be needed to obtain the total national
audience for the films listed in the tables is to multiply by 3.33. Yet clearly
this procedure would not be valid in all cases. The more reliable data avail-
able from 1948 on, supplemented by the less reliable but still significant fig-
ures available for the period 1930–47, suggest that there were indeed, as the
industry claimed, important differences between Parisian and provincial
preferences, between urban and rural preferences, and thus between early
predictions concerning a film’s success based on its Parisian record and its
actual long-term nationwide popularity. For instance, from the early thir-
ties on, it is clear that a number of more ambitious films, notably those di-
rected by individuals now recognized as auteurs, failed outside Paris, just as
they failed with general-release audiences inside Paris. On the available evi-
dence, in contrast with their (sometimes only relative) Parisian success, sev-
eral of Feyder’s films flopped in the provinces (Le Spectre vert, Si l’empereur
savait ça, and La Piste du nord ), as did Caïn, L’Opéra de quat’sous, Entrée des
artistes, and several of Duvivier’s more ambitious films (Golgotha, Le Golem,
and David Golder). Two of Grémillon’s wartime films, Remorques and Lu-
mière d’été, failed outside Paris, as did Les Parents terribles (Orphée failed
everywhere).
Generally, provincial audiences were more likely to favor films and gen-
res favored by the general-release audience in Paris. This had the effect of
reinforcing the sleeper effect of such films and genres over time. The one
exception is historical romances, which were widely popular with Parisians,
even or especially on general release, but not with provincial audiences.
L’Herbier’s historical romances, such as L’Épervier and La Route impériale,
had demonstrated this sleeper effect in Parisian general release, while En-
tente cordiale was popular with all Paris audiences. But if provincial audi-
ences did not agree about historical romances, they did support the Paris
general-release audiences in their taste for melodrama and farce. Two of the
outstanding wartime successes, Le Voile bleu (a melodrama with Gaby Mor-
lay) and Fièvres (a musical drama with Tino Rossi), were to prove success-
ful almost solely because of provincial support. The fifties provide many
instances of another provincial predilection—that for musicals. In 1951,
Andalousie, Chacun son tour, Musique en tête, and Boîte de nuit all did dis-
 336 | , ,  
proportionately well outside Paris. Those featuring Luis Mariano were par-
ticularly popular in the provinces (Quatre jours à Paris, Le Chanteur de
Mexico, and Violettes impériales). What now can seem rather vacuous post-
war musicals organized around the singularly undramatic activity of some
band popular at the time—Jacques Hélian’s in Paris-St Germain des Prés
and Musique en tête, Ray Ventura’s in Mademoiselle s’amuse, Nous irons à
Paris, and Nous irons à Monte Carlo—were (even) more successful in the
provinces than in Paris. While musicals rated highly everywhere in the early
thirties, there is some evidence to suggest that they were even more popu-
lar outside of Paris than in the city.
The provinces cannot, however, be treated as a coherent bloc, whose
“backward” or “rural” attitudes might be globally opposed to those of a
more sophisticated Paris. A detailed study of regional variations still needs
to be undertaken, but certain generalizations can safely be made. Toulouse
audiences, for instance, were notorious for replicating the more sophisti-
cated taste of Paris. The ranking given French films screened in Toulouse in
1933 was remarkably consistent with the ranking given those same films by
Paris audiences. Both groups ranked highly L’Atlantide, La Maternelle, and
Les Deux Orphelines, as well as Fanny and Marius, Les Croix de bois, La Petite
Chocolatière, and Il est charmant. Toulouse placed Le Chanteur inconnu and
Jocelyn higher, but the differences are minimal. Lille, as befits the image of
an austere and pragmatic northern town, was sometimes more favorably
disposed toward serious and even somber films than was Paris. Duvivier’s
Golgotha, which did not do very well in Paris and appeared on no other poll,
topped the Lille poll for 1934–35.48 At the other end of the country,
Provence, with its own production system and actors, tended to favor films
with a local setting and accent. Films starring Fernandel were widely appre-
ciated throughout France, but nowhere so intensely as in Provence. The
most impressive instances were to be Uniformes et grandes manœuvres and Le
Boulanger de Valorgues, in a later decade, but that similar preferences were al-
ready operative in the thirties is apparent from the 1933 returns from Mar-
seille’s four principal theaters, which show Colombier’s Charlemagne as far
and away the most profitable and his Sa meilleure cliente in fifth place. Nei-
ther rated as highly elsewhere.49 The same is true of Il était une fois, a curious
film about an operation that transforms a woman morally as well as aesthet-
ically: low on Paris lists, it came fourth in Marseille. Even more dramatic
was the success of L’Ordonnance, a military melodrama, and Une femme au
volant, both of which failed in Paris but scored second and seventh, respec-
tively, in Marseille. Although there were common favorites in all years,
Provençal audiences nevertheless differed measurably in their appreciation
of certain films and certain genres. They did not take to René Clair’s films
as Paris audiences did, showing no interest at all in Quatorze juillet. Like
 Box-Office Success in the Thirties | 337
most regions, they were equally uninterested in Tumultes and the science-
fiction film IF 1 ne répond plus.
Finally, for obvious reasons, the German-speaking areas, for as long as
their linguistic culture remained distinctive, recorded anomalous returns.
In fact, the Alsace population didn’t much like any French films in the thir-
ties and forties, and those that it did favor were totally unpredictable and
unrelated to the lists from other regions. In Strasbourg, even in the early
fifties, a mediocre German film could expect to draw three times the audi-
ence of a good French film.50 In sum, for much of the classic period, France
was effectively a patchwork of regional audiences with notable differences
in their preferences relating to regional identities, and in order to obtain
any definitive figures for the total national audience for a given film these
regional and rural preferences would have to be addressed. To do so would
involve accessing numerous regional theater programs covering the whole
decade, and would involve lengthy calculations.
 TEN

Conclusion

T he data so far accumulated concerning the films of the thirties and the
discourses that surrounded them allow us to explore the ways in which
the French cinema of the thirties might be defined, both from within and
from without. To do this, we need to be able to answer two questions: first,
what are the terms, elements, motifs, and figures which best characterize this
cinema, what are the relations between them, and what is the nature of the
macrotext which they serve to construct; second, what are the characteristics
which distinguish this cinema both from other national cinemas of the pe-
riod and from the French cinema of the decades that preceded and followed
it. The comments that follow should be considered no more than prelimi-
nary indications of the direction which such an exploration might take.
First, it is apparent that the French cinema of the thirties did not deal
equally with all aspects of human experience. No national cinema, of
course, ever does, and the fields which it deals with most intensively are
those which pose the most important questions concerning identity for the
audiences of the day. French films of the thirties showed a marked predilec-
tion for the fields of class and of gender, and for the notions of art and of
nature as forms of transcendence. They avoided almost entirely, however,
those binaries more typical of the horror and science-fiction genres which
call into question what it means to be human, and which, in the case of the
German and American cinemas, characterized periods of national crisis.
On the evidence of this cinema, “knowledge,” whether scientific or arcane,
was not a preoccupation of the decade, and the various social crises did not
trigger any form of national paranoia. Very few of the decade’s films deal in
any way at all with the “ultimate purposes of existence,” whether by way of
opposition between the human and the animal or between the human and
the divine, nor do they appeal to supernatural forces. Certainly, there were
categories of film which saw “the human” as divided between the instinc-
tual and the spiritual, the barbaric and the civilized, but in such cases civi-
lization itself is defined in social terms rather than in religious or even
simply political terms. The possibility that established religion might con-
 Conclusion | 339
stitute a valid form of transcendence is seldom broached in the course of
the decade, and never, when it is, to popular acclaim.
Nor, until fairly late in the decade, are broadly “international” consider-
ations given any significant weight in popular mythology. Large numbers of
foreigners appear in the films of the decade, but the great majority of them
are based on stereotypical national representations mobilized for perfunc-
tory comic or dramatic effect. That other peoples are different, and that
their differences are innate and known once and for all, is a fact that can be
largely taken for granted. Only when war threatens do a number of still
fairly conventional spy stories involving external relations displace the mili-
tary vaudevilles so common earlier in the decade, and these are successful
mainly with urban audiences. French engagement with the outside world is
largely confined to specific overseas territories in which France has a colo-
nial interest, and that engagement is pursued primarily by legionnaires,
with a supporting cast of engineers and administrators.
These absences ensure that the focus of the decade’s cinema will be pri-
marily internal and social. Yet even within the social, in a cinema which
provided its citizens with numerous myths concerning society, class, and
gender as key categories for understanding their place in the world, it is sur-
prising how little attention is paid to children, to education, and to the
media. Early in the thirties, a series of conventional melodramas, dating for
the most part from an earlier age, exploit the innocence and vulnerability of
children to sentimental effect, and a few late films foreshadow the attention
to be paid during the war years to the future generation (“youth,” though
seldom “children”), who risk being corrupted by the sins of their elders. But
statistically they are absent from the cinema of this decade. As a generic cat-
egory, the youth film was mentioned occasionally in the thirties, but no-
where near as often as in the following twenty years, when it was to become
better known as the film sur l’enfance. The religious film was also to become
a much more widely recognized generic category in the postwar period,
though the number of films to be so categorized would never be great;
rather, a relatively few religious films were to have a relatively large impact
on audiences, and critics with a Catholic orientation were to seize on this
(wrongly, as it turned out) as a sign of things to come.
There are, then, significant absences from the mythology constructed
by the cinema of the thirties, and these allow us to better circumscribe the
fields on which it concentrates with some intensity. These fields can best be
described, at least initially, by compiling a list of the objects, settings, fig-
ures, and events which constitute the repertoire of recurrent textual ele-
ments underlying this cinema’s representation of reality. These objects,
settings, figures, and events can be thought of as the nodes of the textual
web, each one caught up and articulated with a number of others in a series
 340 | , ,  
of intersecting narratives. Each of them, through intensive use and reuse,
acquired metaphoric and/or metonymic associations which allow us to rec-
ognize its significance in the mythology of the day.
To list these recurrent textual elements is to bring together sections of
the various chapters of both Part 1 and Part 2. Among objects and settings
are the accordion, the guinguette, the bar-restaurant, the nightclub, and the
music hall; the dockside with its ships and its grills; flowers, bicycles, and
taxis; racecourses and boxing rings; circuses and fairgrounds; Montmartre,
the Vieux Port, la place Blanche, and the urban slums of Belleville. Among
the figures are orphans, twins, and doubles; amnesiacs, athletes, engineers,
and aviators; good-time girls, seductive vamps, and spies; tramps and bank-
ers; gullible provincials; artists, actresses, stars, and singers; stereotypical
foreigners; the “little people” of Paris together with the crooks and police
with whom their lives intersect; shrews and bigots; powerful aging males
and vulnerable waifs; florists and laundresses, reporters, and Salvation
Army girls. Among the events which mark the lives of such figures are gam-
bling scenes, lottery wins, and problematic inheritances; exchanged babies
and arranged and unconsummated marriages; joining the legion to expiate
one’s guilt in a climactic Arab attack; the ship that sails without one, and
the woman who betrays one’s trust and destroys male solidarity; the day in
the country, the revelation of artistic talent or of male magnificence, and
the rejection of wealth as one hits the road.
While this list may, despite its incompleteness, seem long, the exclu-
sions that preceded it allow us rather to see it as a dense concentration of el-
ements that are closely related to one another in multiple ways via more or
less conventional narrative sequences, and that articulate a relatively small
number of intensely experienced anxieties relating to gender and sexuality,
particularly masculinity and forbidden desires; to nature and nurture, the
city and the country, and the cost of progress; to human fallibility and the
possible forms of expiation; to sincerity, money, and worth; and to the var-
ious forms of corruption, inequality, and injustice dominating social exis-
tence, together with a number of fantasized forms of escape from that
existence. Very generally, that is, they articulate questions concerning social
and sexual identity, establishing a mythical framework which allowed audi-
ences to understand obliquely who they were, whether this identity was
predestined or escapable, and if the latter who they might become, and why,
and how.
Certain of the textual elements constituting this mythical web of mean-
ing were over-determined, in the sense that at different times and in differ-
ent films, or even in a single film, they could fulfill multiple functions. If
orphans were so common, it was because their status as “floating” social ele-
ments could serve to articulate general statements about the lack of a well-
anchored social identity and about disenfranchisement, but also because
 Conclusion | 341
they could be used to evoke dysfunctional families and misunderstood chil-
dren, because the vulnerability of the orphan could be used to evoke social
injustice and iniquitous power relations—because it could, in fact, stand for
a number of oppressed social groups. If lottery wins and their analogues
were so common, it was because they could figure a form of fantasized es-
cape from these social injustices and deprivations, but also because, by shift-
ing status and class, the recipient could become someone else, and thus
demonstrate in much the same way as identity shifts triggered by exchanges
of clothing that social identity was not in fact predestined, but rather so-
cially, and even arbitrarily, imposed. This new status opened up the theme
of sincerity, as did all forms of wealth, with their concomitant anxieties
about “true” friendship and “true” love. Finally, the sudden acquisition of
wealth was represented as incompatible with art and with creativity—in-
deed, was inherently corrupting, and thus to be rejected in favor of, say,
mateship and the open road.
The actor figure was similarly over-determined, serving, most obvi-
ously, to promote art and, reflexively, the status of the filmmaker as artist—
the high road to spiritual salvation and transcendence in a degraded world.
In addition, acting went to the heart of identity, proposing social personae
as roles that the performer could assume or shuck off at will, and this in
turn might be represented as an entertaining game or as a source of existen-
tial terror, opening up the possibility of an absolute lack of any inherent
identity. The actor figure also could be used to evoke the question of sin-
cerity, which constituted one of the fundamental themes of the decade. In
fact, the actor could fluctuate from being one of the falsest and most sus-
pect of figures to being the truest and most authentic of figures, alone able
to get in touch with some fundamental reality and to transmute a degraded
reality into something purer and finer.
As a final instance, it was inevitable that the financier should be a central
element of the textual web of this cinema, since quite aside from his demon-
ization as the figure principally responsible for the social collapse and con-
sequent injustices of the day, he stood metonymically for the prevailing
economic system; while this was seldom mentioned directly, it was (again
metonymically) present in the form of “money” as discussed above. Whence
the constant oppositions between financier and artist, financier and worker,
financier and provincial, and financier and tramp—oppositions in which
the financier was doomed to defeat by the superior values of art, of nature,
of love, of sincerity, or of freedom. Finally, as powerful male authority fig-
ures, financiers could feature in patriarchal narratives problematizing mas-
culinity and dysfunctional families, in which they might take up with or
take over much younger females in quasi-paternal relationships which both
caricature the unequal power relationships between male and female and
raise questions of forbidden sexuality.
 342 | , ,  
More generally, not just the over-determined elements of the web but
all of its nodes served cumulatively to articulate a set of opposed values re-
lating to having or not having secure identities—relating to exile and be-
longing, solidarity and divisiveness, sincerity and falseness, oppression and
escape. A large number of the key nodes figure various forms of prison,
both actual and metaphorical, in which the protagonist finds himself or
herself trapped—penal colonies, reformatories, boarding schools, unhappy
families, slums, rigid social and gender roles, conventional moral codes—
something so huge and multiform that it sometimes seems to equate with
life itself, with “reality.” The governors and warders of this system come in
for consistent and implacable abuse, though a number of films recognize
that these figures too are prisoners of the system, as in favorable circum-
stances they may themselves come to realize. All the inmates of this system
are in some sense in exile, disenfranchised, if only because they are not in
control of their own destiny. Iniquitously put in the wrong, they acquire
the status of criminals, as do in their eyes, those who betrayed and enslaved
them, whence the omnipresence of a metaphorical criminality.
The forms of fantasized escape from this prison are on occasion cele-
brated, but more often they are discredited as impossible of achievement or
as ineffectual. The implacability of the destiny which has condemned
them is apparent in the almost complete absence from the web of any form
of social or political action that might transform the conditions of their ex-
istence. Part of the problem is the fact that the very articulateness which
might allow them to conceptualize such transformations has been appro-
priated by their jailers, whose glib line of talk and whose sleight of hand
leaves those imprisoned with an inarticulate desire for freedom which, un-
spoken, can find expression only in a series of visual metaphors. Toward
the end of the decade, a few films begin to represent the conditions of im-
prisonment as something short of definitive, as the new “humanizing” par-
adigm begins to recognize the inmates no longer as “criminals” but as “un-
fortunates,” in need of compassion rather than of punishment.
This mention of a late evolution of the textual web brings up the ques-
tion of its stability in the course of the decade. A number of industrial fac-
tors would suggest that in economic terms a periodization involving a
paradigm shift took place toward the middle of the decade. This can al-
ready be seen in table 9.2, in which some of the crucial factors are listed.
These have been charted in figure 10.1 in such a way as to make their cor-
relation clearer. The two lowest graphs indicate the number of films pro-
duced and released each year. These indicate that something significant
happened in 1934–35, since the graphs dip significantly for those years. An
initial explanation for this dip is provided by the two roughly parallel
graphs above them: the number of spectators in millions per year and the
gross receipts in millions of francs per year which these audiences produced
Figure 10.1. Industry Changes 1930–39
 344 | , ,  
(given for Paris, which equaled approximately 30 percent of the French to-
tals): both peaked in 1931 and 1932 and declined steadily thereafter to a
low point in 1935. This corresponds to the impact of the depression in
1932 and the worst period of social and economic tension in the following
three years. However, the number of spectators rose again thereafter until
1938 (indeed, until August 1939), and when one factors in the increases in
entry price that took place over those same years, the result is a quite star-
tling increase in receipts from 1937 to August 1939.
While these factors suggest that a difficult few years in the middle of
the decade separated two periods of relative prosperity, the industry was not
affected uniformly: the distinctive impact of the depression on the produc-
tion and exhibition sectors can best be seen in the two more dramatic
graphs beginning at the top left. The top graph, which (multiplied by ten)
gives the average weekly audience per theater in Paris general release for
French sound films, reveals the extent to which the exhibition sector bene-
fited from the introduction of sound. As more and more theaters were con-
verted for sound and more and more sound films became available to the
market, however, the weekly audience per sound theater dropped abruptly
from over seven thousand to about twenty-four hundred in 1935. There-
after, the stabilization of production and release, together with the recovery
of audience numbers, brought about a stabilization of weekly audiences
which lasted until the war.
The remaining graph indicates the even more startling turnaround in
the fortunes of producers that occurred in 1934–35. The average returns
per French sound feature film had been astronomical in the first years of
the decade, but had plummeted to under half their 1930 level by 1932.
This caused numerous bankruptcies and the sudden decrease in production
in 1934. But thereafter, the conjunction of a number of favorable circum-
stances—stable production, increasing audiences, increased entry prices,
and no doubt also the developing mythology outlined above—saw the av-
erage returns per French feature film improve markedly in 1936 and, in-
deed, generate something of a bonanza for producers in the period from
late 1938 to August 1939. This stabilization of industrial conditions in the
last years of the decade, and most notably the relative prosperity of the pro-
duction sector, doubtless explains why the sense of crisis so loudly voiced
by the industry in 1934 and 1935 dissipated fairly rapidly, and why the
public inquiries resulting from it never came to anything. Government in-
action between 1935 and 1939, so often criticized, was probably due in fact
to decreased pressure from the industry for the government to act.
The industry’s economics would therefore suggest that the introduction
of sound saw a few years of prosperity followed by a crisis occurring be-
tween 1933 and 1935, during which significant, though largely unplanned
and involuntary, changes took place, and these ensured that stability, and
 Conclusion | 345
even a return to prosperity, characterized the period from 1936 until the de-
claration of war. The comments in industry journals quoted in chapter 9
bear out this periodization, but also indicate the industry’s belief that it was
primarily the high quality of technical finish with which the films of the
late thirties were endowed that made them a success on both the national
and international markets. The reverse could as easily be argued—namely,
that the high technical finish was a consequence of greater availability of
funds to producers after 1936.
The question that arises is whether this “industrial” division of the
1930s into two periods of approximately the same length (1930–34,
1935–39) corresponds in any way to a periodization of filmic content. A
number of references to such a periodization have been made in earlier
chapters, and certain of these are worth recalling. As a first observation, al-
though the first year of the decade saw a larger number of dramas than of
comedies, the gross production level of comedies was thereafter far higher
than that of dramas. The popularity of these comedies with spectators,
however, showed a dramatic decline in the 1933–34 season, when they were
displaced in terms of popularity by social and psychological dramas. The
1930–31 and 1931–32 seasons had both been dominated by comedies
which ran in exclusive release for years, notably Le Roi des resquilleurs and its
immediate successors, together with Jean de la lune and Théodore et Cie, and
the host of sentimental comedies and musical comedies starring Maurice
Chevalier and the Henri Garat–Lilian Harvey couple, the military vaude-
villes which acquired a surprising following, and the “vulgar” theatrical
comedies which attracted such condemnation from moralists and movie
lovers alike. Recognition of the dominance of comedies was widespread
among industry personnel, not least theater managers, and La Cinématogra-
phie Française commented on its survey of their views on 1932 releases to
the effect that “light-hearted and inoffensive films hold top spot.”1 It is not
surprising, therefore, that the discourse of “popular vitality” promoting the
hoodlum, the working-class “wise guy” with a dynamic personality and a
boisterous comic edge, should have been so prominent in fan magazines of
this period, nor that it should have been attached not just to René Lef èvre
and Albert Préjean but also to comedians such as Bach, Rellys, and Milton.
It was the only discourse to embrace such comic actors. Again, it was only in
this early period—say, 1930 to 1933—that lists of popular stars focused
primarily on young leading men and women who starred in romantic com-
edies—“Prince Charming” and “The Nicest Smile”—or that the ingénue
discourse had any currency in fan magazines.
Even then, as we have seen, audience interest in young romantic stars
was ambivalent, but it is incontrovertible that older men with a more
somber and substantial persona came to the fore from 1935 on, as the pref-
erence for social and psychological dramas began to become apparent.
 346 | , ,  
Thereafter, Fernandel was the only comic actor to feature among the
twenty most popular stars, though Bach made a final appearance in twenti-
eth place in 1936. The associated discourse of maturity that circulated in
fan magazines promoted men of authority, father figures who bore the
weight of the world on their shoulders. From 1933 on, these masculine
personae were required in films of the day either to uphold and extend
French social, cultural, and spiritual authority in military and, occasionally,
religious roles or to embody a higher moral authority that contested the val-
ues and attitudes currently prevailing in society on behalf of some margin-
alized group. Or, at least, their ability so to do was postulated and ques-
tioned. National films, military films, and particularly spy films began to
figure prominently in annual box-office statistics, and the seductive foreign
vamp or her sensual French counterpart became a recognized emploi ; as
well, the outsider figure, most memorably embodied in Gabin, came to the
fore. Boulevard comedies, with their casts consisting of the upper bour-
geoisie and its camp followers involved in farcical narratives and superficial
problems, lost their appeal, giving way to questions of guilt and expiation.
These diverse trends do not lend themselves easily to summary, but it is
true to say that the main nodes of the textual web and the main connec-
tions between them are much more characteristic of the second half of the
decade. Undoubtedly, most of them can be traced back to the first half of
the decade, if not always in a clearly identifiable form. There, however, they
do not constitute the bulk of the strands of the web, nor even the most
prominent strands. It is more accurate to see the French cinema of the early
sound years as primarily working with myths and stereotypes inherited
from previous decades and preexisting media, while “coasting” on the nov-
elty of the new sound technology and assuming (wrongly as it turned out)
that this strategy would be sufficient to ensure box-office profitability.
It is hard to avoid a correlation between the economic ebullience of the
early sound cinema, the prominence of comic successes, and the wide-
spread assumption that France had been spared and would continue,
miraculously, to be spared the effects of the depression. This optimism was,
of course, to be proved wrong by the downturn of 1933–34. After this
point, the elements of the web related to the mythic identities outlined
above better answered the needs of audiences, and adventitious matter
tended to fall away. This explanation would relate the web described above
most specifically to the effects of the depression, while recognizing that
most of its elements had been present in one form or another in the first
half of the decade, and even earlier. At first sight, it would seem that a cin-
ema deriving its principal constituent elements from a social crisis that
struck most other European countries at approximately the same time was
not going to be wildly unlike the cinema of those other countries. What is
surprising is that the web as it developed in France did arguably contain
 Conclusion | 347
certain strands that were peculiar to France alone. The section of the web
related to what is now called “poetic realism” was one such. It was, however,
only one small section of a larger thematic cluster relating to powerful mas-
culine figures, unequal gender relations, dysfunctional families, and dis-
turbed sexual patterns, which cumulatively constitute a distinctive core
peculiar to the French cinema of this decade. To this block can be added
the intense focus on art, the artist, and the actor/actress, which seems to me
to be carried further here than in other national cinemas.
One final way to get at the characteristic patterns of the thirties is to iso-
late those few elements of the web which were considered characteristic of
contemporary life, distinguishing it from the past and foreshadowing the
future. The films sometimes help us in this task by themselves reflecting on
the contemporaneity of certain textual elements. As has already been men-
tioned, technology and technicians are clearly represented in them as “newly
mythic.” From the lowest to the highest, anyone associated with technology
is endowed with an aura. The taxi driver or mechanic, the race-car driver,
the engineer, and the aviator are all felt to be, in their different ways and to
different degrees, contemporary heroes. Indeed, the engineer (and some-
times the doctor, though not the scientist) speaks of a society newly con-
fident of its ability to transform the physical world, as it was so clearly
unconfident of its ability to transform the social world. In the cultural
arena, the equivalent “contemporary” occupations are jazz musician and
bandleader, two roles that are already beginning to displace the established
roles of street singer and realist singer. Negroes are beginning to make their
presence felt on the cultural scene, and after the war they and the big bands
were to dominate the popular musical scene. Films of the late thirties clearly
indicate that a new spirit is abroad related to the lifestyle of the young and
of students, and that this lifestyle revolved around music. The films of the
next decade would confirm this trend.
Partaking of both technological advances and contemporary cultural
popularity, the cinema itself constitutes one of the “progressive” elements
of the thirties mythology, and anyone associated with it—but particularly
the star—is assured of a place in the forefront of the age. La Boutique aux
illusions (39s3) is already reflecting on the importance of cinema in a mod-
ern mythology. This technological prominence of the media extended to
the radio and to television, which figure in several aggressively contempo-
rary narratives, and to all forms of advertising, which repeatedly appear in
critiques or parodies of modern life.
For the most part, however, the decade’s films were too preoccupied
with the problems facing them in the present to reflect on the forms that
“progress” might be taking at that time, and too preoccupied with the pos-
sibility of war to look to the future with anything but apprehension. The
world was closing in around the “little people” of Europe, and the only
 348 | , ,  
categories of peculiarly contemporary people who attract admiration are
those who seem to escape the prison walls—notably the reporters, whose
job may take them to the most exotic regions of the world, and the avia-
tors, whose freedom to escape the earthbound problems of contemporary
society attracted unreserved envy. When Noël-Noël wins a plane it is the
archetypal updating of the lottery win, which even his boss envies.
Indeed, as we saw at the beginning, an aviator made the perfect roman-
tic hero for Renoir’s last prewar film, though to kill him off at the end was
certainly an unusual move. Apart from this move, however, and in the same
way that the opening of La Règle du jeu can be shown to draw on a number
of elements from the repertoire made available by the textual web of the
cinema and of adjacent media, so the final scenes can be shown to do the
same. A brief reference to those final scenes will serve to round off the indi-
cations given so far of the ways in which this film draws on the thirties
macrotext. The following points are by no means exhaustive:
1. The mechanism used to trigger the tragic denouement, the exchange of
clothing which leads to a case of mistaken identity, was, as we have
seen, a commonplace of the day, and indeed has a long history. It is mo-
bilized twice here—first, Lisette lends her cloak to Christine, which
leads Schumacher to believe that he is seeing Octave embracing his wife;
second, Octave, in an impulsive gesture, lends his overcoat to Jurieux,
leading Schumacher to believe that he is seeing Octave returning to the
scene of his “crime,” when in fact it is Jurieux. In sum, Schumacher suc-
cessively mistakes Christine for Lisette and Jurieux for Octave, with
deadly consequences. As we saw in chapter 1, the well-known “bor-
rowed plumage” narrative which leads to mistaken identity was a stock
in trade of scriptwriters of the thirties, though it was usually introduced
in order to foreground a class theme or to associate the wealthy with the
criminal underclass. Often the mistake in identity was made more un-
derstandable by basing it on a widely recognized uniform. The equiva-
lent effect is achieved in Renoir’s film by having Schumacher’s purchase
of the cloak for Lisette and her rejection of it foregrounded in an earlier
scene.
2. Nevertheless, although the killing of Jurieux is the result of a mistaken
identity, the film represents it as the working out of a predestined pat-
tern. Some of the mechanisms by which 1930s films represented (or,
rather, constructed) this sense of destiny were also noted in chapter 1.
Common among them were premonitions and metaphorical foreshad-
owings of the sort used in La Règle du jeu. Fortune-tellers, sorcerers,
destiny figures, or simple apprehensions might all serve to predict the
outcome of the narrative, as here more overtly the dance of death and
the slaughter of the rabbits serve to introduce audience expectations of
 Conclusion | 349
a violent end. Indeed, given that Jurieux is early established as the chief
“rabbit” in the film, unable or unwilling to control his animal passions,
it is far from the case that his death is due to mistaken identity—he was
destiny’s intended victim from the start, and Schumacher the game-
keeper was his intended executioner. This too was a commonplace of
the period—for the “unforeseeable eventuality” to prove, on reflection,
to have been extraordinarily appropriate.
3. At a more trivial level, even the phrase “a deplorable accident” by which
the marquis attempts to gloss over the tragedy might have been recog-
nized by audiences of the day as a typically understated and ironic re-
sponse to events of this nature. In Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (38.25), for
instance, when Lemel accuses Walter of being a spy and a brawl erupts,
the lights fail and Lemel tumbles from the balcony to his death. “A ter-
rible accident” is the official pronouncement, though it is clearly far
from accidental. A similar phrase occurs at the end of Le Dernier Tour-
nant (39.23) as the protagonist fantasizes about a reconciliation in the
afterlife with his mistress, for whose death he is responsible—he’ll take
her in his arms and explain that it was “all just an accident,” and she’ll
believe him. In the war years, the same sort of reaction was to turn up in
Lumière d’été, in which the lord of the manor and his mistress reminisce
about “the tragic hunting accident” that conveniently disposed of his
first wife, and in Un Seul Amour, where the vengeful husband who has
bricked up his wife’s lover in a wardrobe and left him to die goes off
hunting and, unable to live with the knowledge of his wife’s and his
own actions, dies in what is reported as “a terrible accident.” Filmic
murders and suicides were regularly presented in such euphemistic
terms within the textual world, in the expectation that spectators would
see through the hypocrisy. This is a minor point, but it makes clear that,
in little as in big things, a recognizable stock of situations, events, ges-
tures, and phrases found its way into scenario after scenario.
4. Finally, placing the film once again in the context of its day can help us
to understand the reception that awaited it at the box office. Essentially,
the ending involves the tragic death of a principal character occurring
immediately after a hilariously riotous and even farcical chase through
the chateau, in which Schumacher flourishes his hunting gun and looses
shots at all and sundry, and in which more or less guilty adulterers take
shelter wherever they can find it, including under fat ladies’ skirts;
meanwhile, a deliberately amateurish series of theatrical performances,
at once humorous and intensely ominous, provides entertainment for
the guests and for us. The contrast in tone evident in this description of
the final scenes, which is indeed characteristic of the film as a whole, has
often been blamed for the film’s (purely relative) lack of success. The
mechanism noted above as at the origin of the narrative denouement—
 350 | , ,  
an exchange of clothing leading to mistaken identity—was far more
typical of farce than of tragedy, and retains a certain tonal ambivalence
in this film. Neither clearly drama nor clearly comedy, the film is best
categorized as a comédie dramatique, and these were not nearly as com-
mon in the thirties as they were to be in the forties and fifties, nor were
they anywhere near as successful at the box office as they were later to
be. Pagnol was the only director consistently to produce plays and films
that could be classified thus and that were popular with audiences of the
day. In Marius (31.81), he even managed to achieve this while providing
an anti-romantic ending, though there was no death involved. By far
the greater number of his films end on the humane, wry, and gentle
note more typical of the genre. Attempts to end a comédie dramatique
in an anti-romantic way, or a fortiori in a grim way, were usually unsuc-
cessful even when undertaken by skilled scriptwriters and directors.
L’Homme à l’Hispano (33.65) is a case in point.
Replacing La Règle du jeu in the context of the textual web from which
so many (indeed, arguably all) of its elements were drawn can thus serve to
extend our understanding of both its construction and its reception. In
combination with an awareness of the social and industrial context within
which it arose, such an understanding can lead to an appreciation of the
reasons why that particular arrangement of textual elements might have
originated then and there, and been acceptable or not to the “gatekeepers”
who determined whether it would be made and screened or not, and been
enjoyable or not to the spectators who saw it. If this sort of conclusion is
possible in the case of such a film as La Règle du jeu, it will certainly be pos-
sible in the case of any other and lesser film we might care to analyze.
 A VIEWER’S GUIDE

The two hundred films listed here are all available commercially or through
film institutes. They have been listed alphabetically by year, and graded as
follows:

1 = Watchable only by the committed

3 = Watchable
5 = Good
7 = Very good
9 = Excellent

The grade accorded each film appears in parentheses after the title. The
number preceding each title refers to the film’s position in the filmography.

1930
30.13 Le Blanc et le noir (2)
Learning that her husband is unfaithful, she swears to offer herself to the
first comer. He is a Negro, but in the dark she doesn’t notice! There is a
baby, of course, which must hastily be swapped. A casually racist and trivial
film from a Guitry play.
30.18 Chacun sa chance (4)
A musical in which Gabin as a shop-window dresser swaps roles with a
baron, with “amusing” consequences.
30.21 Le Chemin du paradis (4)
An early musical comedy that established Garat and Harvey as the leading
romantic couple of the early thirties. Mild satire of big business, perhaps
with some influence from the Marx brothers.
30.59 Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (3)
An expressionist-influenced murder mystery solved by an ebullient re-
porter. The police inspector is in fact an international bandit (and the hero-
ine’s first husband) in disguise.
 352 | A Viewer’s Guide
30.61 L’Opéra de quat’sous (3)
The Beggar’s Opera. A Brechtian “presentation” of the rise and rise of a
criminal, in cahoots with the chief of police, as a parody of capitalist en-
terprise. Negligible narrative drive and coherence. Notable for the revolt of
the underclass—the army of the poor. Tableaux and songs.
30.66 La Petite Lise (5)
A melodrama concerning an honorable ex-prisoner who rescues his unde-
serving daughter and her man at the cost of returning to prison. The first
fifteen-minute sequence set in Guyana is amazingly good (8/10), especially
as far as sound is concerned.
30.69 Prix de beauté (7)
An at times powerful critique of the destructive effect of the press/beauty
contests/stardom. The first half and the end have a fascinating soundtrack
with some splendid documentary and montage segments. A magnificently
ironic finale.
30.78 Le Roi des resquilleurs (6)
(1945 version viewed) Immensely popular in its year. A tale of an amiable
working-class rogue out to con his way into money and the affection of at-
tractive women. Mythic locations—horse racing, boxing matches, cycling,
football, a beauty parlor, Montmartre and street singer, and so on.
30.79 La Ronde des heures (3)
(1949 version viewed) Poignant and very popular drama about a singer mar-
ried “above his station” who is despised by his father-in-law, loses his voice
and is unable to support the family, and so disappears to a job in a circus.
There he makes good again, and finally recovers voice, wife, and daughter.
30.84 Sous les toits de Paris (6)
René Clair’s first sound film, exploring sound/silence techniques. A cold
and unsentimental play with myths of “the little people of Paris”—apaches,
a blonde vamp, a street singer, mateship, casual sexuality.

1931

31.1 À nous la liberté (6)

An effective satire of capitalism as hard labor and bosses as greedy crooks,
the deadening effect of clocks, routines, and assembly lines. Some wonder-
ful moments, but a bit heavy-handed. Celebrates mateship and the open
road, yet it is machines that finally free the mates to hit that road.
31.11 Au nom de la loi (7)
A grim, well-told realist crime story involving murder, drug smuggling, and
a seductive female who is behind it all. Her line about criminality being
 A Viewer’s Guide | 353
synonymous with adventure and freedom and about living for the moment
wins over the young cop planted in her gang. The climax resembles the sit-
uation in Le Jour se lève.
31.18 Baroud (3)
French civilizing mission and inter-religious tension. A French soldier in
Africa and his Arab mate, united in a struggle against rebellious Arab tribes
but divided by the Frenchman’s love for the Arab’s sister.
31.34 Cœur de Lilas (7)
A moving murder mystery. A policeman goes on leave to investigate pri-
vately the murder of an industrialist, and gradually becomes involved with
the chief suspect, only to have her confess her guilt at the end. His growing
affection for her and her gradual realization of the new life opening up be-
fore her are well done. Songs by Fréhel, and by Gabin in an unusually un-
sympathetic role.
31.38 Le Congrès s’amuse (3)
A Garat–Harvey vehicle: a romantic costume drama involving a relation-
ship between the czar and a serving wench, in which the demands of pub-
lic life destroy a private idyll.
31.45 Croix de bois (9)
A very powerful reconstruction of trench warfare in World War I, orga-
nized around the experiences of a small group of enlisted men. Little nar-
rative drive, just endurance; little sense of hatred, more of futility.
31.55 Faubourg Montmartre (4)
A blend of melodrama and social realism typical of the time. Paris, drugs,
thugs, poverty, prostitution, the poor but honest shop-girl and her fallen
sister, and their old dad from the provinces. Worth watching for an extraor-
dinary peasant exorcism. Songs by Fréhel and Florelle.
31.68 Il est charmant (5)
A musical comedy with Garat as a feckless law student who turns the
provincial law practice which his uncle buys him into a cross between a
night-club and a brothel. Various ingenious (for the time) special effects.
31.74 Ma cousine de Varsovie (4)
Typical boulevard comedy. Country house, nonchalant adultery, everyone
trying to deceive and cuckold everyone else; entries and exits, concealments
and revelations. Popescu in one of her better roles as the Polish cousin who
stirs the pot.
31.77 Mam’zelle Nitouche (5)
A vaudeville in which everyone seems to have two identities—a daytime
one in the convent and a nighttime one in the nightclub. This, together
 354 | A Viewer’s Guide
with a dashing lieutenant and a plot that requires everyone including the
heroine to disguise themselves as soldiers in his regiment, makes for good
fun.
31.81 Marius (8)
The first installment in Pagnol’s trilogy involving Marius, his “typically
Provençal” father César, and Fanny, to whom Marius is engaged. But Mar-
ius dreams of the South Seas and of adventure. . . . Wonderfully con-
structed meridional characters, with quaint charm, volatility, and an ami-
able indolence.
31.84 Le Million (5)
The little people of Paris, a lottery win, a lost ticket, a balletic chase, a night
at the opera. Trivial material, well orchestrated.
31.97 Paris-Béguin (2)
Mixture of musical (rehearsal and staging of a production) and low-
life/gangster genres. Gabin, as a seductive thug, is shot and dies in the star’s
arms, but she goes on stage and sings her little heart out. Hokum.
31.98 Paris-Méditerranée (5)
Romantic musical comedy involving mistaken identities, in which a sales-
girl accidentally comes to travel to the Riviera with an English lord, with
predictable consequences. A good role for Arabella.
31.107 Pour un sou d’amour (5)
An odd mixture of melodrama and romantic comedy, in which a million-
aire swaps roles with his secretary in a search for true affection. Visually and
technically interesting, with music/songs that have structural significance.
Grotesque African flashbacks!
31.118 Le Rosier de Madame Husson (2)
Clumsy filmmaking, and awful acting from Fernandel, but worth seeing for
its notoriety. It satirized provincial authorities, moral and otherwise, and
was widely banned. It’s hard to see why, now, given what other films got
away with.
31.134 Tumultes (6)
A low-life drama focusing on an ex-con played by Boyer. Released from
prison, he reasserts himself in the milieu, but is betrayed by his girl (and his
mate!).
31.135 Un chien qui rapporte (1)
An amazingly discontinuous one-joke film about a dog trained to jump
into rich men’s cars. Grossly over-acted, but with a few technically interest-
ing sequences.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 355
31.146 Vampyr (4)
Expressionist film with perfunctory sound and painfully detailed generic
motifs and themes. The effect is not so much sinister as slightly grotesque.

1932
32s1 L’Affaire est dans le sac (2)
A clumsy attempt at Marx Brothers humor and at surrealist atmosphere. An
incompetent student-prank film that has been retrospectively (over)my-
thologized.
32.12 L’Atlantide (6)
A fantasy about a lost civilization in the desert (“Atlantis”) ruled over by a
fascinating but ruthless goddess/queen, who destroys all men lured to her
domain. Of two French explorers, one resists out of fidelity to his mate; the
other cedes and, in a drug-induced madness, kills his mate.
32.25 Boudu sauvé des eaux (7)
A hilarious performance from Michel Simon as a tramp who is rescued
from drowning by a bourgeois book-seller and proceeds to seduce both his
maid and his wife, and dismantle the respectable facade of the household.
Momentarily tempted by respectability, he finally returns to the open road.
32.33 Le Chien jaune (4)
A standard Simenon/Maigret crime story, efficiently told. Brittany, drug
smuggling, and a seedy Le Vigan.
32.24 Chotard et Cie (7)
An entertaining tale of a bourgeois family’s scorn for their poet son-in-law,
and his ultimate triumph over and reconciliation with them. Typically fas-
cinating camera work, sound bridges, depth of field, optical effects—
Renoir having fun.
32.50 Les Deux Orphelines (2)
A classic maudlin melodrama about piteous defenseless orphan girls, one of
them blind, abandoned in a big city, prey to fiendish exploiters of female
flesh. Slums, mistaken identities, coincidences, an illegitimate child, madness.
32.58 Fanny (7)
The second panel of Pagnol’s trilogy. A family melodrama softened by
comic meridional dialogues and by-play. A typical example of a comédie
dramatique. Some impressive documentary filming in Marseille.
32.59 Fantômas (3)
An episode in Inspector Juve’s endless quest to foil and capture the master
criminal Fantômas. Gothic atmosphere and an attempt to evoke pervasive evil.
 356 | A Viewer’s Guide
32.67 Les Gaietés de l’escadron (2)
A typical military vaudeville, episodic to the point of incoherence. Sides
with the men to ridicule most officers. Clumsy efforts at comedy by Gabin,
Fernandel, and Raimu.
32.97 La Nuit du carrefour (2)
Bleak version of Simenon crime story directed by Renoir. Often incompre-
hensible, but creating a certain atmosphere—night, misty drizzle, dreary
flat terrain.
32.109 Poil de Carotte (7)
A young boy’s experience of growing up in a dysfunctional family, with a
malevolent mother and a withdrawn, apparently indifferent father. Mo-
ments of idyllic happiness, moments of (special effects) terror, final under-
standing with father.
32.116 Quatorze juillet (8)
An extraordinary experiment in narrative technique. A sardonic look at the
“little people” of Paris over twenty-four hours, held together by the pat-
terning of objects—hats, wallets, coats, umbrellas, taxis, flowers, and peo-
ple treated as objects. As usual with Clair, a fascinating soundtrack.
32.130 Stupéfiants (3)
Peter Lorre as a sinister drug dealer in a drug-smuggling racket run by big bus-
iness. The trail leads from the theater world to Portugal and South America.
32.134 Topaze (6)
An unworldly schoolteacher, used as a front by a crooked financier and set
up to take the rap, ends up turning the tables. A wonderful role for Jouvet.

1933
33.1 L’Abbé Constantin (3)
A romantic comedy in which an amiable village curate and his godson get
involved in a struggle between a local countess and two American women
for control of the local chateau.
33.12 Les Aventures du roi Pausole (2)
Intended as an amiable erotic comedy, but put together too incompetently
to be either erotic or comic.
33.23 Ces messieurs de la Santé (7)
A fascinatingly ambivalent film, at once distrusting businessmen as confi-
dence tricksters and yet expressing a guilty delight in the machinations of one
of them. The vacuous poor need money-making machines like him to take
their money and multiply it, no holds barred. A great comic role for Raimu.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 357
33.26 Cette vieille canaille (7)
Harry Baur as a respectable doctor who becomes involved with a fairground
girl, whom, Pygmalion-like, he sets about “educating.” At times almost her
suitor, he is at times almost her jailer. She “escapes” with a circus performer,
whom the doctor is required to operate upon in a well-calculated finale. An
unusually subtle and complex relationship. A three-minute montage se-
quence in the middle.
33.41 Dans les rues (4)
A realist “street” film—slums, a poor family, a good and a bad brother,
thugs, thieves, and a gang fight. Respectability is mocked, but family affec-
tion and an honest job ultimately win out over the lure of the street and of
quick money.
33.59 Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier (4)
Pagnol’s filmed version of his comedy about a nouveau riche who marries
his daughter to a ne’er-do-well aristocrat. The son-in-law finally comes to
appreciate the daughter’s simple goodness, and he reforms.
33.62 Le Grand Jeu (8)
Feyder’s famous foreign legion film turning on an ambiguity about the
identity of the wan young woman whom he finds in the North African gar-
rison town. She has amnesia and has lost her past, but he too is anxious to
recapture his past through her.
33.65 L’Homme à l’Hispano (5)
Begins as a bouncy romantic comedy—appearing rich and suave in a bor-
rowed car, the impoverished Georges lives out a brief romance with a titled
Englishwoman, until his deceit catches up with him and tragedy super-
venes. An extraordinary virtuoso technical sequence in the middle.
33s5 Jofroi (6)
Pagnol’s short film about a peasant who sells his orchard but can’t stand the
idea of the buyer cutting down “his” trees. Comic attempts to do away with
himself in more and more exotic ways, to bring pressure on the new owner.
33.76 Liebelei (3)
A banal costume drama about an officer who is a bit of a rake with the girls,
and who is called to account just when he has found true love. Vienna, mil-
itary settings, the aristocracy, balls, duels, points of honor, noble gestures.
33.80 Le Maître de forges (7)
A fine film, though the subject can seem dated—a nouveau-riche entrepre-
neur and his stolid devotion to an aristocratic young woman, who finally
comes to appreciate his qualities. Interesting technical effects, superimposi-
tions, and montages.
 358 | A Viewer’s Guide
33.92 Les Misérables (6)
Well-told transcription of Hugo’s melodrama about the rehabilitation of a
former convict.
33.114 La Rue sans nom (6)
A street film that doesn’t try to aestheticize the squalor—slums, raw pov-
erty, desperation, violence, and nastiness, with typical melodramatic plot
incidents. The arrival of an old mate and fellow criminal with his attractive
daughter evokes a past better suppressed, but ultimately mateship proves
stronger than poverty, lust, selfishness, and so on.
33.124 Théodore et Cie (7)
An enjoyable and very popular comedy involving working-class mates on
the make, conning a wealthy uncle and his wife’s lover out of vast amounts
of money by means of various deceits and disguises.
33.134 Le Tunnel (4)
(English version viewed) Science fiction. Having built the Channel Tunnel
in 1940, our hero, an engineer, is funded to build a transatlantic tunnel.
His trials, both technical and financial, but also of course sentimental, and
his ultimate success.

1934

34.1 Angèle (7)

Pagnol’s Provençal melodrama of seduction, illegitimacy, sequestration,
and reconciliation. Good acting, even from Fernandel, and much location
work.
34.9 L’Atalante (5)
A routine story of a newly married canal-boat master, his young wife
tempted by the bright lights, and their final reconciliation. Saved by some
wonderfully surreal images and Michel Simon’s baroque persona.
34.17 Le Bossu (2)
A stagy costume drama: an evil prince assassinates an aristocrat to marry his
widow, and a hero who swears to avenge the foul deed and save the aristo-
crat’s daughter. Returning seventeen years later disguised as a hunchback,
he rights all wrongs and marries the daughter.
34.30 Le Comte Obligado (4)
An elevator attendant inherits, and decides to blow it all in three days of
high life. He becomes a “count,” with much opportunity for (rather crass)
class satire. One of Milton’s surviving comedies, with a standard morality
play about the heart and sincerity being more important than money or
position.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 359
34.31 La Crise est finie (6)
The joys and disappointments of stage life. Provincials mount a show in
Paris that single-handedly banishes the gloom of the depression. Narrative
drive and technical competence.
34. 34 Dédé (5)
A musical comedy in which Dédé and his mate, an indolent millionaire,
con a bourgeois and seduce his wife. The film purveys a bland optimism—
“Dans la vie, faut pas s’en faire.”
34.35 Le Dernier Milliardaire (4)
A quaint fantasy set in Casinario/Monte Carlo. The princess, her suitor the
banker (called Banco), who alone can save Casinario’s economy, and the
orchestra conductor she really loves. This film’s failure at the box office
prompted Clair to leave France.
34.47 Hôtel du Libre Échange (4)
A Feydeau farce about the discontents and dissatisfactions of respectable
married life. Attempts to realize libidinous desires, entries and exits, deceits
and revelations, mistaken identity. All make fools of themselves in one way
or another.
34.52 Jeunesse (4)
A street film: an abandoned girl, an unwanted pregnancy, an attempted sui-
cide. Various young men try unsuccessfully to tempt her into narratives of
desire. A curiously glum and inconsequential film, with no point of identi-
fication, yet impressive as a downbeat, unheroic look at “today’s youth.”
34.53 Justin de Marseille (5)
A tough gang boss in Marseille, a criminal and enforcer but with a sense of
honor and responsibility, and loved by the people. Similar in some respects
to Pepe le Moko, but Justin has an understanding with the police.
34.54 Lac aux Dames (5)
Rohmeresque character drama set in a spa resort. An impoverished swim-
ming instructor and his involvement with a number of women, notably
Puck (Simone Simon), an elfin creature in complicity with nature.
34.55 Liliom (3)
Charles Boyer as a charismatic brute loved by a pallid but good girl. Killed
in a failed hold-up, he is given a second chance on earth by the heavenly bu-
reaucracy in order to see his girl and their child. Grotesque heavenly se-
quences.
34.70 Les Nuits moscovites (6)
Well-told “Russian” drama, with soldiers, honor, spies, gambling debts, and
noble gestures of renunciation. Harry Baur has the best role as a massively
 360 | A Viewer’s Guide
forbidding merchant, rival of the hero. Some montages of war documents,
and fine sets.
34.76 Pension Mimosas (5)
On the margins of the gambling industry, a passionate relationship between
a godmother and her ne’er-do-well “son.” Slow at first (and the copy viewed
was not very good until halfway through), but obsessive toward the end.
34.92 Sans famille (3)
A genuine melodrama: an English aristocrat’s baby son is stolen and abducted
to France. Brought up in poverty, he escapes with a troupe of traveling play-
ers. Pickpockets, inheritances, and slow poison, and finally a family reunited.
34.97 Si j’étais le patron (6)
A comedy/fantasy in which the French car industry is saved by an inventive
worker, an eccentric investor, and the mateship of the employees, who take
over the firm and introduce a more labor-friendly environment.
34.115 Zouzou (4)
A fairground: Gabin and Josephine Baker as white brother and adopted black
sister. She loves him, but he follows the call of the sea and finally prefers her
friend. But she makes good on the stage, and sings on through her tears. The
last thirty minutes are taken up mostly by the show she sings in.

1935
35.1 Adémaï au moyen âge (1)
Clumsy and slack comedy set in the Middle Ages (the war between the
French and the English), intended to capitalize on Noël-Noël’s success as
Adémaï in a previous film. Desperate but unsuccessful attempts at humor.
35.5 Baccara (6)
A well-told “marriage of convenience” romantic comedy featuring a re-
turned war hero (improbably played by Jules Berry) and a kept woman in
danger of expulsion from France. In the trial scene, society itself is on trial,
as is her protector, a corrupt banker.
35.6 La Bandera (6)
Gabin as a character forced to flee Paris and joining the Spanish foreign le-
gion. A classic of the genre: hounded by a bounty hunter, he rehabilitates
himself by the heroic defense of an outpost and dies “a worthy death.”
35.12 Le Bonheur (7)
Boyer as an anarchist cartoonist who develops a love-hate relationship with
a film star. Attempting to assassinate her because of the vacuous escapist
optimism she peddles, he comes to love her, and she comes to incorporate
the assassination into her next film. Finally he departs, and she is seen on
 A Viewer’s Guide | 361
stage acting that departure. The sardonic anarchist is more appealing than
the lover.
35.13 Bonne Chance (4)
Another gentle play on the idea of incest, as Guitry and Delubac set off on a
trip as “brother and sister,” then “father and daughter,” but end up husband
and wife. Gambling and a lottery win foreground the “luck” of the title.
35.20 Cigalon (4)
A slight Pagnol comedy about a (typically Provençal) master chef so refined
that he can never bring himself actually to prepare a meal for anyone, but is
outraged when a rival establishment opens in “his” village.
35.27 Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (9)
One of the greatest of films. Renoir’s splendid Popular Front tale of a cor-
rupt publishing house taken over by the workers, who succeed with the
help of Lange the dreamer and his Arizona Jim fantasies.
35.28 Crime et châtiment (5)
A reasonable attempt at transcribing the Dostoevsky novel in which
Raskolnikov plays cat and mouse with the judge and with God, and is fi-
nally saved by the love of a good woman.
35.42 L’Équipage (7)
Aerial warfare: the young pilot discovers, to his horror, that the woman he
loves is in fact his admired squadron leader’s wife. “But your husband and I
are more than brothers, we’re a team!” The only solution, of course, is
death. Mythologization of war, of proving oneself a man, of the aviator fig-
ure, and of male camaraderie.
35.43 Escale (3)
A wily smuggler and an honorable merchant-marine lieutenant vie for Eva’s
favors, the latter not realizing her murky involvement with the former. Idyll
and tragedy. A curiously dated film.
35.52 Le Golem (2)
Straight from the German expressionist tradition, a tale of the Jewish
ghetto in Prague and a clay monster infused with life by the rabbi’s secret
rituals, which ultimately breaks loose to destroy their persecutors.
35.53 Golgotha (3)
Duvivier’s heavy-handed retelling of the Christ story, with Le Vigan as
Christ (!) and Gabin as Pontius Pilate (!).
35.62 Jim la Houlette (4)
A Fernandel comedy in which he plays a novelist’s secretary but is in fact
the author of the romances, which are aimed at his boss’s wife. He is in-
 362 | A Viewer’s Guide
duced to write a crime story about the bandit Jim la Houlette, whereupon
the real Jim appears. Great ideas, but weak implementation.
35.67 La Kermesse héroïque (3)
Slow and painfully unfunny tale of cowardly greedy Dutch burghers and
their more generous wives, who deal very effectively with their Spanish
ruler and his army. Splendid sets, and immensely popular in its day, but
vastly overrated.
35.92 Princesse Tam-Tam (4)
Josephine Baker as a lowly North African shepherdess full of vitality. She is
taken up by a novelist and presented in France as a princess. Orientalism
and Pygmalion scenes. Much of the film turns out to have been the novel
he was writing about her. A great final scene.
35.93 Quelle drôle de gosse (7)
Screwball comedy, fast-paced, with Darrieux in a Katherine Hepburn role
as an outrageous female. “You’re exploiting the fact that I’m just a feeble
woman” is, in context, a hilarious line.
35.98 La Rosière des Halles (4)
A country girl comes to town as cook for a playwright who is having trou-
ble getting the feel for the way the “people” talk. She and her market mates
unwittingly provide the necessary inspiration. A mildly amusing play on art
and life.
35.109 La Tendre Ennemie (6)
Ghosts of three people involved in a girl’s past offer a delightfully distanc-
ing commentary on and intervention in her sentimental affairs. Flashbacks,
multiple narrators, drifting transitions, and a nicely structured finale.
35.110 Toni (7)
A wonderful documentary quality to this tale of passion, jealousy, and mur-
der among immigrant workers in the south of France.
35.117 Un soir de bombe (7)
A very amusing comedy in which a banker under pressure absconds and is
replaced by his double, a tramp suffering from amnesia. Larquey is good in
the double role, being clapped in the loony bin as a banker and hitting the
road again with his mate as a tramp.

1936
36s1 Une partie de campagne (9)
A wonderfully evocative fragment of a never-completed film. The possibil-
ities opened up by a day in the country are stifled by bourgeois marriage,
leaving unspoken regrets.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 363
36s2 La Vie est à nous (9)
A bewilderingly inventive film using an astonishing range of techniques
(many taken up later by Godard) to promote the Communist Party and
ridicule the fascists. Absolutely brilliant.
36.7 L’Appel du silence (7)
A mythologized biography of Charles de Foucauld, soldier and missionary,
fascinated by the solitude and the silence of the African desert. France’s civ-
ilizing mission.
36.11 Au son des guitares (5)
A Tino Rossi musical based in Corsica: tempted away by the wiles of a
woman, he can be happy only when he returns. The best sequence is when
he joins tramps under the bridges of Paris. Unlike some French singers, this
lad had a voice.
36.13 Aventure à Paris (4)
Jules Berry as an impoverished but bumptious con man preying on a biscuit
manufacturer. Trivial but watchable, with a nice mockery of advertising at
one point.
36.15 Les Bas-Fonds (3)
Renoir’s very popular transposition to France of the Gorky novel. A con-
fused narrative and stagy sets, but some nice moments, including the final
images.
36.17 La Belle Équipe (6)
A famous Popular Front film, full of the motifs of working-class life. Worth
seeing for that alone. Usually shown with the replacement happy ending.
36.21 César (6)
The last part of Pagnol’s trilogy, in which Césariot finally gets to know and
respect his father, and Marius and Fanny finally get together.
36.27 Le Coupable (5)
A melodrama about a man torn between his family’s legal traditions and his
own love of music, finally called on to pass judgment, unawares, on his
own illegitimate son.
36.42 Faisons un rêve (3)
A classic boulevard comedy and a trivial vehicle for a self-satisfied Guitry. A
recorded play.
36.54 L’Homme de nulle part (7)
Pirandello’s splendid story of a man who escapes a bleak family situation
when he is believed dead. He constructs a second identity and relationship,
despite the threatened return of the old one. A satire on greed, self-interest,
and calculation.
 364 | A Viewer’s Guide
36.62 Jenny (5)
Jenny runs a nightclub/casino, which is going downhill because she’s ob-
sessed by young Lucien, but Lucien falls for her prudish daughter, who is
shocked to discover the details of her mother’s life. Carné’s first film, there-
fore worth seeing.
36.69 Mademoiselle Docteur, or Salonique, nid d’espions (4)
A daring German female spy, an atmosphere of intrigue, confusion, and
deception; she is, of course, torn between her duty to her country and her
love for a French counterspy.
36.75 Marinella (5)
A Tino Rossi musical organized around the opening of a nightclub and the
star’s love for the director’s humble secretary, who turns out to be the noto-
rious “masked singer.” As usual, the choreography is awful.
36.77 Mayerling (6)
The emperor disapproves of his son, Archduke Rudolph, who mixes incog-
nito with the hoi polloi, has reprehensibly democratic ideas, and is dallying
with the “unworthy” Marie. A tragic end. High production values.
36.78 Ménilmontant (6)
Slum kids and the building of a facility for them. Class enmity is repre-
sented as primordial—the rich are selfish and inhumane, and the authori-
ties pompous and overbearing.
36.80 Messieurs les Ronds de Cuir (5)
This surprisingly effective “farce” opposes civil servants and red tape to a ri-
otous night life and the Folies-Bergère. Typical episodic vaudeville struc-
ture.
36.83 Mon père avait raison (4)
Guitry boulevard comedy. Misogyny and unhappy families. One is always
basically alone, except for male friends. Yet, the tentative and rather hypo-
critical moral conclusion proposes the need to break the cycle of mistrust
between male and female.
36.85 Le Mort en fuite (3)
Two disconsolate actors (Berry and Simon) conceive a kidnapping plan to
promote themselves, but nobody notices. A strained and somewhat vacu-
ous comedy.
36.91 Le Nouveau Testament (4)
Another Guitry comedy with an interesting but tenuous plot, witty (or
“witty”) dialogue, much flirtation and adultery, and a condescending role
for the master. The implications of incest are even more overt than usual.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 365
36.95 Paris (1)
Cross-class love story—the characters are trivial and the situations senti-
mentalized. A cliché-ridden tourist’s view of Paris.
36.99 Pepe le Moko (8)
The Kasbah as both refuge and trap for rough diamond Pepe; his dreams of
Paris, his betrayal by Gaby, the steamer that sails without him, the grill, the
cops, the suicide. Essential viewing.
36.112 Rigolboche (3)
Mistinguett, on the run from a supposed crime in Dakar, makes good in
the nightclubs of Paris. A cliché-ridden plot and a slack copy of American
choreography.
36.115 Le Roman d’un tricheur (9)
Guitry’s one uncontestable cinematic masterpiece. A splendidly picaresque
tale with sardonic commentary. A wonderfully immoral tale.
36.121 Sept hommes . . . une femme (5)
A surprisingly amusing boulevard comedy in which an attractive widow
tests her seven suitors. The central section in particular has a number of
close similarities with La Règle du jeu.
36.123 Sous les yeux d’Occident (4)
A “Russian” tale of a student caught up in political events that don’t really
interest him; he betrays revolutionary friends, yet is thought a hero by
them. Much anguish and the usual implacable fatality.
36.127 La Terre qui meurt (3)
An early color film about “the land,” tradition and ritual versus the city and
its real, if qualified, opportunities. The country is in hock to the city and its
vulture-like lawyers, but it can still be productive in the hands of someone
who loves it.
36.135 Un grand amour de Beethoven (1)
Pretentious nonsense from Gance about the grandeur and tragedy of artis-
tic genius; but at least there is some good music in this one. Stilted acting,
poor continuity, all done in tableaux and grandiloquent gestures. Uninten-
tionally comic.
36.136 Un mauvais garçon (5)
A young female law student, too independent for her own good, is brought
into line by her family when she is conned into falling for the man they had
chosen for her in the guise of a criminal she has to defend. Darrieux here re-
places Lilian Harvey opposite Garat in an amusing, if anti-feminist, ro-
mantic comedy.
 366 | A Viewer’s Guide
1937
37.2 Abus de confiance (6)
Guilt toward the young: a penniless law student cons a worthy middle-class
family into believing she is their long-lost daughter, and in her first legal
cases finds herself pleading for other young people in her situation. Vanel is
excellent, as usual.
37.3 L’Affaire du courier de Lyon (2)
An atrocious costume drama and eighteenth-century crime story based on
doubles, coincidences, and mistaken identity. But some fine landscapes.
37.6 L’Alibi (7)
A “fantastic” murder mystery, in which von Stroheim plays a sinister crimi-
nal cum fairground magician and man of many disguises. Bizarre sets and
weird relationships.
37.11 Arsène Lupin, detective (3)
A clumsy comedy and knowing pastiche, as the notorious gentleman crook
sets up a detective agency run by his gang as a front for his next master
stroke.
37.22 Chéri-Bibi (7)
The tough but basically decent criminal, exiled to a penal colony in
Guyana: a grim life, despair, but camaraderie between the inmates. The
love of a good woman, and an escape in which he dies; but his inherent no-
bility is acknowledged by the guards.
37.30 La Dame de Malacca (5)
The fascination of the exotic for an English girl caught in a loveless mar-
riage in Malaya. Stuffy European conventions contrast with the excitement
and sensuality, but also the dangers, of the Orient.
37.34 Désiré (6)
One of Guitry’s better comedies, which sides with the servants in mocking
and conning the usual upper-bourgeois family. An upstairs-downstairs plot
is unusual in its use of dreams and of Freud to establish the butler’s erotic
relationship with the mistress.
37.37 Drôle de drame (7)
Very English goonish humor in a parody of a detective story, with police
dressed as old ladies, Jouvet as a salacious bishop in a very becoming kilt, and
Barrault as a crazed cyclist who kills butchers, and so on. Not terribly well
received in its day, and a bit slow-paced, but it has become a cult classic.
37.40 L’Étrange Monsieur Victor (5)
M. Victor runs a business as a front for criminal activities. Barrault as an in-
nocent man whom he has caused to be wrongfully imprisoned for seven
 A Viewer’s Guide | 367
years, but who escapes and unmasks him. A typical example of the “facade
of respectability” films which were so common.
37.42 Fauteuil 47 (2)
A boulevard comedy focusing on an actress and her relations with various
men, notably Paul, author of a mutist [sic] play. The usual casual adultery
and marginally incestuous relationships.
37.48 Forfaiture (7)
The Orient as the dark Freudian underside of white society. Mongolia, the
staunch European engineer with his development projects, and his wife led
astray by curiosity and desire, and finally branded by the fierce and lustful
prince.
37.53 Les Gens du voyage (6)
A circus story in which the resurgence of the past in the form of an escaped
convict father complicates then resolves a romance between his son and the
boss’s daughter. Simmering sexuality and a fine climactic chase.
37.54 La Grande Illusion (7)
An immensely popular film playing on the notions of nation, race, and
class during World War I. A rather slack narrative, but with some unforget-
table moments, and ultimately a pacifist message.
37.55 Gribouille (5)
Michèle Morgan as an immigrant cleared of murder, and Raimu as one of
the jurors instrumental in clearing her. He takes responsibility for her, but
his family is disrupted by her disturbing presence. A fascinating set of am-
bivalent relationships.
37.57 Gueule d’amour (7)
Gabin and Balin, as lady-killer and heartless vamp, play another variation
on male camaraderie and female sexuality, love and money, affection and
calculation.
37.58 L’Habit vert (3)
A trivial farce mobilizing clichés about stuffy aristocracy, the extravagances
of artists, the Folies-Bergère etc. Mildly amusing.
37.67 Mademoiselle ma mère (4)
A romantic comedy in which a bumptious young thing marries to escape
parental pressure and falls for her husband’s son. Obvious (and explicit)
Oedipal implications.
37.69 La Marseillaise (3)
A curiously distanced and dispassionate version of the French revolution,
made by Renoir on subscription. Disorganized storytelling, stagy sets and
acting.
 368 | A Viewer’s Guide
37.70 Marthe Richard, au service de la France (4)
A spy story set during World War I: simplistic nationalistic triumphalism,
partially subverted by von Stroheim’s powerful presence as the German com-
mander who is the spy’s lover; her betrayal of him, and his dignified suicide.
37.71 Le Mensonge de Nina Petrovna (5)
A tragic Russian tale of a high-class tart who comes to believe for a moment
that she might be able to transcend the past through her relationship with
young Franz who loves her, but who is finally forced to sacrifice her chance
of happiness for his sake. Another very Oedipal story.
37.75 Mollenard (7)
A piratical merchant captain and arms smuggler, loved by his crew but sti-
fled by hypocritical bureaucrats and crapulous company officials. And his
wife. Weakened, he is “kidnapped” and humiliated by his wife, then re-kid-
napped by his crew for a final voyage.
37.80 Naples au baiser du feu (5)
A musical drama of temptation, repentance and forgiveness. A singer is se-
duced by a mysterious young woman who compulsively fictionalizes her
life in order to exercise power over every man. But male friendship and the
homely girl win out.
37.87 Orage (5)
Michèle Morgan here softens the traditional representation of the femme
fatale toward that mysterious but fascinating “other woman” with un-
plumbed potential for commitment whom she was often to play.
37.89 Les Perles de la couronne (1)
Slow, stagy tale tracing through the ages the events surrounding the pearls
in the crown. Strained humor, self-satisfied commentary, reverence for tra-
dition and position, together with total reliance on cliché and stereotype.
37.95 Prison sans barreaux (5)
A conflict of philosophy in the running of reform institutions (here, for
adolescent girls): in one corner, a belief that wickedness is innate, requiring
hierarchy and discipline, and in the other the enlightened new director who
blames sociological factors and promotes compassion and understanding.
37.100 Regain (6)
A splendid Pagnol film about the rebirth of a dying village in Haute Provence.
A mythic play with the notions of family, soil, plow, and grain, and a profound
scorn for civil service and progress. Right-wing anarchism, but powerful.
37.103 Sarati le terrible (7)
Another film overtly fascinated by incest: Harry Baur as a tyrannical Alge-
rian dock boss overly attracted by his niece Rose. She, alas, falls for a French
 A Viewer’s Guide | 369
aristocrat who (incognito) is trying to redeem himself in the colonies. One
genuinely erotic moment.
37.104 Le Schpountz (4)
Fernandel as a gullible provincial dreaming of movie stardom, and finally
winning out over the snide mockery of the industry. The comedian as a cure
for all the world’s ills, and a nice satire on Paramount’s European operations.
37.109 Le Temps des cerises (3)
An episodic narrative, with inter-titles, caricatures, and documents, devised
as propaganda for the Communist Party’s policies toward the aged. The
working class as a group hero, iniquitously treated.
37.113 La Tragédie impériale (7)
Baur in a lovely role as Rasputin, presented as an outrageously vulgar Rus-
sian peasant version of Christ. The climax, where he is unsuccessfully assas-
sinated again and again, is wonderful.
37.117 Un carnet de bal (7)
A quality production: a widow revisits dancing partners from a ball held in
her youth, providing an opportunity for eight brief genre tales. Nostalgia
for youthful aspirations, regret for lost illusions, age and its disappoint-
ments. Finally, the good son.
37.124 Yoshiwara (4)
A Japanese geisha, a Russian officer, a secret mission, spies and counter-
spies. High emotion, self-sacrifice, and a double death. One sequence uses
anti-realistic cross-dissolves of painted backdrops and props that points for-
ward to Ophüls’s postwar films.

1938
38.2 L’Accroche-Cœur (4)
Guitry boulevard comedy with an atypical and very effective downbeat
ending. A gentleman thief has a brief romance with a society woman, but
his money runs out and he admits defeat.
38.4 Alerte en Méditerranée (3)
International collaboration between rival European navies staves off disas-
ter when a pirate ship threatens the known world with a cloud of poison
gas. Very popular in its time, though it now seems clumsy and incompe-
tently narrated. The noble German captain gives his life to save French pas-
sengers.
38.12 La Bête humaine (8)
A great film right from the opening “documentary” railway images. Zola’s
story of a man doomed by his genetic inheritance to kill the woman he
 370 | A Viewer’s Guide
desires. Gabin was never better, and Renoir himself appears in a small role.
Immensely popular.
38.14 Café de Paris (3)
A murder mystery in which an eminently killable press baron is duly killed,
and all suspects are revealed to have their darker side, which usually finds
expression in the Café de Paris’s private rooms.
38.16 Carrefour (8)
A fascinating tale of a wealthy bourgeois who has suffered amnesia in the
war, and is obliged to explore his own past self to discover a possible crimi-
nal persona. Does it matter, if he has now redeemed himself? Vanel very
fine again.
38.18 La Chaleur du sein (5)
Gilbert has a surfeit of mothers, and his father (Michel Simon) is intent on
adding further to the collection; but all prefer the son to the husband. A
comedy about the difficulties besetting “the modern family,” ending with a
reconciliation between father and son, which turns out to be what really
matters after all.
38.25 Les Disparus de St Agil (6)
A murder mystery in a boy’s school, with those elements of the fantastic
and the bizarre for which Véry was renowned. The headmaster turns out to
be the boss of a gang of relatively amiable forgers. Mildly reflexive, notably
when discussing the relative political utility of Art and a box of matches.
38.27 Le Drame de Shanghaï (7)
A dense and rich evocation of Russian refugees caught up in Chinese poli-
tics and civil war, and a sympathetic portrait of a young communist party
activist. Reminiscent of La Condition humaine in its ambition and in its po-
litical stance.
38.29 Éducation de prince (4)
A mildly amusing fantasy about the oil-rich country Sylvestrie, whose
prince is being educated in democratic values and in gaiety by his French
fellow students. Space for mild satire on royalty, business, and politics.
38.31 Entrée des artistes (4)
Drama students being educated into their high calling by Jouvet. Preten-
tious waffle about life and art, acting and truth; rather boring, but a surprise
success with the public.
38. 32 Ernest le rebelle (2)
A grotesque tale in which Fernandel gets washed up penniless in the banana
republic of Cucaracha and ends up leading a peasants’ revolt. Incompetent
storytelling.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 371
38.34 La Femme du boulanger (7)
Pagnol’s well-known Provençal community; the baker’s young and sexy
wife (and his inspiration) is seduced away by a shepherd, and he won’t bake
till she returns. Its charm depends on its quaint characters and its digressive
narrative. More simmering sexuality.
38.37 La Fin du jour (4)
A desultory story about aging actors, their desperate dignity, and their self-
delusions. Jouvet, Simon, and Francen, all poorly used. Myths of the actor,
of art and life. A surprise success.
38.50 Hôtel du Nord (8)
A little community in a Paris rooming-house. Fine roles for Arletty and Jou-
vet, but a painful pair of young lovers. Orphans, immigrant refugees, and
homosexuals are all treated sympathetically, as are all marginals who dream
of a way out, or in. Carné and Jeanson (not Prévert) and classic set design.
38.52 Je chante (4)
Trénet in a musical about the rise of a young singer, whose verve and bon-
homie saves the girls’ hostel run by his uncle, which he then turns into a
music school. Some good songs.
38.54 Le Joueur d’échecs (8)
A wonderful film set in the time of Polish revolt against Russian domina-
tion. The Baron’s workshop for constructing automata is a delight, and the
mechanized chess pieces which he constructs there serve multiple meta-
phoric purposes.
38.56 Katia (2)
The love affair between Czar Alexander and Katia Dolgorouki. A Russian
period piece which like most of its kind involves a sentimental trivializing
of history. If only they’d listened to Katia, the Russian Revolution need
never have happened.
38.60 La Maison du Maltais (5)
An unusually interesting role for Dalio as a feckless North African poet
cum smuggler involved in an interracial love affair which is doomed by
poverty, parental malice, and fatal delays and misunderstandings.
38.63 Métropolitain (4)
An unusual and intriguing poetic realist film with Préjean and Ginette
Leclerc in the lead roles of worker and vamp. As in Le Jour se lève, a crapu-
lous stage magician slyly manipulates their lives. A nice circularity sees the
initial staged murder repeated for real at the end.
38.64 Mon curé chez les riches (5)
A village priest who smokes, swears, sings, and extorts money for “his poor”
is caught up in local politics when a nouveau riche tries to buy his way to
 372 | A Viewer’s Guide
power. The priest organizes a coalition against politicians and for France.
Poor continuity and riddled with clichés.
38.66 Monsieur Coccinelle (8)
One of the great unknown films of the decade. Astonishingly inventive and
constantly amusing tale of a bureaucrat whose dead aunt proves to be irre-
pressibly alive.
38.69 Noix de coco (3)
A boulevard comedy in which the respectable pater familias comes to re-
alize that he had once had an affair with his own wife when she was a
good-time girl in Saigon. More multiple adultery and quasi-incestuous rela-
tionships. Marie Bell in another double role.
38.83 Prisons de femmes (3)
A contorted narrative with tense changes and a diegetic novelist/narrator
who investigates the social pressures that drive women into unsavory com-
pany. An oddly incompetent film, but worth viewing for its ambition.
38.84 Quai des brumes (9)
One of the greatest films of the decade. This Carné/Prévert world is a bleak
foggy dockside which drives the deserter figure played by Gabin into im-
possible dreams of escape. To be on one’s own is to be free, but first the
spotty dog then Nelly undermine his independence. Typically weird roles
for Michel Simon and Le Vigan.
38.85 Raphaël le tatoué (4)
Fernandel as a humble night-watchman who invents a dashing twin
brother, Raphaël (“Je suis mon frère”), and gets to become him. A clumsy
pastiche of motor racing, with futuristic cars.
38.87 Remontons les Champs-Élysées (1)
Guitry as a teacher instructing us in French history as seen from the conser-
vative right. He gives himself all the best roles and lines. Painfully redun-
dant, gross overacting, simpering anecdotes about royalty; but very popular
in its day.
38.92 La Route enchantée (5)
A whimsical Trénet musical which strains after Marx Bros humor. A young
singer dreams of then follows the enchanted road which leads to adventure,
romance, and success, and to a chateau with ghosts, baroque sets, and a
lovely daughter. Several of his best songs.
38.93 La Rue sans joie (4)
A well-worn combination of melodrama and squalid realism (poverty and
female invulnerability) modulating into a murder mystery with Préjean as
reporter/investigator bursting into court at the last moment with evidence
 A Viewer’s Guide | 373
to save our heroine—and to condemn the social conditions which breed
such injustice.
38.103 Tricoche et Cacolet (6)
A riotous farce in which a fine cast of actors runs through all the tricks of
the trade—disguises, deceptions, manipulations. And songs. And all at a
hectic pace.
38.107 Trois Valses (4)
A musical in three episodes opposing bourgeois rectitude and wealth to Bo-
hemian gaiety through three generations. A quality production, gently re-
flexive.
38.109 Un de la Canebière (3)
A sentimental musical comedy about three Marseille fishermen who want
to set up a sardine factory to impress their girlfriends, who in turn are pre-
tending to be movie stars. The Aunt Clarisse sub-plot is reminiscent of
Charley’s aunt, and Rellys makes a wonderfully repugnant transvestite.

1939
39.2 Battement de cœur (6)
A very popular romantic comedy. Impoverished, and forced to choose be-
tween a reformatory, a pseudo-marriage, and a school for pickpockets, Ar-
lette chooses the latter and is caught up in political maneuvers which lead
to adoption by an aristocrat and a real marriage.
39.4 Berlingot et Cie (3)
A farce set in a fairground: two mates, a little girl they look after, a madman
on the loose, and a crazy manager. Momentarily heroes for catching some
thugs, the two mates nevertheless hit the road again at the end. A Fréhel song.
39.11 Cavalcade d’amour (4)
Three parallel tales in different ages, in which cross-class romances are
thwarted twice and finally accepted. As usual, financiers have an image
problem, but artists don’t. A fairytale-like structure.
39.12 La Charrette fantôme (3)
Duvivier again explores timeless legends in an expressionist, or at least po-
etic, style. The Salvation Army officer and her quest to save the soul of
David Holmes from the Grim Reaper in his insufficiently eerie chariot.
39.16 Les Cinq Sous de Lavarède (4)
Fernandel as a braggart who is trapped into a round-the-world race against
the clock in order to gain a fortune. Jailed in New York, smuggled out of
San Francisco in a coffin, a maharaja in a harem in Calcutta (etc.); and ac-
cidentally winning the Tour de France.
 374 | A Viewer’s Guide
39.17 Circonstances atténuantes (7)
Michel Simon as a dried-up old judge stranded with his family in a dive
where he and his wife are revitalized by the humanity and camaraderie of a
class of people they would once have despised. They in their turn come to
admire his criminal skills.
39.21 De Mayerling à Sarajevo (3)
The Austro-Hungarian empire and the Archduke Ferdinand, felt by his fa-
ther to be too liberal in his leanings, not to mention too popular, and to
have chosen unwisely in falling for Countess Chotek. Standard hokum.
Several interesting series of cross-dissolves.
39.23 Dernier Tournant (6)
An effective telling of The Postman Always Rings Twice: the footloose vag-
abond, the naive husband and his sexy wife, the faked accidents and the real
one; tension between independence and commitment.
39.25 Derrière la façade (4)
A typical Mirande script—an episodic narrative in which each of the sus-
pects in a murder mystery is revealed, in his or her separate genre tale, to be
hiding guilty secrets. A cynical view of society as corrupt from top to bot-
tom. A compendium of genre conventions.
39.27 Deuxième Bureau contre Kommandantur (3)
A World War I spy story involving identical twins—a resistance leader and
a man of the cloth. The triumphalist finale is undercut by the spectator’s
identification with the German investigating officer, whose merits even the
French acknowledge.
39.33 Entente cordiale (5)
Rehearses the English–French political entente in the years 1898–1918
with an eye to the approach of World War II, but with a pacifist dedication.
Incidental glorification of French culture, military feats, and values.
39s6 L’Espoir (4)
The Spanish civil war: internationalist allies struggle against Franco’s supe-
rior forces, undertaking a mission to bomb a key bridge. Some striking im-
ages at the end. In Spanish.
39.37 La Famille Duraton (2)
A media producer on holiday discovers a “hilarious” provincial family who
stand for the real France, and develops a radio program around them with-
out their knowledge. It is, of course, very successful, revealing the French to
be joyous, amusing, outspoken, and fundamentally likable.
39.39 Fric-Frac (5)
Fernandel as a gullible jeweler’s assistant, caught up in and quite exhilarated
by an amiable criminal plot to rob his boss. “There are no honest people;
 A Viewer’s Guide | 375
everyone’s a thief, we just do it openly.” Again the discovery that humanity
lies with the people, however criminal, especially when embodied in Michel
Simon and Arletty.
39.45 Ils étaient neuf célibataires (2)
Labored play on the idea of foreigners in France anxious to marry ab-
solutely anyone in order to get French citizenship, but the down-and-out
bachelors exploited for this purpose revolt. Hammy acting, classist and
chauvinist values.
39.48 Le Jour se lève (8)
Gabin as the worker holed up in an apartment building recalling the se-
quence of events that led to him murdering the fast-talking showman. A
wonderful role for Jules Berry. A famous Carné–Prévert film that is obliga-
tory viewing.
39.49 Louise (1)
Yet another mythologization of the artist from Gance, as crassly conven-
tional as ever. Every move signaled well in advance, and a grossly melodra-
matic plot with the worst sort of cultural chauvinism. Oedipal rivalry
between the composer and Louise’s jealous father.
39.51 Macao, l’enfer du jeu (6)
An actress on tour gets caught up in strife in Canton, and thence in Macao
with an adventurer/gunrunner. Also a sinister Oriental banker/gambler and
his daughter who doesn’t realize what he does. Also an eager young French
reporter, who saves her. Exotic adventure, Balin and von Stroheim as sol-
diers of fortune, and a curiously effective evocation of turbulent South
China.
39.54 Menaces (5)
A fascinating film, made during and about the political events leading up to
the declaration of war and the occupation, seen through the eyes of a little
community in a hotel. Clumsy, but important. An awkward upbeat end
was added after the liberation.
39.59 Les Musiciens du ciel (3)
A hymn to the altruism of the Salvation Army—a noble female officer is
committed to saving the soul of a handsome wastrel. She saves him as she
has saved others, but at a dreadful price. . . . Ho hum.
39.69 Paradis perdu (1)
Gance and the glory of the artist’s creative powers, again. Heavy-handed
comedy and painfully ironic tragedy (war declared on their marriage day,
for instance). The painter wants to marry a young woman suspiciously re-
sembling his daughter, but dies of some unnamable disease too soon (or
perhaps not soon enough).
 376 | A Viewer’s Guide
39.71 Pièges (5)
A murder mystery in which a young girl whose friend has been one of the
victims is used as bait. An excuse for several sketches involving von Stro-
heim, Maurice Chevalier, and Pierre Renoir, some of a mildly perverse na-
ture.
39.78 La Règle du jeu (10)
One of the greatest films ever made, to be seen again and again. A formally
exquisite play on questions of rules and passion, civilization and nature, in-
side and outside, upstairs and down. Rich in metaphors of poachers, and
rabbits, and mechanical men.
39.79 Remorques (9)
One of the great Gabin–Morgan films, obligatory viewing. The tugboat
captain and the mysterious woman who appears out of the storm, to dis-
rupt his life. A Prévert script, full of wonderful metaphors—the towline,
the starfish, the lost fingers, etc.
39.80 Sans lendemain (6)
A sophisticated contemporary melodrama about a good-time girl whose
past love appears; she has to try to keep him in the dark about the present,
just as before she had to keep him in the dark about her past. Directed by
Ophüls.
39.85 Sur le plancher des vaches (4)
Winner of an airplane in a lottery, an ordinary Frenchman (Jean Durand!)
proves surprisingly adept and wins the heart of his flying instructress by a
(failed) attempt to rescue her. Low-key precursor of Le Ciel est à vous.
39.87 Tourbillon de Paris (3)
A celebration of the swing band and its popularity with modern young
things, which allows frequent opportunities for mockery of classical music,
opera, etc. Provincial musicians who make the big time in Paris.
39.88 La Tradition de minuit (5)
A murder mystery in which two of the tight group of suspects are drawn
together and marry . . . but his past catches up with him and a squalid po-
lice agent further dooms his hope of ever redeeming himself.
And, made after war was declared, but still in 1939:
39.95 L’Homme qui cherche la vérité (3)
Suspecting that he is unloved, cheated by everyone, and cuckolded by his
son, a banker simulates deafness and thus induces everyone to betray their
real feelings for him. Bloody bourgeois, they even want to be loved sin-
cerely.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 377

PRIZES AND FESTIVAL ENTRIES

As an indication of the films which were regarded at the time as the most
prestigious among each year’s production, I list below those films entered in
international competitions, and those films awarded prizes by various in-
dustrial authorities.

Venice Biennale
1932 French entries: Au nom de la loi, Azaïs, À nous la liberté, Un coup de télé-
phone, David Golder, Hôtel des étudiants, La Bande à Bouboule.
1934 French entry: reputedly Bouboule 1er, roi nègre.
1935 French entries: Crime et châtiment, Marie des Angoisses, Maria Chapde-
laine, Le Voyage imprévu.
Coupe Volpi: Pierre Blanchar for his role in Crime et châtiment.
Best colonial film: Itto
1936 French entries: L’Appel du silence, Veille d’armes, Anne Marie, Mayerling,
Le Grand Refrain, La Tendre Ennemie. Later Le Roman d’un tricheur was
added, while La Kermesse héroïque, which had been deliberately omitted
by the French government, was screened at the express wish of the jury.
Coupe Volpi: Annabella, for her role in Veille d’armes.
Coupe Alfieri: Feyder, for La Kermesse héroïque.
1937 French entries: La Grande Illusion, Les Perles de la couronne, Un carnet de
bal, Hélène. Le Messager was added later.
Coupe Mussolini (best foreign film): Un carnet de bal.
Coupe du jury international: La Grande Illusion.
Coupe de la Direction Générale de la Cinématographie: (best scenario):
Les Perles de la couronne.
1938 French entries: Paix sur le Rhin, Le Joueur d’échecs, L’Innocent, Quai des
brumes, Altitude 3200, La Mort du cygne, Ramuntcho, Abus de confiance,
L’Affaire Lafarge. The British and American jury members resigned be-
cause of the awarding of best film to Triumph of the Will and the Coupe
Mussolini to Vittorio Mussolini’s film Luciano Serra, pilote.
1939 French entries: Derrière la façade, La Fin du jour, Le Jour se lève, Jeunes
Filles en détresse, La Bête humaine, Le Grand Élan. No prizes were
awarded, but La Fin du jour reputedly received exceptional applause.

Festival International du Cinéma, Exposition de Bruxelles

1935 French entries: La Bandera, L’Équipage, Les Mystères de Paris, Variétés.
Best music track: L’Équipage.
Medals: La Bandera, Variétés.
 378 | A Viewer’s Guide
Cannes Festival
1939 The Cannes festival was due to be held in September, but due to the dec-
laration of war it was deferred, initially until January 1940. It was finally
held in 1946.
French entries: La Loi du Nord, La Charrette fantôme, L’Homme du Niger,
La France est un empire, L’Enfer des anges.

Grand Prix du Cinéma Français

This prize was intended to identify the best French film of the year, but a strict
(and evolving) definition of “French” served to exclude such films as Jenny, Les
Bas-Fonds, Mayerling, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and many others.
1934 Maria Chapdelaine.
1935 La Kermesse héroïque (over Veille d’armes, Crime et châtiment, Deuxième Bu-
reau).
1936 L’Appel du silence (over Un amour de Beethoven, Courrier-Sud, Hélène).
1937 Légions d’honneur (over Ces dames aux chapeaux verts, J’accuse, L’Affaire du
courrier de Lyon).
1938 Alerte en Méditerranée (over Les Filles du Rhône, Entrée des artistes, Trois de
St-Cyr, Fort Dolorès).
1939 Quai des brumes (over Feu de paille, La Fin du jour).
An additional prize was awarded in 1937 to mark the great exhibition of
that year. It went to La Mort du cygne (over Abus de confiance, which received
the jury’s compliments, Les Hommes sans nom, Les Perles de la couronne, La
Bataille silencieuse, and Gribouille).

Prix Louis Delluc

This prize was created by a group of independent critics under forty years
of age, including Achard, Altman, Bessy, Bost, Charensol, Franck, Gilson,
Jeanson, and Régent, as a radical alternative to the official Grand Prix. It
was awarded in December each year.
1936 Les Bas-Fonds (over Sous les yeux d’Occident, La Belle Équipe, Le Roman
d’un tricheur, César, Jenny, and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange).
1937 Le Puritain.
1938 Quai des brumes (over Les Disparus de St-Agil, La Femme du boulanger, and
Entrée des artistes).

Prix Méliès
Awarded for overall quality by the Académie du Film (150 elected film-
makers) which was formed in 1939.
1939 La Bête humaine and Quai des brumes jointly.
 A Viewer’s Guide | 379
Prix Jean Vigo
Awarded by the Académie du Film for a courageous work.
1939 Les Disparus de St-Agil

Prix Janie Marèse

Awarded by the Académie du Film for the best actress/most original perfor-
mance.
1939 Arletty, for her role in Hôtel du Nord.

Prix Pierre Batcheff

Awarded by the Académie du Film for best actor/most original perfor-
mance.
1939 Michel Simon, for his role in Les Disparus de St-Agil.
 FILMOGRAPHY

This filmography attempts to list all French sound feature films produced
between the introduction of sound in 1929 and the declaration of war in
1939—roughly, that is, the decade of the thirties. Especially for the earlier
part of the decade, this is no easy task. There are a number of reasons for
this. First, the sonorization of French studios and movie theaters was a long-
drawn-out process, and many films designed as silent films were hastily and
often only partially sonorized, either during production or some time after-
ward. It is difficult to know whether to include films with no more than a
recorded music-track or, at best, a few scenes of added dialogue. Second,
the existence of multiple language productions, both inside and outside
France, makes it difficult to define what is to constitute “a French film.”
Third, the concept of “a feature film” was not clearly defined anywhere in
the world at the time, and most especially in France, where fiction films of
different lengths, from 20 minutes to 120 minutes, had been made during
the twenties, and continued to be made after the introduction of sound.
Fourth, many films more or less episodic, didactic, or documentary in na-
ture, and structured by a more or less recognizably narrative form, were
sometimes distributed and exhibited in the same way as more conventional
feature films. Finally, many films promoted to the trade as available to the
market at the time were never in fact made, or if made were very possibly
never released.
The establishment of a definitive filmography is therefore impossible,
even without the endless uncertainties created by the absence of surviving
copies and the fragmentary or contradictory nature of surviving docu-
ments. Anyone working in the field must take as a starting point the two
most reliable sources of information concerning film production of this
period—Vincent Pinel’s Filmographie des longs métrages sonores du cinéma
français 1 and the Catalogue des films français de long métrage: films sonores de
fiction 1929–1939 produced under the supervision of Raymond Chirat.2
These two filmographies overlap substantially, but do not entirely coincide
precisely because they take different positions on some of these questions.
Yet even within their different terms of reference the two filmographies are,
as their authors acknowledge, not entirely reliable. Both contain many films
far shorter than an hour in length, and Pinel knowingly includes certain
 Filmography | 381
mid-length films of the period which were relatively unknown at the time
but which have since become well known—L’Affaire est dans le sac (32s1),
Zéro de conduite (33s8), Jofroi (33s5), Une partie de campagne (36s1), and
so on—but does not mention hundreds of other mid-length films that
were produced and widely screened in the same years, often to far greater
acclaim. Despite its title, Chirat’s catalogue includes films that are not fic-
tion, as does Pinel’s, though in the latter case it is deliberate. Moreover, both
filmographies contain numerous problematic entries due to the accidental
or deliberate inclusion of some (but by no means all) films which were ei-
ther silent or only partially sonorized. Both contain a number of films
which were never released, if they were ever made, and avoid taking a posi-
tion on the necessity of release as a criterion of inclusion. Finally, Chirat in-
cludes films, such as Sirocco (30s16) and Espoir (39s6), which are not in
French and thus scarcely conform to his own precondition for inclusion.
While recognizing that there is still a lot of work to do, the present film-
ography attempts to rectify the bulk of these errors and inconsistencies, and
to supplement the existing filmographies by including a small number of
films that seem to have been overlooked by their compilers. As a necessary
step toward achieving these aims, an explicit stand should be taken on each
of the problems outlined above—what constitutes a sound film, what con-
stitutes a French film, and what constitutes a feature film.

SOUND FILM
Few of the early films commonly listed as “the first French sound films”
were in fact 100 percent talkies. They may have had a music-track and/or a
noise-track, but (particularly in the case of the many sound-on-disk films)
the dialogue was often restricted to specific scenes or to occasional songs. Le
Collier de la reine (29s1) was “merely” sonorized, not dialogued, and only
the final trial scene of Le Requin (29s2) was dialogued. La Cinématographie
Française at first attempted to categorize the films that it reviewed for the
trade in terms of the degree of sonorization, so that exhibitors would know
the status of the films on the market, which it was for the most part in the
interests of the producers and distributors to conceal. Indeed, many adver-
tisements in trade journals were drastically misleading, claiming for the
films a far higher degree of sonorization than they in fact manifested. Some
that were ultimately never made at all were nevertheless advertised as al-
ready available and fully dialogued.
To confuse matters even more, silent or partially sonorized films might
later, as the market and technology developed, be “upgraded” to a more
nearly fully dialogued form, though they might not find a distributor even
then. In the years of greatest confusion (1930–33), reviewers developed
systems of categories to identify the degree of sonorization, though they
 382 | Filmography
were never entirely consistent or reliable. One of these was as follows: (1)
“films with sound and dialogue,” or “films with 100 percent French dia-
logue”; (2) “sonorized films, with [some] French dialogue”; (3) “sonorized
films with sounds, music, and songs.” The latter description might sound
like a full talkie, but was in fact far from it. In the first season of sound pro-
duction, very few films qualified as “with 100 percent French dialogue.” By
May 1930, only about a dozen of these had been released, and many films
normally included in filmographies such as this one are to be found in the
second category—Le Collier de la reine (29s1) and Mon béguin (29.1), for
instance. Some were even in the third category, where they were listed
alongside The Jazz Singer and other early Warner Brothers and MGM pro-
ductions. A year later, lists of films previewed by the film censors still dis-
tinguished “sonorized films,” “sonorized films with dialogue,” and “films
with dialogue.”
In this filmography, I have included only those films which the surviv-
ing evidence suggests were indeed fully talking films, though I have left in
films such as Caïn (30.15) and L’Or des mers (32.99), which, in one way or
another, while not fully dialogued, exploited or seem to have exploited the
experimental nature of sound recording by designing largely undialogued
scenes, or which, as in the case of Clair’s films, constituted a systematic pro-
test against the very nature of sound film. All sonorized or partially dia-
logued films excluded from the present filmography but included by Pinel
or Chirat are found in a supplementary list at the end, with explanations for
their exclusion. Where the evidence for exclusion has not been conclusive,
the films have been provisionally left in, and a second supplementary list
designates such “suspect” films.

FRENCH FILMS
Pinel adopts a restrictive definition of what constitutes “a French film,”
based on the source of funding and the nationality of the director, whereas
Chirat includes all those, together with many more co-productions, notably
all those “made with French-speaking actors, and by a team which includes
people of French nationality.” In general, I follow Chirat in this matter,
defining Frenchness in very broad terms. A key criterion for inclusion in the
present filmography is the film’s reception by the public, and in particular
the language spoken by the actors, whereas the make-up of the production
team and the nationality of the director are irrelevant. Ideally, then, this
filmography aspires to include every film that would have seemed French to
the French audience of the day. In pursuit of this aim, and with the help of
Sadoul,3 I have included several French versions of multilingual produc-
tions which Chirat overlooked, though there is still work to do here. A par-
ticular problem is posed by French-speaking films from Belgium, Switzer-
 Filmography | 383
land, and Canada. Certainly, nationals of these countries would be out-
raged to see “their” films included here as French, yet in some cases a French
audience might not at the time have registered their foreignness. Several
Belgian films by Schoukens and Le Carillon de la liberté (32s4) by Roudès
were advertised as Belgian, and have been included in the secondary film-
ography, as have foreign-language films such as Espoir (39s6) and Sirocco
(30s16).

FEATURE FILMS—LENGTH
In the late twenties, there was no institutional standard for “a feature film.”
The term did not exist in French, and in English it is an institutional term
describing films that “feature” as the principal attraction in a program. The
French term long métrage was never closely defined, but Pinel and Chirat
are in agreement that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and that the term
should be reserved for films over 1,650 meters—that is, over one hour—in
length. I have gone along with this, while recognizing that it excludes a
large number of films—perhaps hundreds—of between forty and sixty min-
utes which did in fact constitute the principal feature in programs of the
early years of the decade. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the in-
dustry itself accepted, or very soon came to accept, a distinction of this
sort. Films under 1,650 meters in length are several times in key film lists of
the decade categorized as films de première partie, while those longer than
1,650 meters are called grands films.
Film length is not always easy to ascertain in the absence of the film it-
self. The only attempt at a catalogue of French films less than sixty minutes
long is patently incomplete and often inaccurate, and surviving evidence is
particularly contradictory in this area. Nevertheless, I have been able to ex-
clude from Pinel’s and Chirat’s lists a large number of films which certainly
or almost certainly were under one hour in length. Les Trois Masques (29s3),
for instance, usually listed as the first French sound feature film, was less
than an hour long. So, according to contemporary censorship lists, were
Chiqué (30s5), Le Roi du camembert (31s7), Je t’adore mais pourquoi (30s9),
Y’en a pas deux comme Angélique (31s8), La Fille du Bouif (31s5), Brumes de
Paris (32s3), L’Indésirable (33s3), and many others which Pinel and/or Chi-
rat include. On the other hand, contemporary evidence suggests that
Jimmy (30.45) may have been 1,666 meters long (i.e., just over sixty min-
utes), so it is included. It is, moreover, listed by GFFA among its grands
films rather than its films de première partie.
Many other films in the filmography are only just over sixty minutes—
L’Âge d’or (30s2, 62 minutes), Prix de beauté (30.69, 65 minutes), Ah!
Quelle gare (32.3, 65 minutes), Mon ami Tim (30.89, 66 minutes), La Perle
(32.105, 63 minutes), Un peu d’amour (32.141, 65 minutes), La Tendre
 384 | Filmography
Ennemie (35.109, 64 minutes), and others—but this would be the case
wherever the line was drawn. A number are of unknown length, since the
evidence is either absent or radically contradictory. A simple typographical
error may give the length as 1,450 meters in one document and 2,450 me-
ters in another. Where real doubt persists, the film is included, but noted in
the “suspect” list. A typically problematic case is La Maison jaune de Rio,
which Chirat includes despite acknowledging that it was cut to 38 minutes
(!) “for reasons of exhibition,” and was totally incomprehensible. The trade
review at the time of release gave its length as 2,500 meters (i.e., 92 min-
utes), though the censorship list in early 1931 records it as having been
only 1,300 meters (i.e., 48 minutes) when passed for release. At least every-
one agrees that it was never screened in anything approaching feature-
length form, so it should not figure in the filmography.

FEATURE FILMS—NARRATIVE
Certain films listed in standard filmographies are not, or may not have been,
primarily narrative in nature. In general, the prime criterion for inclusion in
the present filmography has been the existence of a fictional narrative die-
gesis as the dominant structure of the film. Thus, where the function of the
film is primarily descriptive or didactic and any narrative structure is sec-
ondary, the film has been excluded from this filmography. Several propa-
ganda films, such as La Vie est à nous (36s2) and Le Monde en armes (29s9),
are primarily didactic in this way. Sommes-nous défendus? (38s3) was exhib-
ited as the principal feature in a program and has a perfunctory narrative
frame in which a reporter describes to a Parisian audience his experiences
when invited to view the fortifications on the northern frontier, but it is
nevertheless primarily directive and descriptive. The descriptive element is
also predominant in long documentaries such as La Croisière jaune (31s4)
and La Croisière noire (1926), and such films have been excluded. L’Amour
qu’il faut aux femmes (33s1) seems to have been primarily didactic, consist-
ing of an instructional medical frame explicating in a condescending way
the emotional needs of women, treated in brief fictional sections. Courrier
d’Asie (39s5) seems to have combined propaganda, travelogue, and adver-
tising, and had, at best, a perfunctory narrative frame. Pinel and Chirat in-
clude most or all of these, since the former at least aims to list all feature-
length sound films, regardless of function or structure. Here, they can be
found in the supplementary filmography.
In all these matters, the decision as to where to draw the line was diffi-
cult. An easier decision was the relegation of such films as Paramount en
parade (30s12), which was no more than a series of sketches, few of which
were even in French. Likewise, Voilà Montmartre (34s3), La Boutique aux
illusions (39s3), and others of the same sort have been eliminated, since
 Filmography | 385
they were no more than a record of a series of music-hall sketches or silent
shorts, sometimes in a perfunctory narrative framework. A slightly more
difficult case is Méphisto (30s11), which consisted of a series of four forty-
minute episodes designed as a serial to accompany the feature films in four
successive programs. It seems to have been included in other filmographies
simply because it was the first serial of the sound era, and was thus re-
viewed extensively, but there is no real justification for including it if all the
others that succeeded it are not included. A slightly different situation
arises when two or more full-length films are produced as a coherent whole,
but screened separately. Such was the case with Sidonie Panache and Chabi-
chou (34.98), the three parts of Les Misérables (33.92), and possibly Le Tigre
du Bengale and Le Tombeau hindou (37.110). These have been listed under
the first title, as parts 1, 2, 3, and so on.

PUBLICATION
Many novels have been written but never published, and they cannot be
said to be part of the corpus of their national literature. Similarly, a film that
was never released publicly cannot be said to form a part of the cinematic
corpus of the nation. The simplest case is provided by films that were de-
stroyed in a fire in 1940 before being released, and were never remade. More
generally, any film that did not achieve public release, commercial or other-
wise, has been excluded from the present filmography, but noted for inter-
est’s sake in the supplement. It is, of course, not always easy to identify which
films were not released. Many films of the thirties can be traced through
conception, production, and post-production to presentation to the trade
and review. They were thus “available to the market,” yet there is no clear
evidence that a distributor ever took them up and released them.
As usual, La Cinématographie Française is invaluable in listing films re-
leased onto the market, but it was far from comprehensive in reviewing
such films, and when it did so it was sometimes unclear as to whether the
film was simply “finished,” or approved for release by the censors, or actu-
ally screened. It listed most films going into first-release theaters, though
not all (since it wasn’t, alas, aiming to cater to future researchers), and not
all films went into first-release theaters. A number of less prestigious films
slipped onto the suburban market unpublicized and unrecorded. Even the
alphabetical lists in La Semaine à Paris, giving the week’s film programs for
all Paris theaters together with films currently on exclusive release, are of
uncertain reliability in some years, and it is not possible to say for certain
that a film was never released without surveying the individual programs of
all suburban theaters (and, in theory, all provincial theaters) over the prob-
able period of release. Even so, some films surfaced only long after their
nominal release date. L’Ensorcellement de Séville (31.54), shot from August
 386 | Filmography
to October 1930, edited in January 1931, “available” for many months
thereafter, and approved by the censor in the course of 1931 was reputedly
not screened till 1936, and I have not been able to trace even that screening.
Pour un soir (31.106), filmed as Sancta Maria in April 1931 and as Stella
Maris in May, edited in June, publicized to the trade for months thereafter,
and approved by the censor by August 1932 was actually presented to the
trade only in August 1933, when it was condemned as impossible to screen
in its existing form. Nevertheless, it was screened publicly in Paris for one
week at the end of 1933, before disappearing “forever.” (In fact, paradoxi-
cally, it is one of the relatively few films from that year of which a copy is
commercially available.)
Certain production companies can be identified as particularly prob-
lematic in their release practices. Nord Films, based in Lille, consistently
advertised a bracket of films (Fumées [30s8], Vouloir [31.148], Virages
[30.94], La Chanson du lin [31s2], L’Équipe) as if they were finished and
100% talkies, but it only gradually produced some of them, and then, as
far as can be ascertained, usually in lesser degrees of sonorization. None,
except very briefly Virages and, less certainly, Vouloir seems ever to have
been released in Paris, though others may have been released in Lille. Like-
wise, a number of directors’ names can be associated with such problematic
films: Jaeger-Schmidt of Nord Films, of course, together with Monca,
Pallu, Perojo, Sévérac, Mittler, Weill, Pujol, Roudès, Marca-Rosa, Rosca,
Rozier, Guarino, and Péguy, for instance. Some occasionally made success-
ful films, but it is hard to see how their track record could have justified
continued funding. Certainly, the near invisibility of much of their pro-
duction in the journals and programs of the day renders the compilation of
a definitive filmography close to impossible.
To summarize the above observations, the following filmography at-
tempts to list all French feature films of the thirties which were or probably
were 100 percent talkies, which were or probably were over one hour in
length, which were probably received by French audiences as French, and
which constructed as their primary effect a fictional diegesis structured by
narrative. Many will feel, with some justification, that certain films here rel-
egated to the supplementary list should be included in the main filmogra-
phy, and notably those which at some stage had sound, and on occasion
some dialogue, added after production. The date under which the films are
listed is the date when production began. I have taken these from Chirat
and Pinel, except where the release date suggested that the year of produc-
tion proposed in those filmographies was impossible—either the film had
already been released in the previous year, or it was released before week 5 of
the proposed year of production. The Paris release date is given after the di-
rector’s name, to the nearest week. Thus 18/30 after the director’s name sig-
nifies that the film was released in week 18 of 1930. I have not bothered to
 Filmography | 387
record the precise release date, even where it is known, since the place of the
films in the annual seasonal programming, together with the number of
weeks of screening, was of primary concern here. Where I am unsure if the
film was ever in fact released, I have simply put a question mark. Where I
suspect an earlier untraced release, I have followed the release date that I
give with a question mark.
Underlined films are those which Pinel, with his more restrictive defi-
nition of Frenchness, does not include in his filmography. Films which fig-
ure in the annual tables of most popular films are printed in boldface type.
The films which I have viewed in preparing this book have been indicated
in the filmography by an asterisk. Those which are commercially available,
or which other commentators report having viewed, but which I have not
myself viewed, are marked with a hash mark. With contributions from
other researchers, this should ultimately lead to a knowledge of the total
corpus of films which have survived into the twenty-first century. Each
year’s output is numbered, and all in-text references in part 1 give the film’s
year of production and its position on the annual list. Thus 32.18 refers the
reader to the 18th film on the 1932 list (Le Béguin de la garnison, Vernay
and Weill, released in week 15 of 1933). This has been done to avoid clut-
tering the text with lengthy references or thousands of footnotes. Alterna-
tive titles have been given only when the film was released or sometimes
screened under an alternate title.
 388 | Filmography
1929
1 Mon béguin, Behrendt, 50/30
2 Mystère de la Villa Rose, Le, Hervil & Mercanton, 4/30
3 Nuit est à nous, La, Roussell, 3/30
4 Quand nous étions deux, Perret, 18/30
5 Route est belle, La, Florey, 4/30

1930
1 À mi-chemin du ciel, Cavalcanti, 23/31
2 Accusée, levez-vous!, Tourneur, 37/30
3 Amour chante, L’, Florey, 47/30
4 Amours de minuit, Les, Genina & M. Allégret, 3/31
5 Amours viennoises, Choux & Land, 1/31
6 Anglais tel qu’on le parle, L’, Boudrioz, 24/31
7 Anny je t’aime, Lamac, 44/33?
8 Arlésienne, L’, Baroncelli, 38/30
9 Arthur, Perret, 1/31
10 Atlantis, Dupont & Kemm, 39/30
11 Barcarolle d’amour, Roussell, 41/30
12 Big House, Fejos & Hill, 20/31
13 Blanc et le noir, Le, M. Allégret & Florey, 21/31*
14 Bodega, La, Perojo, 26/30
15 Caïn, aventure des mers exotiques, Poirier, 48/30
16 Capitaine jaune, Le, Sandberg, 51/30
17 Cendrillon de Paris, Hémard, 47/30
18 Chacun sa chance, Steinhoff & Pujol, 51/30*
19 Chanson des nations, La, Meinert & Gleize, 26/31
20 Chanteur de Séville, Le, Noé & Navarro, 7/31
21 Chemin du paradis, Le, Thiele & de Vaucorbeil, 46/30*
22 Chérie, Mercanton, 51/30
23 Chevaliers de la montagne, Les, Bonnard, 13/31
24 Chute dans le bonheur, La, Pujol & Steinhoff
25 Contre-enquête, Daumery, 49/30
26 Dans une île perdue, Cavalcanti, 4/31
27 David Golder, Duvivier, 10/31 #
28 Défenseur, Le, Ryder, 22/30
29 Dernière Berceuse, La, Righelli & Cassagne, 23/31
30 Deux fois vingt ans, Tavano, 11/31
31 Deux Mondes, Les, Dupont, 37/30
32 Douceur d’aimer, La, Hervil, 42/30
33 Enfant de l’amour, L’, L’Herbier, 32/30
34 Énigmatique Mr. Parkes, L’, Gasnier, 41/30
35 Étrangère, L’, Ravel, 6/31
36 Femme d’une nuit, La (L’Herbier), 18/32
 Filmography | 389
37 Femme et le rossignol, La, Hugon, 11/31
38 Fin du monde, La, Gance, 4/31
39 Flagrant Délit, Schwarz & Tréville, 10/31
40 Folle Aventure, La, Froelich and Antoine, 11/31
41 Fra Diavolo, Bonnard, 16/31
42 Grande Mare, La, Henley & Bataille-Henri, 29/30
43 Haï-Tang, Eichberg & Kemm, 38/30
44 Homme qui assassina, L’, Bernhardt & Tarride, 3/31
45 Jimmy, Epstein, 1931?
46 Joker, Le, Waschneck, 46/30
47 Lettre, La, Mercanton, 47/30
48 Lévy et Cie, Hugon, 43/30
49 Lopez, le bandit, Daumery, 6/31
50 Maison de danses, Tourneur, 9/31
51 Maison de la flèche, La, Fescourt, 50/30
52 Marius à Paris, Lion, 46/30
53 Miracle des loups, Le, Bernard, 29/31
54 Mon ami Victor!, Berthomieu, 52/30
55 Mon cœur incognito, Noé & Antoine, 3/31
56 Mon gosse de père, Limur, 18/30 #
57 Monsieur le Duc, Limur, 9/31
58 Monsieur Le Fox, Roach, 3/31
59 Mystère de la chambre jaune, Le, L’Herbier, 6/31*
60 Nos maîtres, les domestiques, Grantham-Hayes, 45/30
61 Opéra de quat’sous, L’, Pabst, 45/31*
62 Parfum de la dame en noir, Le, L’Herbier, 45/31*
63 Paris la nuit, Diamant-Berger, 52/30
64 Père célibataire, Le, Robison, 49/32
65 Petit Café, Le , Berger, 19/31
66 Petite Lise, La, Grémillon, 49/30*
67 Princes de la cravache, Les, Wion (?)
68 Prison en folie, La, Wulschleger, 4/31
69 Prix de beauté, Genina, 19/31*
70 Procureur Hallers, Le, Wiene, 46/30
71 Razzia, Sévérac, 47/31
72 Rebelle, Le, Millar, 41/31
73 Refuge, Le, Mathot, 2/31
74 Réquisitoire, Le, Buchowetzki, 9/31
75 Rêve, Le, Baroncelli, 19/31
76 Roi de Paris, Le, Mittler, 36/30
77 Roi des aulnes, Le, Iribe, 9/31
78 Roi des resquilleurs, Le, Colombier, 46/30
79 Romance à l’inconnue, Barberis, 8/31
80 Ronde des heures, La, Ryder, 7/31
81 Roumanie, terre d’amour, Morlhon, 36/31
 390 | Filmography
82 Secret du docteur, Le, Rochefort, 39/30
83 Si l’empereur savait ça, Feyder, 44/30
84 Sous les toits de Paris, Clair, 17/30*
85 Spectre vert, Le, Feyder & Barrymore, 18/30
86 Tampon du capiston, Le, Francis & Toulot, 12/31
87 Tendresse, La, Hugon, 20/30
88 Toute sa vie, Cavalcanti, 45/30
89 Tu m’oublieras, Diamant-Berger, 52/30
90 Un caprice de la Pompadour, Wolff & Hamman, 18/31
91 Un trou dans le mur, Barberis, 23/30
92 Une belle garce, Gastyne, 51/30
93 Vacances du diable, Les, Cavalcanti, 12/31
94 Virages, Jaeger-Schmitt, 16/31

1931
1 À nous la liberté, Clair, 51/31*
2 Affaire Blaireau, L’, Robert, 11/32
3 Aiglon, L’, Tourjansky, 35/31
4 Allô Berlin, ici Paris, Duvivier, 47/32
5 Amour à l’américaine, L’, Heymann, 52/31
6 Amour et discipline, Kemm, 6/32
7 Amoureuse aventure, L’, Thiele, 4/32
8 Après l’amour, Perret, 49/31
9 Ariane, jeune fille russe, Czinner, 9/32 (in Fr)
10 Atout-cœur, Roussell, 38/31
11 Au nom de la loi, Tourneur, 16/32*
12 Autour d’une enquête, Siodmak & Chomette, 23/31
13 Aviateur, L’, Selter, 11/31
14 Azaïs, Hervil, 32/31
15 Bal, Le, Thiele, 37/31
16 Baleydier, Mamy, 3/32
17 Bande à Bouboule, La, Mathot, 51/31
18 Baroud, Ingram, 45/32* (in Eng)
19 Bête errante, La, Gastyne, 4/32
20 Blanc comme neige, Ellias, 31/31
21 Buster se marie, Brothy & Autant-Lara, 2/32
22 Calais-Douvres, Litvak & Boyer, 39/31
23 Camp volant, Reichmann, 37/32
24 Cap perdu, Le, Dupont, 14/31
25 Capitaine Craddock, Le, Schwarz & de Vaucorbeil, 49/31 #
26 Ceux du “Viking,” Ginet (& Frissell), 9/32
27 Chance, La, Guissart, 52/31
28 Chant du marin, Le, Gallone, 4/32
29 Chanteur inconnu, Le, Tourjansky, 49/31
 Filmography | 391
30 Chauve-Souris, La, Lamac & Billon, 13/32
31 Chienne, La, Renoir, 47/31*
32 Cinq gentlemen maudits, Les, Duvivier, 7/32 #
33 Circulez!, Limur, 47/31
34 Cœur de Lilas, Litvak, 7/32*
35 Cœur de Paris, Le, Benoît-Lévy & M. Epstein, 19/32
36 Cœurs joyeux, Schwarz & de Vaucorbeil, 49/32
37 Coiffeur pour dames, Guissart, 21/32
38 Congrès s’amuse, Le, Charell & Boyer, 43/32*
39 Coquecigrole, Berthomieu, 51/31
40 Cordon-Bleu, Anton, 2/32
41 Costaud des P.T.T., Le, or Le Roi des facteurs, Bertin & Maté, 50/31
42 Côte d’Azur, Capellani, 28/32
43 Coups de roulis, La Cour, 21/32
44 Couturière de Luneville, La, Lachmann, 16/32
45 Croix de bois, Les, Bernard, 12/32*
46 Croix du sud, La, Hugon, 20/32
47 Dactylo, Thiele, 14/31
48 Delphine, Campellani & Marguenat, 47/31
49 Disparu de l’ascenseur, Le, Torre, 4/32
50 Durand contre Durand, Thiele & Joannon, 48/31
51 Échec au roi, d’Usseau & de la Falaise, 36/31
52 Échec et mat, Goupillières, 36/31
53 En bordée, Francis & Wulschleger, 29/31
54 Ensorcellement de Séville, L’, Perojo, 1936?
55 Faubourg-Montmartre, Bernard, 38/31*
56 Femme de mes rêves, La, Bertin, 7/32
57 Fille et le Garçon, La, Thiele, 10/32
58 Fils de l’autre, Le, de la Falaise, 10/32
59 Fortune, La, Hémard, 4/32
60 Frères Karamazoff, Les, Ozep, 4/32
61 Fuite à l’anglaise, Kemm
62 Gagne ta vie, Berthomieu, 41/31
63 Galeries Lévy et Cie, Les, Hugon, 5/32
64 Gloria, Behrend & Noé, 44/31
65 Grains de beauté, Caron, 11/32
66 Grock, Boese & Hamman, 19/31
67 Hardi les gars!, Champreux, 43/31
68 Il est charmant, Mercanton, 9/32*
69 Inconstante, L’, Behrend & Noé, 25/31
70 Jean de la Lune, Choux, 9/31
71 Jenny Lind, Robison, 7/32
72 Juif polonais, Le, Kemm, 38/31
73 Laurette ou le cachet rouge, Casembroot, 14/31
 392 | Filmography
74 Ma cousine de Varsovie, Gallone, 15/31*
75 Ma tante d’Honfleur, Maurice, 11/32
76 Magie moderne, Buchowetzki, 41/31
77 Mam’zelle Nitouche, M. Allégret, 49/31*
78 Marchand de sable, Le, Hugon, 4/32
79 Mardi gras, Weill, 18/33
80 Marions-nous, Mercanton, 10/31
81 Marius, Korda, 41/31*
82 Masque d’Hollywood, Le, Badger & Daumery, 17/31
83 Miche, Marguenat, 18/32
84 Million, Le, Clair, 14/31*
85 Mistigri, Lachmann, 49/31
86 Mon amant l’assassin, Bussi, 24/32
87 Mon cœur et ses millions, Berthomieu, 45/31
88 Monsieur de minuit, Le, Lachmann, 33/31
89 Monsieur le Maréchal, Lamac, 44/31
90 Monts en flammes, Les, Trenker & Hamman, 46/31
91 Nicole et sa vertu, Hervil, 1/32
92 Nuit d’Espagne, de la Falaise, 14/32
93 Nuits de Port-Saïd, Les, Mittler, 41/33
94 Nuits de Venise, Billon & Wiene, 9/31
95 On purge bébé, Renoir, 26/31 #
96 Papa sans le savoir, Wyler, 15/32
97 Paris-Béguin, Genina, 41/31*
98 Paris-Méditerranée, May, 8/32*
99 Partir, Tourneur, 35/31
100 Pas sur la bouche, Evreïnoff, 39/31
101 Passeport 13.444, Mathot, 27/31
102 Petit Écart, Le, Schünzel & Chomette, 43/31
103 Petite Chocolatière, La, M. Allégret, 7/32*??
104 Petite de Montparnasse, La, Schwarz & de Vaucorbeil, 13/32
105 Piste des géants, La, Walsh & Couderc, 12/31
106 Pour un soir, or Stella maris, Godard, 52/33 #
107 Pour un sou d’amour, Grémillon, 9/32*
108 Princesse, à vos ordres, Schwarz & de Vaucorbeil, 15/31
109 Prisonnier de mon cœur, Tarride, 17/32
110 Procès de Mary Dugan, Le, de Sano, 46/31
111 Quand on est belle, Robison, 12/32
112 Quand te tues-tu ?, Capellani, 47/31
113 Quatre vagabonds, Les, Lupu-Pick, 15/31
114 Rien que la vérité, Guissart, 37/31
115 Rive gauche, Korda, 34/31
116 Roi du cirage, Le, Colombier, 46/31
 Filmography | 393
10 As du turf, Les, Poligny, 13/32
11 Athlète incomplet, L’, Autant-Lara, 24/32
12 Atlantide, L’, Pabst, 24/32*
13 Aux urnes, citoyens!, Hémard, 11/32
14 Avec l’assurance, Capellani, 25/32
15 Baby, Lamac & Brillon, 7/33
16 Bariole, Vigny, 20/34
17 Barranco, Ltd, or Le Bon Filon, Berthomieu, 25/32
18 Béguin de la garnison, Le, Vernay & Weill, 15/33
19 Belle Aventure, La, Schünzel & Le Bon, 49/32
20 Belle Marinière, La, Lachmann, 49/32
21 Billet de logement, Le, Tavano, 39/32
22 Bleus de l’amour, Les, Marguenat, 4/33
23 Bluffeur, Le, Laguet & Blake, 45/32
24 Bonne Aventure, La, Diamant-Berger, 28/32
25 Boudu sauvé des eaux, Renoir, 46/32*
26 Brumes, Baroncelli, (?)
27 Cas du docteur Brenner, Le, Daumery, 12/33
28 Ce cochon de Morin, Boyer, 52/32
29 Chair ardente, Plaisetty, 39/32
30 Champion du régiment, Le, Wulschleger, 37/32
31 Chanson d’une nuit, La, Litvak, 6/33
32 Chasseur de chez Maxim’s, Le, Anton, 10/33
33 Chien jaune, Le, Tarride, 27/32
34 Chotard et Cie, Renoir, 27/33*
35 Chouchou poids plume, Bibal, 48/32
36 Clair de lune, Diamant-Berger, 47/32
37 Clochard, Péguy, 8/33
38 Coffret de laque, Le, Kemm, 29/32
39 Cognasse, Mercanton, 36/32
40 Complice, La, Guarino, 52/32?
41 Conduisez-moi, Madame, Selpin, 47/32
42 Coup de feu à l’aube, de Poligny, 33/32
43 Criez-le sur les toits, Anton, 33/32
44 Crime du Bouif, Le, Berthomieu, 5/33
45 Crime du Chemin Rouge, Le, Sévérac, 7/33
46 Criminel, or Mort d’homme, Forrester, 2/33
47 Dame de chez Maxim’s, La, Korda, 14/33
48 Danton, Roubard, 42/32
49 Dernier Choc, Le, Baroncelli, 20/32
50 Deux Orphelines, Les, Tourneur, 10/33*
51 Direct au cœur, Arnaudy & Lion, 3/33
52 Don Quichotte, Pabst, 14/33
53 Embrassez-moi, Mathot, 43/32
54 Enfant de ma sœur, L’, Wulschleger, 7/33
 394 | Filmography
117 Ronny, Schünzel & Le Bon, 4/32
118 Rosier de Madame Husson, Le, Bernard-Deschamps, 5/32*
119 Salto mortale, Dupont, 22/31
120 Sergent X, Le, Strijewski, 14/32 #
121 Serments, Fescourt, 43/31
122 Service de nuit, Fescourt, 15/32
123 Soixante-dix-sept rue Chagrin, de Courville, 46/31
124 Sola, Diamant-Berger, 7/31
125 Son Altesse l’Amour, Schmidt & Péguy, 40/31
126 Sous le casque de cuir, de Courville, 17/32
127 Soyons gais, Robison, 16/31
128 Sur la voie du bonheur, Joannon (?)
129 Tout ça ne vaut pas l’amour, or Un vieux garcon, J. Tourneur, 42/31
130 Tout s’arrange, Diamant-Berger, 30/31
131 Tragédie de la mine, La, Pabst, 5/32
132 Train des suicidés, Le, Gréville, 33/31
133 Tu seras duchesse, Guissart, 8/32
134 Tumultes, Siodmak, 17/32*
135 Un chien qui rapporte, Choux, 1/32*
136 Un coup de téléphone, Lacombe, 13/32
137 Un homme en habit, Bossis & Guissart, 27/31
138 Un soir au front, Ryder, 12/31
139 Un soir de rafle, Gallone, 28/31
140 Une histoire entre mille, Rieux, 1936?
141 Une nuit à l’hôtel, Mittler, 18/32
142 Une nuit au Paradis, Lamac & Billon, 19/32
143 Vacances, Boudrioz, 2/32
144 Vagabonde, La, Bussi, 37/31
145 Vagabonds magnifiques, Les, Dini, 34/31
146 Vampyr, Dreyer, 40/32*
147 Verdun, souvenirs d’histoire, Poirier, 45/31
148 Vouloir, Jaeger-Schmidt (?)

1932
1 À moi le jour, à toi la nuit, Berger, 52/32
2 Adhémar Lampiot, Christian-Jaque, (?)
3 Ah! Quelle gare!, Guissart, 36/33
4 Allo, Mademoiselle!, Champreux, 50/32
5 Amour en vitesse, L’, Guter & Heymann, 33/32
6 Amour et la veine, L’, Banks, 52/32
7 Amour . . . amour, Bibal, 39/32
8 Amours de Pergolèse, Les, Brignone, 14/33
9 Âne de Buridan, L’, Ryder, 52/32
 Filmography | 395
55 Enfant du miracle, L’, M. Diamant-Berger, 23/32
56 Enlevez-moi, Perret, 44/32
57 Extase, Machaty, 11/33
58 Fanny, M. Allégret, 44/32*
59 Fantômas, Fejos, 21/32*
60 Faut-il les marier?, Lamac & Billon, 27/32
61 Femme en homme, La, Genina, 11/32
62 Femme nue, La, Paulin, 43/32
63 Fils improvisé, Le, Guissart, 47/32
64 Fleur d’oranger, La, Roussell, 42/32
65 Folle Nuit, La, Bibal & Poirier, 15/32
66 Foule hurle, La, Hawks & Daumery, 41/32
67 Gaietés de l’escadron, Les, Tourneur, 38/32*
68 Gamin de Paris, Le, Roudes, 35/32
69 Gitanes, Baroncelli, 10/33
70 Homme qui ne sait pas dire non, L’, Hilpert, 11/33
71 Hôtel des étudiants, Tourjansky, 39/32
72 IF1 ne répond plus, Hartl, 9/33
73 Il a été perdu une mariée, Joannon, 52/32
74 Je vous aimerai toujours, Camerini, 23/33
75 Jugement de minuit, Le, Esway, 11/33
76 Kiki, Lamac & Billon, 4/33
77 Ma femme . . . homme d’affaires, Vaucorbeil, 36/32
78 Madame ne veut pas d’enfants, Steinhoff & Landau, 15/33
79 Maquillage, or Je t’attendrai, Anton, 19/33
80 Mariage de Mlle Beulemans, Le, Choux, 1932
81 Marie, légende hongroise, or Une histoire d’amour, Fejos, 52/32
82 Martyre de l’obèse, Le, Chenal, 13/33 #
83 Mater dolorosa, Gance, 2/33
84 Maurin des Maures, Hugon, 49/32
85 Mélo, Czinner, 43/32
86 Merveilleuse Journée, La, Mirande & Wyler, 47/32
87 Mirages de Paris, Ozep, 3/33
88 Moi et l’impératrice, Hollaender & Martin, 20/33
89 Mon ami Tim, Forrester, 26/32
90 Mon cœur balance, Guissart, 44/32
91 Mon curé chez les riches, Couzinet, 18/32
92 Monsieur Albert, Anton, 26/32
93 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Lekain & Ravel, 42/32
94 Monsieur, Madame et Bibi, Boyer (& Neufeld), 11/32
95 Moune et son notaire, Bourlon, 34/33
96 Ne sois pas jalouse, Genina, 5/33
97 Nuit du carrefour, La, Renoir, 16/32*
98 Occupe-toi d’Amélie, Viel & Weisbach, 52/32
99 Or des mers, L’, Epstein, 20/33
 396 | Filmography
100 Panurge, Bernheim, 49/32
101 Paris-Soleil, Hémard, 6/33
102 Pas de femmes, or Pas besoin de femmes, Bonnard, 28/32
103 Passionnément, Guissart & Mercanton, 38/32
104 Pax, Elias, 26/33
105 Perle, La, Guissart, 31/32
106 Picador, Le, Jaquelux, 47/32
107 Plaisirs de Paris, Gréville, 2/34
108 Plombier amoureux, Le, Autant-Lara, 52/32
109 Poil de Carotte, Duvivier, 45/32*
110 Pomme d’Amour, Dréville, 51/32
111 Poule, La, Guissart, 21/33
112 Pouponnière, La, Boyer, 6/33
113 Pour vivre heureux, Torre, 51/32
114 Premier mot d’amour, Le, Guarino, 4/34
115 Prenez garde à la peinture, Chomette, 22/32
116 Quatorze juillet, Clair, 3/33*
117 Quick, Siodmak, 35/32
118 Rien que des mensonges, Anton, 32/52
119 Rivaux de la piste, de Poligny, 8/33
120 Rocambole, Rosca, 50/32
121 Roche aux mouettes, La, Monca, 24/33
122 Roger la Honte, Roudès, 11/33
123 Roi bis, Le, Beaudoin, 52/32
124 Roi des palaces, Le, Gallone, 51/32
125 Rouletabille aviateur, Szekely, 2/33
126 Sa meilleure cliente, Colombier, 51/32
127 Si tu veux, Hugon, 38/32
128 Simone est comme ça, Anton, 53/33
129 Soir des rois, Le, Daumery, 2/33
130 Stupéfiants, Gerron & Le Bon, 52/32*
131 Suzanne, Joannon & Rouleau, 44/32
132 Tête d’un homme, La, Duvivier, 6/33
133 Toine, Gaveau, 13/33
134 Topaze, Gasnier, 2/33*
135 Triangle de feu, Le, Gréville, 48/32
136 Trois mousquetaires, Les, Parts 1 and 2 (Milady), Diamant-Berger, 51/32
and 8/33
137 Truc du Brésilien, Le, Cavalcanti, 50/32
138 Un fils d’Amérique, Gallone, 23/32
139 Un homme heureux, Bideau, 8/33
140 Un homme sans nom, Ucicky & Le Bon, 39/32
141 Un peu d’amour, Steinhoff, 47/32
142 Un rêve blond, Martin, 43/32
143 Une étoile disparaît, Villers, 34/32
 Filmography | 397
144 Une faible femme, Vaucorbeil, 12/33
145 Une heure près de toi, Lubitsch, 23/32
146 Une idée folle, Vaucorbeil, 18/33
147 Une jeune fille et un million, Neufeld & Ellis, 41/32
148 Une petite femme dans le train, Anton, 39/32
149 Vainqueur, Le, Heinrich & Martin, 13/32
150 Vignes du Seigneur, Les, Hervil, 38/32
151 Violettes impériales, Roussell, 51/32
152 Voix qui meurt, La, Dini, 8/33
153 Vous serez ma femme, de Poligny, 21/32
154 Voyage de noces, Schmidt & Fried, 2/33

1933
1 Abbé Constantin, L’, Paulin, 43/33*
2 Adieu les beaux jours, Meyer & Beucler, 45/33
3 Agonie des Aigles, L’, Richebé, 48/33 #
4 Ailes brisées, Les, Berthomieu, 25/33
5 Âme de clown, or Teddy et partner, Didier & Noé, 42/33
6 Ami Fritz, L’, Baroncelli, 46/33
7 Amour guide, L’, Taurog & Boyer, 4/34
8 Ange gardien, L’, Choux, 8/34
9 Assommoir, L’, Roudès, 26/33
10 Au bout du monde, Ucicky & Chomette, 5/34
11 Au pays du soleil, Péguy, 5/34 #
12 Aventures du roi Pausole, Les, Granowsky, 51/33*
13 Bach millionnaire, Wulschleger, 52/33
14 Bagnes d’enfants, or Gosses de misère, Gauthier, 31/33
15 Barbier de Séville, Le, Bourlon & Kemm, 52/33
16 Bataille, La, Farkas, 1/34 #
17 Belle de nuit, Valray, 9/34
18 Bleus du ciel, Les, or L’Avion blanc, Decoin, 48/33
19 Bouboule 1er, roi nègre, Mathot, 16/34
20 Caprice de princesse, Hartl & Clouzot, 3/34
21 Casanova, Barberis, 15/34
22 Cent mille francs pour un baiser, Bourlon & Delance, 32/33
23 Ces messieurs de la Santé, Colombier, 12/34*
24 C’était un musicien, Zelnik & Gleize, 17/34
25 Cette nuit-là, Sorkin, 53/33
26 Cette vieille canaille, Litvak, 46/33*
27 Champignol malgré lui, Ellis, 43/33
28 Chant du destin, Le, Legrand, 41/35
29 Charlemagne, Colombier, 52/33
30 Château de rêve, von Bolvary & Clouzot, 45/33
31 Châtelaine du Liban, La, Epstein, J., 6/34
 398 | Filmography
32 Chemin du bonheur, Le, Mamy, 1/34
33 Chourinette, Hugon, 9/34
34 Ciboulette, Autant-Lara, 46/33
35 Colomba, Couzinet, 47/33
36 Coq du régiment, Le, Cammage, 52/33
37 Coralie et Cie, Cavalcanti, 23/34
38 Coucher de la mariée, Le, Lion, 21/33
39 Crainquebille, Baroncelli, 11/34
40 D’amour et d’eau fraîche, Gandera, 49/33
41 Dans les rues, Trivas, 45/33*
42 Dernière Nuit, La, Cassembroot, 16/34
43 Deux Canards, Les, Schmidt, 16/34
44 Deux ‘Monsieur’ de Madame, Les, Jacquin & Pallu, 16/33
45 Du haut en bas, Pabst, 51/33
46 Épervier, L’, L’Herbier, 47/33
47 Étienne, Tarride, 51/33
48 Étoile de Valencia, L’, de Poligny, 25/33
49 Ève cherche un père, Bonnard, 53/33
50 Fakir du Grand Hôtel, Le, Billon, 1/34
51 Faut réparer Sophie, Ryder, 49/33
52 Femme idéale, La, Berthomieu, 4/34
53 Femme invisible, La, Lacombe, 23/33
54 Feu Toupinel, Capellani, 10/34
55 Fille du régiment, La, Lamac & Billon, 24/33
56 Fusée, La, Natanson, 19/33
57 Gardez le sourire, Fejos, 14/34
58 Garnison amoureuse, La, Vaucorbeil, 12/34 #
59 Gendre de Monsieur Poirier, Le, Pagnol, 51/33*
60 Georges et Georgette, Schünzel & Le Bon, 5/34
61 Grand Bluff, Le, Champreux, 36/33
62 Grand Jeu, Le, Feyder, 17/34*
63 Guerre des valses, La, Berger & Ploquin, 50/33
64 Héritier du Bal Tabarin, L’, Kemm, 43/33
65 Homme à l’Hispano, L’, J. Epstein, 13/33*
66 Idylle au Caire, Schünzel & Heymann, 27/33
67 Il était une fois, Perret, 41/33
68 Illustre Maurin, L’, Hugon, 51/33
69 Incognito, Gerron, 11/34
70 Iris perdue et retrouvée, Gasnier, 52/33
71 Je te confie ma femme, Guissart, 16/33
72 Jocelyn, Guerlais, 35/33
73 Judex 34, Champreux, 18/34
74 Knock, ou le triomphe de la médecine, Goupillières & Jouvet, 45/33
75 Léopold le bien aimé, Brun, 7/34
76 Liebelei, or Une histoire d’amour, Ophüls, 11/34 (in Fr)*
 Filmography | 399
77 Madame Bovary, Renoir, 2/34
78 Mademoiselle Josette ma femme, Berthomieu, 15/33
79 Maison du mystère, La, Roudès, 23/34
80 Maître de forges, Le, Rivers & Gance, 49/33*
81 Mannequins, Hervil, 41/33
82 Margoton du bataillon, La, Darmont, 24/33
83 Mari garçon, Le, Cavalcanti, 18/33
84 Mariage à responsabilité limitée, Limur, 3/34
85 Masque qui tombe, Le, Bonnard, 29/34
86 Maternelle, La, Benoit-Lévy & M. Epstein, 36/33 #
87 Matricule 33, Anton, 40/33
88 Merveilleuse Tragédie de Lourdes, La, Fabert, 43/33
89 Mille et deuxième nuit, La, Volkoff, 21/33
90 Miquette et sa mère, Diamant-Berger & Maurice & Rollan, 12/34
91 Mireille, Gaveau, 6/34 #
92 Misérables, Les, Parts 1, 2, and 3, Bernard, 6/34, 8/34 and 8/34*
93 Miss Helyett, Bourlon & Kemm, 35/33
94 Mon chapeau, Guissart, 24/33
95 N’épouse pas ta fille, Rozier, 7/34
96 Nu comme un ver, Mathot, 19/33
97 On a volé un homme, Ophüls, 11/34
98 Ordonnance, L’, Tourjansky, 35/33
99 Paprika, Limur, 49/33
100 Paris-Deauville, Delannoy, 15/34
101 Pas besoin d’argent, Paulin, 21/33
102 Pêcheur d’Islande, Guerlais, 16/34
103 Père prématuré, Le, Guissart, 40/33
104 Petit Roi, Le, Duvivier, 48/33
105 Plein aux as, Houssin, 52/33
106 Pour être aimé, J. Tourneur, 44/33
107 Primerose, Guissart, 8/34
108 Prince des Six Jours, Vernay, 11/34
109 Professeur Cupidon, Baudoin & Chemel, 19/33
110 Quelqu’un a tué, Forrester, 2/34
111 Requins du pétrole, Les, Katscher & Decoin, 29/33
112 Robe rouge, La, Marguenat, 48/33
113 Rothchild, Gastyne, 18/34
114 Rue sans nom, La, Chenal, 5/34*
115 Sexe faible, Le, Siodmak, 44/33
116 Simoun, Le, Gémier, 53/33
117 Six cent mille francs par mois, Joannon, 36/33
118 Son altesse impériale, Gerron, 48/33
119 Son autre amour, Machard & Rémy, 8/34
120 Surprises du divorce, Les, Kemm, 12/33
121 Surprises du sleeping, Les, Anton, 50/33
 400 | Filmography
122 Tambour battant, Robison & Beucler, 9/34
123 Testament du docteur Mabuse, Le, Lang & Sti, 17/33
124 Théodore et Cie, Colombier, 15/33*
125 Tire au flanc, Wulschleger, 40/33
126 Toi que j’adore, von Bolvary & Valentin, 10/34
127 Toto, J. Tourneur, 36/33
128 Touchons du bois, Champreux, 14/33
129 Tout pour l’amour, May & Clouzot, 38/33
130 Tout pour rien, Pujol, 38/33
131 Trois balles dans la peau, Lion, 24/34
132 Trois hommes en habit, Bonnard, 27/33
133 Trois pour cent, Dréville, 5/34
134 Tunnel, Le, Bernhardt, 51/33* (in Eng)
135 Un certain M. Grant, Lamprecht & Le Bon, 43/33
136 Un coup de mistral, Roudès, 6/34
137 Un de la montagne, Le Henaff & Poligny, 26/35
138 Un fil à la patte, Anton, 12/34
139 Un jour viendra, Lamprecht & Veber, 13/34
140 Un soir de réveillon, Anton, 42/33 #
141 Une femme au volant, Gerron, 38/33
142 Une fois dans la vie, Vaucorbeil, 6/34
143 Une vie perdue, Rouleau & Esway, 37/33
144 Vierge du rocher, La, or Le Drame de Lourdes, Pallu, 32/34
145 Vingt-huit jours de Clairette, Les, Hugon, 13/33
146 Vive la compagnie, Moulins, 11/34
147 Voie sans disque, La, Poirier, 20/33
148 Voix du métale, La, or L’Appel de la nuit, Marca-Rosa, 25/34
149 Voix sans visage, La, Mittler, 48/33
150 Volga en flammes, Tourjansky, 15/34

1934
1 Adémaï aviateur, Tarride, 41/34
2 Affaire Coquelet, L’, Gourguet, 42/35
3 Amok, Ozep, 37/34
4 Amour en cage, L’, Lamac & de Limur, 26/34
5 Angèle, Pagnol, 43/34*
6 Antonia, romance hongroise, Boyer & Neufeld, 2/35
7 Aristo, L’, Berthomieu, 36/34
8 Arlette et ses papas, Roussell, 37/34
9 Atalante, L’, or Le Chaland qui passe, Vigo, 37/34*
10 Auberge du Petit Dragon, L’, Limur, 50/34
11 Aux portes de Paris, Baroncelli & Barrois, 12/35
12 Aventurier, L’, L’Herbier, 52/34 #
13 Banque Némo, La, Viel, 30/34
 Filmography | 401
14 Bibi la Purée, Joannon, 8/35
15 Billet de mille, Le, Didier, 2/35
16 Bleus de la marine, Les, Cammage, 39/34
17 Bossu, Le, Sti, 52/34*
18 Brevet 95–75, Lequim, 34/34
19 Calvaire de Cimiez, Le, Baroncelli & Dallière, 18/34
20 Caravane, Charell, 43/34
21 Cartouche, Daroy, 43/34
22 Caserne en folie, La, Cammage, 13/35
23 Cavalier Lafleur, Le, Ducis, 50/34 #
24 Cessez le feu, or Amis comme autrefois, Baroncelli, 22/34
25 Chanson de l’adieu, La, von Bolvary & Valentin, 44/34
26 Chansons de Paris, Baroncelli, 24/34
27 Chéri de sa concierge, Le, Guarino, 34/34
28 Cinquième Empreinte, La, Anton, 27/34
29 Compartiment de dames seules, Christian-Jaque, 5/35
30 Comte Obligado, Le, Mathot, 5/35*
31 Crise est finie, La, Siodmak, 40/34*
32 Dactylo se marie, May, 20/34
33 Dame aux camélias, La, Gance & Rivers, 44/34
34 Dédé, Guissart, 51/34*
35 Dernier Milliardaire, Le, Clair, 41/34*
36 Dernière Heure, Bernard-Derosne, 39/34
37 École des contribuables, L’, Guissart, 44/34
38 Enfant du carnaval, L’, Volkoff, 17/34
39 Famille nombreuse, Hugon, 43/34
40 Fanatisme, Lekain & Ravel, 17/34
41 Fédora, Gasnier, 12/34
42 Filles de la concierge, Les, or Mes filles, J. Tourneur, 22/34
43 Flambée, La, Marguenat, 46/34
44 Flofloche, Roudès, 30/34
45 Greluchon délicat, Le, Choux, 39/34
46 Homme à l’oreille cassée, L’, Boudrioz, 13/35
47 Hôtel du Libre Échange, L’, M. Allégret, 45/34*
48 Itto, Benoît-Lévy & M. Epstein, 12/35 #
49 J’ai une idée, Richebé, 50/34
50 Jeanne, Marret, 48/34
51 Jeune fille d’une nuit, La, Schünzel & le Bon, 20/34
52 Jeunesse, Lacombe, 21/34*
53 Justin de Marseille, Tourneur, 14/35*
54 Lac aux Dames, M. Allégret, 20/34*
55 Liliom, Lang, 17/34*
56 Maison dans la dune, La, Lampin, 31/34
57 Maître Bolbec et son mari, Natanson, 48/34
58 Mam’zelle Spahi, Vaucorbeil, 44/34
 402 | Filmography
59 Marche nuptiale, La, Bonnard, 3/35
60 Maria Chapdelaine, Duvivier, 50/34
61 Maternité, Choux, 16/35 #
62 Mauvaise Graine, Wilder, 27/34
63 Minuit, place Pigalle, Richebé, 40/34
64 Miroir aux alouettes, Le, Steinhoff & Le Bon, 14/35
65 Mon cœur t’appelle, Gallone, 37/34
66 Monde où l’on s’ennuie, Le, Marguenat, 3/35
67 N’aimer que toi, Berthomieu, 43/34
68 Nous ne sommes plus des enfants, Genina, 15/35
69 Nuit de mai, Ucicky & Chomette, 41/34
70 Nuits moscovites, Les, Granowsky, 46/34*
71 On a trouvé une femme nue, Joannon, 19/34 #
72 Oncle de Pékin, L’, Darmont, 21/34
73 Or dans la rue, L’, Bernhardt, 52/34
74 Or, L’, Poligny, 22/34
75 Paquebot Tenacity, Le, Duvivier, 26/34
76 Pension Mimosas, Feyder, 3/35*
77 Père Lampion, Le, Christian-Jaque, 51/34
78 Petit Jacques, Le, Roudès, 41/34
79 Poliche, Gance, 30/34
80 Porteuse de pain, La, Sti, 12/34
81 Prince de minuit, Guissart, 44/34 #
82 Prince Jean, Le, Marguenat, 51/34
83 Princesse Czardas, Jacoby & Beucler, 37/34
84 Quadrille d’amour, Eichberg & Fried, 4/35
85 Rapt, Kirsanoff, 1/35
86 Reine de Biarritz, La, Toulout, 49/34
87 Remous, Gréville, 20/35
88 Rêve éternel, Fanck & Chomette, (13/39?)
89 Roi de Camargue, Baroncelli, 4/35
90 Roi des Champs-Élysées, Le, Nosseck, 2/35 #
91 Rosaire, Le, Lekain & Ravel, 15/34
92 Sans famille, M. Allégret, 52/34*
93 Sapho, Perret, 14/34
94 Scandale, Le, L’Herbier, 26/34
95 Secret des Woronzeff, Le, Robison & Beucler, 5/35
96 Secret d’une nuit, Le, Gandera, 41/34
97 Si j’étais le patron, Pottier, 44/34*
98 Sidonie Panache, Parts 1 and 2 (Chabichou), Wulschleger, 42/34 and 49/34*
99 Tartarin de Tarascon, Bernard, 45/34
100 Toboggan, Decoin, 13/34 #
101 Train de 8h 47, Le, Wulschleger, 21/34
102 Trois cents à l’heure, Rozier, 9/35
103 Trois de la marine, Barrois, 39/34
 Filmography | 403
104 Turandot, princesse de Chine, Lamprecht & Veber, 7/35
105 Un homme en or, Dréville, 45/34*
106 Un tour de cochon, Tzipine, 26/34
107 Un train dans la nuit, Hervil, 39/34
108 Une femme chipée, Colombier, 41/34
109 Une nuit de folie, Cammage, 17/34 #
110 Vers l’abîme, Steinhoff & Veber, 35/34
111 Veuve joyeuse, La, Lubitsch, 4/35
112 Votre sourire, Banks & Caron, 49/34
113 Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon, Le, Tarride, 19/34
114 Voyage imprévu, Le, Limur, 52/34
115 Zouzou, M. Allégret, 51/34*

1935
1 Adémaï au Moyen-Age, Marguenat, 43/35*
2 Amants et voleurs, Bernard, 46/35
3 Arènes joyeuses, Anton, 51/35
4 Aux jardins de Murcie, Gras & Joly, 48/36
5 Baccara, Mirande & Moguy, 51/35*
6 Bandera, La, Duvivier, 38/35*
7 Barcarolle, Lamprecht & Lebon, 13/35
8 Baron Tzigane, Le, Hartl & Chomette, 27/35
9 Beaux jours, Les, M. Allégret, 45/35
10 Bébé de l’escadron, Le, Sti, 48/35
11 Bichon, Rivers, 10/36
12 Bonheur, Le, L’Herbier, 6/35*
13 Bonne Chance, Guitry & Rivers, 38/35*
14 Bourrachon, Guissart, 47/35
15 Bourrasque, Billon, 25/35 #
16 Bout de chou, Wulschleger, 34/35
17 Cavalerie légère, Hochbaum & Vitrac, 50/35
18 Chant de l’amour, Le, Roudès, 27/35
19 Chemineau, Le, Rivers, 46/35 #
20 Cigalon, Pagnol, 49/35*
21 Clown Bux, Le, Natanson, 20/35
22 Contrôleur des wagons-lits, Le, Eichberg, 7/35
23 Coqueluche de ces dames, La, Rosca (?)
24 Coup de trois, Le, Limur, 16/36
25 Coup de vent, Dréville, 15/36
26 Couturier de mon cœur, or Le Roi de la couture, Cesse & Jayet, 45/35
27 Crime de Monsieur Lange, Le, Renoir, 4/36*
28 Crime et châtiment, Chenal, 20/35*
29 Debout là-dedans, Wulschleger, 51/35
30 Dernière Valse, La, Mittler, 34/35
 404 | Filmography
31 Deuxième Bureau, Billon, 38/35
32 Diable en bouteille, Le, Hilpert & Steinbicker, 14/35
33 Dieux s’amusent, Les, Schünzel & Valentin, 37/35
34 Divine, Ophüls, 46/35 #
35 Domino vert, Le, Selpin & Decoin, 2/36
36 Dora Nelson, Guissart, 45/35
37 École des cocottes, L’, Colombier, 39/35
38 École des vierges, L’, Weill, 44/35
39 Enfant du Danube, L’, Derlé & Alexandre, 5/36
40 Époux célibataires, Les, Boyer, 29/35
41 Époux scandaleux, Les, Lacombe, 28/35
42 Équipage, L’, Litvak, 43/35*
43 Escale, Valray, 21/35*
44 Famille Pont-Biquet, La, Christian-Jaque, 38/35
45 Fanfare d’amour, Pottier, 46/35
46 Ferdinand le noceur, Sti, 8/35
47 Fille de Madame Agnot, La, Bernard-Derosne, 41/35
48 Folies-Bergère, Achard, 19/35
49 Gaietés de la finance, Les, Forrester, 6/36
50 Gangster malgré lui, Hugon, 18/35
51 Gaspard de Besse, Hugon, 51/35
52 Golem, Le, Duvivier, 6/36*
53 Golgotha, Duvivier, 15/35*
54 Gondole aux chimères, La, Genina, 15/36
55 Haut comme trois pommes, Ramelot & Vajda, 10/36
56 Heureuse Aventure, L’, Georgesco, 21/35
57 Impossible Aveu, L’, Guarino, 22/35
58 J’aime toutes les femmes, Lamac, 43/35
59 Jérome Perreau, Gance, 47/35
60 Jeunes Filles à marier, Vallée, 27/35
61 Jeunesse d’abord, Stelli, 22/36
62 Jim la Houlette, Berthomieu, 44/35*
63 Joli monde, Le Henaff, 31/36
64 Jonny, haute-couture, Poligny, 15/35
65 J’te dis qu’elle t’a fait de l’œil, Forrester, 36/35
66 Juanita, Caron, 39/35
67 Kermesse héroïque, La, Feyder, 49/35*
68 Kœnigsmark, Tourneur, 48/35
69 Lucrèce Borgia, Gance, 51/35 #
70 Lune de miel, Ducis, 50/35
71 Mademoiselle Mozart, Noé, 4/36
72 Marchand d’amour, Gréville, 25/35
73 Marie des Angoisses, Bernheim, 30/35
74 Mariée du régiment, La, Cammage, 45/35
75 Marmaille, La, Bernard-Deschamps, 52/35
 Filmography | 405
76 Marraine de Charley, La, Colombier, 3/36
77 Martha, Anton, 3/36
78 Mascotte, La, Mathot, 30/35
79 Merlusse, Pagnol, 49/35 #
80 Michel Strogoff, Baroncelli, 10/36
81 Moïse et Salomon parfumeurs, Hugon, 50/35
82 Monsieur Sans-Gêne, Anton, 12/35
83 Mystère Imberger, Le, Sévérac, 15/35
84 Mystères de Paris, Les, Gandera, 38/35
85 Odette, Houssin (& Zambon), 25/35
86 Paris, mes amours, Blondeau, 23/35
87 Paris-Camargue, Forrestier, 35/35
88 Parlez-moi d’amour, Guissart, 40/35
89 Pasteur, Guitry & Rivers, 38/35 #
90 Petite Sauvage, La, Limur, 1/36
91 Pluie d’or, Rozier (9/41?)
92 Princesse Tam-Tam, Gréville, 43/35*
93 Quelle drôle de gosse!, Joannon, 20/35*
94 Retour au paradis, Poligny, 46/35
95 Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre, Le, Gance, 8/36
96 Rose, Rouleau, 8/36
97 Roses noires, Boyer (& Martin), 7/36
98 Rosière des halles, La, Limur, 41/35*
99 Route heureuse, La, Lacombe, 7/36
100 Route impériale, La, L’Herbier, 41/35
101 Sacré Léonce, Christian-Jaque, 3/36
102 Sœurs Hortensias, Les, Guissart, 52/35
103 Son Excellence Antonin, Tavano, 23/35
104 Sonnette d’alarme, La, Christian-Jaque, 23/35
105 Sous la griffe, Christian-Jaque, 46/35
106 Sous la Terreur, Forzano & Cohen, 4/36
107 Stradivarius, von Bolvary & Valentin, 42/35
108 Tampon du colonel, Le, Pallu & Lerel (?)
109 Tendre Ennemie, La, Ophüls, 43/36*
110 Toni, Renoir, 8/35*
111 Touche-à-Tout, Dréville, 44/35
112 Tovaritch, Deval, Tarride, & Trivas, 18/35
113 Train d’amour, Le, Weill, 44/35
114 Train de plaisir, Joannon, 10/36
115 Un homme de trop à bord, Lamprecht & Le Bon, 49/35
116 Un oiseau rare, Pottier, 22/35 #
117 Un soir de bombe, Cammage, 49/35*
118 Une fille à papa, Guissart, 16/36 #
119 Une nuit de noces, Monca & Kéroul, 34/35
120 Valse royale, Grémillon, 1/36
 406 | Filmography
121 Variétés, Farkas, 40/35
122 Veille d’armes, L’Herbier, 50/35
123 Vertige, Le, Schiller, 8/35
124 Vie parisienne, La, Siodmak, 6/36
125 Vogue mon cœur, Daroy, 48/35
126 Voyage d’agrément, Christian-Jaque, 28/35
127 Yeux noirs, Les, Tourjansky, 35/35

1936
1 À minuit le 7, Canonge, 3/37
2 À nous deux, Madame la vie, Mirande, 13/37
3 Amant de Madame Vidal, L’, Berthomieu, 40/36
4 Amants terribles, Les, M. Allégret, 34/36
5 Ange du foyer, L’, Mathot, 9/37
6 Anne-Marie, Bernard, 10/36
7 Appel du silence, L’, Poirier, 18/36*
8 Argent, L’, Billon, 21/36
9 Assaut, L’, Ducis, 52/36
10 Au service du Tsar, Billon, 46/36
11 Au son des guitares, Ducis, 43/36*
12 Avec le sourire, Tourneur, 49/36 #
13 Aventure à Paris, M. Allégret, 48/36*
14 Bach détective, Pujol, 43/36
15 Bas-Fonds, Les, Renoir, 50/36*
16 Bateliers de la Volga, Les, Strijewsky, 6/36
17 Belle Équipe, La, Duvivier, 38/36*
18 Bête aux sept manteaux, La, Limur, 9/37
19 Blanchette, Caron, 11/37
20 Brigade en jupons, La, Limur, 28/36
21 César, Pagnol, 46/36*
22 Chanson du souvenir, La, Poligny, 21/37
23 Chemin de Rio, Le, or Cargaison blanche, Siodmak, 3/37
24 Club de femmes, Deval, 21/36
25 Cœur de gueux, J. Epstein, 15/37
26 Cœur dispose, Le, Lacombe, 19/36
27 Coupable, Le, Bernard, 3/37*
28 Courrier-Sud, Billon, 4/37
29 Course à la vertu, La, Gleize, (?)
30 Dame de Vittel, La, Goupillières, 6/37
31 Demi-Vierges, Les, Caron, 50/36
32 Deux Favoris, Les, Jacoby & Hornez, 19/36
33 Deux Gamines, Les, Champreux & Hervil, 15/36
34 Deux Gosses, Les, Rivers, 37/36
35 Disque 413, Le, Pottier, 30/36
 Filmography | 407
36 Donogoo, Schünzel & Chomette, 28/36
37 École des journalistes, L’, Christian-Jaque, 22/36
38 Empreinte rouge, L’, Canonge, 26/37(?)
39 Enfants de Paris, Roudès, 50/40(?)
40 Esclave blanc, L’, Paulin, 40/36
41 Faiseur, Le, Hugon, 32/36
42 Faisons un rêve, Guitry, 1/37*
43 Femmes, Gardan & Bernard-Roland, (?)
44 Flamme, La, Berthomieu, 19/36
45 Gaietés du palace, Les, Kapps, 50/36
46 Gais Lurons, Les, Martin & Natanson, 41/36
47 Garçonne, La, Limur, 9/36
48 Gigolette, Noé, 8/37
49 Grand Refrain, Le, Mirande, 38/36
50 Grands, Les, Bibal & Gandera, 40/36
51 Guerre des gosses, La, Daroy & Deslaw, 43/36
52 Hélène, Benoît-Lévy & M. Epstein, 42/36
53 Homme à abattre, L’, Mathot, 9/37
54 Homme de nulle part, L’, Chenal, 8/37*
55 Homme du jour, L’, Duvivier, 9/37 #
56 Homme sans cœur, L’, Joannon, 10/37
57 Hommes nouveaux, Les, L’Herbier, 51/36 #
58 Île des Veuves, L’, Heymann, 18/37
59 Inspecteur Grey, Canonge, 21/36
60 Jacques et Jacotte, Péguy, 28/36
61 J’arrose mes galons, Darmont & Pujol, 52/36
62 Jenny, Carné, 38/36*
63 Jeunes Filles de Paris, or La Vie n’est pas un roman, Vermorel, 6/37
64 Josette, Christian-Jaque, 4/37 #
65 Joueuse d’orgue, La, Roudès, 46/36
66 Jumeaux de Brighton, Les, Heymann, 44/36
67 Loupiote, La, Bouquet & Kemm, 4/37
68 Loups entre eux, Les, Mathot, 35/36
69 Mademoiselle Docteur or Salonique, nid d’espions, Pabst, 16/37*
70 Madone de l’Atlantique, La, Weill, (?)
71 Maison d’en face, La, Christian-Jaque, 5/37
72 Mari rêvé, Le, Capellani, 2/37
73 Maria de la nuit, or Nuit d’Espagne, Rozier, 27/36
74 Mariages de Mlle Lévy, Les, Hugon, 42/36
75 Marinella, Caron, 13/36*
76 Maris de ma femme, Les, Cammage, 10/37 (?)
77 Mayerling, Litvak, 5/36*
78 Ménilmontant, Guissart, 4/37*
79 Mes tantes et moi, Noé, 6/37
 408 | Filmography
80 Messieurs les Ronds de Cuir, Mirande, 6/37*
81 Mioche, Le, Moguy, 45/36
82 Mister Flow, Siodmak, 44/36
83 Mon père avait raison, Guitry, 48/36*
84 Monsieur Personne, Christian-Jaque, 49/36
85 Mort en fuite, Le, Berthomieu, 47/36*
86 Moutonnet, Sti, 28/36
87 Mutinés de l’Elseneur, Les, Chenal, 9/36
88 Mystérieuse Lady, La, Péguy, (?)
89 Nitchevo, Baroncelli, 51/36
90 Notre-Dame d’Amour, Caron, 46/36
91 Nouveau Testament, Le, Guitry & Ryder, 7/36*
92 Œil de Lynx, détective, Ducis, 35/36
93 On ne roule pas Antoinette, Madeux, 21/36
94 Pantins d’amour, Kapps, 17/37(?)
95 Paris, Choux, 3/37*
96 Passé à vendre, Pujol, 10/37
97 Pattes de mouche, Les, Grémillon, 21/36
98 Peau d’un autre, La, Pujol, 3/37
99 Pepe le Moko, Duvivier, 5/37*
100 Petite Dame du wagon-lit, La, Cammage, 19/36 #
101 Petites Alliées, Les, Dréville, 13/36
102 Peur, La, or Vertige d’un soir, Tourjansky, 15/36
103 Pocharde, La, or Le Crime de la Pocharde, Bouquet & Kemm, 9/37
104 Port-Arthur, Farkas, 50/36 #
105 Porte du large, La, L’Herbier, 43/36
106 Prends la route, Boyer, 6/37 #
107 Prête-moi ta femme, Cammage, 39/36
108 Puits en flammes, Tourjansky, 12/37
109 Quand minuit sonnera, Joannon, 48/36
110 Reine des resquilleuses, La, Gastyne & Glass, 11/37
111 Réprouvés, Les, Sévérac, 8/37 #
112 Rigolboche, Christian-Jaque, 40/36*
113 Roi, Le, Colombier, 44/36 #
114 Roman d’un spahi, Le, Bernheim, 13/36 #
115 Roman d’un tricheur, Le, Guitry, 38/36*
116 Romarin, Hugon, 1/37
117 Rose effeuillée, La, or La Vie de Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, Pallu, 25/37
118 Samson, Tourneur, 10/36
119 Secret de l’émeraude, Le, Canonge, 33/36
120 Secret de Polichinelle, Le, Berthomieu, 6/36
121 Sept hommes . . . une femme, Mirande, 35/36*
122 Souris bleue, La, Ducis, 24/36
123 Sous les yeux d’Occident, M. Allégret, 12/36*
 Filmography | 409
124 Symphonie des brigands, La, Feher, 21/37
125 Tarass Boulba, Granowsky, 11/36
126 Tentation, La, Caron, 34/36
127 Terre qui meurt, La, Vallée, 17/36*
128 Toi c’est moi, Guissart, 49/36 #
129 Topaze, Pagnol, 22/36 #
130 Tout va très bien Madame la Marquise, Wulschleger, 48/36 #
131 Trois dans un moulin, Weill, (?)
132 Trois jours de perm’, Kéroul & Monca, (?)
133 Trois . . . six . . . neuf, Rouleau, 3/37
134 Un de la légion, Christian-Jaque, 38/36 #
135 Un grand amour de Beethoven, Gance, 3/37*
136 Un mauvais garçon, Boyer, 50/36*
137 Une femme qui se partage, Cammage, 8/37
138 Une gueule en or, Colombier, 24/36
139 Une poule sur un mur, Gleize, 21/36
140 Vagabond bien aimé, Le, Bernhardt, 19/36
141 Valse éternelle, Neufeld, 14/36
142 Vingt-sept rue de la Paix, Pottier, 46/36
143 Vous n’avez rien à déclarer?, Joannon, 9/37 #

1937
1 À Venise une nuit, Christian-Jaque, 46/37
2 Abus de confiance, Decoin, 49/37*
3 Affaire du courrier de Lyon, L’, Autant-Lara & Lehmann, 46/37*
4 Affaire Lafarge, L’, Chenal, 10/38
5 Alexis, gentleman-chauffeur, Vaucorbeil, 29/38
6 Alibi, L’, Chenal, 52/37*
7 Aloha, le chant des îles, Mathot, 51/37
8 Amour veille, L’, Roussell, 15/37
9 Anges noirs, Les, Rozier, 44/37
10 Appel de la vie, L’, Neveux, 21/37
11 Arsène Lupin, détective, Diamant-Berger, 18/37*
12 Au soleil de Marseille, Ducis, 22/38 #
13 Balthazar, Colombier, 5/38
14 Bataille silencieuse, La, Billon, 37/37
15 Belle de Montparnasse, La, Cammage, 24/37 #
16 Boissière, Rivers, 22/37
17 Boulot aviateur, Canonge, 26/37
18 Cantinier de la coloniale, La, Wulschleger, 28/37
19 Ces dames aux chapeaux verts, Cloche, 52/37
20 Chanteur de minuit, Le, Joannon, 50/37
21 Chaste Suzanne, La, Berthomieu, 22/37
22 Chéri-Bibi, Mathot, 4/38*
 410 | Filmography
23 Chipée, Goupillières, 6/38
24 Choc en retour, Kéroul & Monca, 15/37 #
25 Cinderella, Caron, 27/37
26 Citadelle du silence, La, L’Herbier, 39/37
27 Claudine à l’école, Poligny, 51/37 #
28 Club des aristocrates, Le, Colombier, 36/37
29 Concierge revient de suite, Le, Rives, (?)
30 Dame de Malacca, La, M Allégret, 40/37*
31 Dame de pique, La, Ozep, 27/37
32 Danseuse rouge, La, Paulin, 21/37
33 Dégourdis de la 11e, Les, Christian-Jaque, 11/37*
34 Désiré, Guitry, 49/37*
35 Deux combinards, Les, Houssin, 8/38
36 Double Crime sur la ligne Maginot, Gandera, 39/37 #
37 Drôle de drame, Carné, 43/37*
38 Escadrille de la chance, L’, Vaucorbeil, 26/38
39 Êtes-vous jalouse?, Chomette, 2/38
40 Étrange M. Victor, L’, Grémillon, 18/38*
41 Euskadi, Le Henaff, 24/37
42 Fauteuil 47, Le, Rivers, 39/37*
43 Femme du bout du monde, La, J. Epstein, 3/38
44 Fessée, La, Caron, 46/37
45 Feu!, Baroncelli, 43/37
46 Fille de la Madelon, La, Mugeli & Pallu, 42/37
47 Filles du Rhône, Les, Paulin, 16/38
48 Forfaiture, L’Herbier, 49/37*
49 Franco de port, Kirsanoff, 20/37
50 François Ier, Christian-Jaque, 7/37 #
51 Fraudeur, Le, or Ceux de la douane, Simons, (?)
52 Gangsters de l’exposition, Les, de Meyst, 19/39(?)
53 Gens du voyage, Les, Feyder, 9/38*
54 Grande Illusion, La, Renoir, 23/37*
55 Gribouille, M. Allégret, 37/37*
56 Griffe du hasard, La, Pujol, 13/37
57 Gueule d’amour, Grémillon, 38/37*
58 Habit vert, L’, Richebé, 45/37*
59 Hercule, Esway, 9/38 #
60 Hommes de proie, Les, Rozier, 27/37
61 Hommes sans nom, Les, Vallée, 49/37
62 Ignace, Colombier, 18/37
63 Innocent, L’, Cammage, 6/38
64 J’accuse, Gance, 3/38
65 Liberté, Kemm, 15/38
66 Ma petite marquise, Péguy, 49/37
67 Mademoiselle ma mère, Decoin, 32/37*
 Filmography | 411
68 Maman Colibri, Dréville, 49/37
69 Marseillaise, La, Renoir, 6/38*
70 Marthe Richard au service de la France, Bernard, 16/37*
71 Mensonge de Nina Petrovna, Le, Tourjansky, 45/37*
72 Messager, Le, Rouleau, 36/37 #
73 Miarka, la fille à l’ourse, Choux, 52/37
74 Mirages, Ryder, 4/38
75 Mollenard, Siodmak, 4/38*
76 Mon député et sa femme, Cammage, 31/37
77 Monsieur Bégonia, Hugon, 52/37
78 Monsieur Breloque a disparu, Péguy, 13/38 #
79 Mort du cygne, La, Benoît-Lévy & M. Epstein, 48/37
80 Naples au baiser de feu, Genina, 51/37*
81 Neuf de trèfle, Mayrargue, 52/37
82 Nostalgie, Tourjansky, 9/38
83 Nuits blanches de Saint-Pétersbourg, Les, Dréville, 11/38
84 Nuits de feu, L’Herbier, 16/37
85 Nuits de prince, Strijewski, 4/38
86 Occident, L’, Fescourt, 7/38
87 Orage, M. Allégret, 2/38*
88 Passeurs d’hommes, Jayet, 49/37
89 Perles de la couronne, Les, Christian-Jaque & Guitry, 20/37*
90 Pirates du rail, Les, Christian-Jaque, 3/38 #
91 Plus Beau Gosse de France, Le, or Le Mari de la reine, Pujol, 43/37
92 Plus Belle Fille du monde, La, Kirsanov, 31/38
93 Police mondaine, Bernheim & Chamborant, 15/37
94 Porte-Veine, Le, Berthomieu, 43/37
95 Prison sans barreaux, Moguy, 7/38*
96 Puritain, Le, Musso, 2/38 #
97 Quadrille, Guitry, 4/38 #
98 Quatre heures du matin, Rivers, 4/38
99 Ramuntcho, Barberis, 8/38
100 Regain, Pagnol, 44/37*
101 Rendez-vous Champs-Élysées, Houssin, 17/37 #
102 Rois du sport, Les, Colombier, 38/37 #
103 Sarati le terrible, Hugon, 31/37*
104 Schpountz, Le, Pagnol, 15/38*
105 Secrets de la Mer Rouge, Les, Pottier, 36/37
106 Si tu reviens, Daniel-Norman, 8/38
107 Sœurs d’armes, Poirier, 45/37
108 Tamara la complaisante, Gandera, 7/38
109 Temps des cerises, Le, Le Chanois, (?)*
110 Tigre du Bengale, Le, Parts 1 and 2 (Le Tombeau hindou), Eichberg, 11/38
and 12/38
111 Titin des Martigues, Pujol, 6/38#
 412 | Filmography
112 Tour de Nesle, La, Roudès, 31/37
113 Tragédie impériale, La, L’Herbier, 13/38*
114 Treizième Enquête de Grey, La, Maudru, 26/37
115 Troïka sur la piste blanche, Dréville, 25/37
116 Trois artilleurs au pensionnat, Pujol, 11/37
117 Un carnet de bal, Duvivier, 37/37*
118 Un déjeuner de soleil, Cravenne, 50/37
119 Un meurtre a été commis, Orval, 15/38
120 Un scandale aux galeries, Sti, 46/37
121 Un soir à Marseille, Canonge, 12/38
122 Une femme sans importance, Choux, 10/37
123 Voleur de femmes, Le, Gance, 10/38
124 Yoshiwara, Ophüls, 33/37*

1938
1 Accord final, Rosenkranz & Sierck, 6/39
2 Accroche-Cœur, L’, Caron, 35/38*
3 Adrienne Lecouvreur, L’Herbier, 39/38
4 Alerte en Méditerranée, Joannon, 35/38*
5 Altitude 3200, Benoît-Lévy & M. Epstein, 29/38
6 Ange que j’ai vendu, L’, Bernheim, 23/38
7 Avion de minuit, L’, Kirsanoff, 31/38
8 Bar du sud, Fescourt, 12/38
9 Barnabé, Esway, 19/38
10 Belle Étoile, Baroncelli, 47/38
11 Belle Revanche, La, Mesnier, 19/39
12 Bête humaine, La, Renoir, 51/38*
13 Ça, c’est du sport, Pujol, 34/38 #
14 Café de Paris, Lacombe, Mirande, & Vernay, 38/38*
15 Capitaine Benoît, Le, Canonge, 52/38
16 Carrefour, Bernhardt, 43/38*
17 Ceux de demain, or L’Enfant de la troupe, Millar & Pallu, (34/38)
18 Chaleur du sein, La, Boyer, 44/38*
19 Champions de France, Rozier, 51/38
20 Cité des lumières, La, Limur, 49/38
21 Clodoche, or Sous les ponts de Paris, Lamy & Orval, 29/38
22 Cœur ébloui, Le, Vallée, 22/38
23 Conflit, Moguy, 51/38
24 Deux de la réserve, Pujol, 15/39
25 Disparus de Saint-Agil, Les, Christian-Jaque, 15/38*
26 Dompteur, Le, Colombier, 50/38
27 Drame de Shanghaï, Le, Pabst, 43/38*
28 Durand bijoutier, Stelli, 27/38
29 Éducation de prince, Esway, 40/38*
 Filmography | 413
30 Entraîneuse, L’, Valentin, 2/40 #
31 Entrée des artistes, M. Allégret, 40/38*
32 Ernest le rebelle, Christian-Jaque, 45/38*
33 Eusèbe, député, Berthomieu, 10/39
34 Femme du boulanger, La, Pagnol, 36/38*
35 Femmes collantes, Les, Caron, 17/38
36 Feux de joie, Houssin, 5/39 #
37 Fin du jour, La, Duvivier, 12/39*
38 Firmin, le muet de Saint-Pataclet, Sévérac, 36/38
39 Fort-Dolorès, Le Henaff, 10/39
40 Frères corses, Kelber, 18/39
41 Gaietés de l’exposition, Les, Hajos, 20/38
42 Gargousse, Wulschleger, 30/38
43 Gibraltar, Ozep, 48/38
44 Glu, La, Choux, 18/38
45 Gosse de riche, Canonge, 23/38
46 Goualeuse, La, Rivers, 42/38 #
47 Grand-Père, Péguy, 17/39
48 Grisou, or Les Hommes sans soleil, Canonge, 19/38
49 Héros de la Marne, Le, Hugon, 48/38
50 Hôtel du Nord, Carné, 50/38*
51 Inconnue de Monte Carlo, L’, Berthomieu, 4/39
52 Je chante, Stengel, 48/38*
53 J’étais une aventurière, Bernard, 51/38 #
54 Joueur d’échecs, Le, Dréville, 48/38*
55 Joueur, Le, Lamprecht & Daquin, 36/38
56 Katia, Tourneur, 42/38*
57 Légions d’honneur, Gleize, 7/38 #
58 Lumières de Paris, Pottier, 40/38 #
59 Ma sœur de lait, Boyer, 19/38
60 Maison du Maltais, La, Chenal, 38/38*
61 Mariage de Véréna, Le, or La Bâtarde, Daroy, (22/39)
62 Marraine du régiment, La, Rosca, (19/39)
63 Métropolitain, Cam, 6/39*
64 Mon curé chez les riches, Boyer, 51/38*
65 Mon oncle et mon curé, Caron, 10/39
66 Monsieur Coccinelle, Bernard-Deschamps, 44/38*
67 Monsieur de cinq heures, Le, Caron, 11/38
68 Moulin dans le soleil, Le, Didier, 13/39
69 Noix de coco, Boyer, 6/39*
70 Nouveaux Riches, Les, Berthomieu, 24/38 #
71 Or dans la montagne, L’, Haufleur, 19/39
72 Paix sur le Rhin, Choux, 45/38
73 Paradis de Satan, Le, Gandera, 36/38
74 Patriote, Le, Tourneur, 24/38
 414 | Filmography
75 Père Lebonnard, Le, Limur, 25/39
76 Petit Chose, Le, Cloche, 22/38 #
77 Petite Peste, Limur, 8/39
78 Piste du Sud, La, Billon, 36/38
79 Place de la Concorde, Lamac, 1/39
80 Présidente, La, Rivers, 21/38 #
81 Prince Bouboule, Houssin, 2/39
82 Prince de mon cœur, Daniel-Norman, 46/38 #
83 Prisons de femmes, Richebé, 41/38*
84 Quai des brumes, Carné, 20/38*
85 Raphaël le tatoué, Christian-Jaque, 6/39*
86 Récif de corail, Le, Gleize, 9/39
87 Remontons les Champs-Élysées, Bibal & Guitry, 48/38*
88 Retour à l’aube, Decoin, 46/38
89 Révolté, Le, Mathot, 43/38
90 Rois de la flotte, Les, Pujol, 42/38
91 Roman de Werther, Le, Ophüls, 49/38 #
92 Route enchantée, La, Caron, 48/38*
93 Rue sans joie, La, Hugon, 16/38*
94 Ruisseau, Le, Autant-Lara & Léhman, 43/38 #
95 S. O. S. Sahara, Baroncelli, 33/38
96 Serge Panine, Méré & Schiller, 3/39
97 Son oncle de Normandie, Dréville, 23/39
98 Tarakanowa, Ozep, 12/38
99 Tempête sur l’Asie, Oswald, 16/38
100 Terre de feu, L’Herbier, 39/42
101 Thérèse Martin, Canonge, 23/39
102 Train pour Venise, Le, Berthomieu, 37/38
103 Tricoche et Cacolet, Colombier, 36/38*
104 Trois artilleurs à l’opéra, Chotin, 19/39
105 Trois artilleurs en vadrouille, Pujol, 27/38
106 Trois de Saint-Cyr, Paulin, 5/39 #
107 Trois valses, Berger, 50/38*
108 Ultimatum, Siodmak & Wiene, 43/38 #
109 Un de la Canebière, Pujol, 38/38*
110 Un fichu métier, Ducis, 41/38
111 Un gosse en or, or Cœur de gosse, Pallu, 4/39
112 Une de la cavalerie, Cammage, 16/38
113 Une java, Orval, 3/39
114 Vacances payées, Cammage, 50/38
115 Vénus de l’or, La, Delannoy & Méré, 19/38
116 Vidocq, Daroy, 12/39 #
117 Vie est magnifique, La, Cloche, 9/39
118 Vierge folle, La, Diamant-Berger, 47/38
119 Visages de femmes, Guissart, 10/39
 Filmography | 415
1939 ( Jan.–Aug.)
1 Angélica, Choux, 39/40
2 Battement de cœur, Decoin, 6/40*
3 Bécassine, Caron, 51/40 #
4 Berlingot et Cie, Rivers, 17/39*
5 Bois sacré, Le, Mathot, 48/39
6 Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo, Poirier, 5/40
7 Brigade sauvage, La, Dréville & L’Herbier, 17/39
8 Café du Port, Le, Choux, 19/40
9 Campement 13, Constant, 50/40
10 Cas de conscience, Kapps, 20/39
11 Cavalcade d’amour, Bernard, 3/40*
12 Charrette fantôme, La, Duvivier, 7/40*
13 Chasseur de chez Maxim’s, Le, Cammage, 45/39
14 Château des quatre obèses, Le, Noé, 21/39
15 Chemin de l’honneur, Le, Paulin, (1940?)
16 Cinq Sous de Lavarède, Les, Cammage, 10/39*
17 Circonstances atténuantes, Boyer, 30/39*
18 Club des fadas, Le, Couzinet, 31/39
19 Coups de feu, Barberis, 16/39
20 Danube bleu, Le, Reinert & Rodé, 12/40
21 De Mayerling à Sarajevo, Ophüls, 18/40*
22 Dédé la Musique, Berthomieu, 9/42
23 Dernier Tournant, Le, Chenal, 20/39*
24 Dernière Jeunesse, Musso, 35/39 #
25 Derrière la façade, Lacombe & Mirande, 11/39*
26 Déserteur, Le, or Je t’attendrai, Moguy, 11/39
27 Deuxième Bureau contre Kommandantur, or Terre d’angoisse, Bibal & Jayet,
25/39*
28 Duel, Le, Fresnay, 28/41
29 Embuscade, L’, Rivers, 12/41 #
30 Émigrante, L’, Joannon, 11/40 #
31 Empreinte du dieu, L’, or L’Empreinte de Dieu, Moguy 20/41*
32 Enfer des anges, L’, Christian-Jaque, 7/41
33 Entente cordiale, L’Herbier, 16/39*
34 Esclave blanche, L’, Sorkin, 7/39
35 Étrange Nuit de Noël, L’, Noé, 33/39
36 Face au destin, Fescourt, 18/40
37 Famille Duraton, La, Stengel, 10/40*
38 Feu de paille, Le, Benoît-Lévy, 13/40
39 Fric-Frac, Autant-Lara & Lehmann, 24/39*
40 Gangsters du Château d’If, Les, Pujol, 7/39 #
41 Grand Élan, Le, Christian-Jaque, 50/40
42 Grey contre X, Gragnon & Maudru, 4/41(?)
 416 | Filmography
43 Héritier des Mondésir, L’, Valentin, 19/40 #
44 Homme du Niger, L’, Baroncelli, 4/40 #
45 Ils étaient neuf célibataires, Guitry, 43/39*
46 Intrigante, L’, Couzinet, 38/40
47 Jeunes Filles en détresse, Pabst, 34/39
48 Jour se lève, Le, Carné, 23/39*
49 Louise, Gance, 34/39*
50 Ma tante dictateur, Pujol, 28/39
51 Macao, l’enfer du jeu, Delannoy, 49/42*
52 Mahlia la métisse, Kapps, 20/42
53 Marseille mes amours, Daniel-Norman, 18/40
54 Menaces, Gréville, 2/40*
55 Monde tremblera, Le, or La Révolte des vivants, Pottier, 5/45 (1941?)
56 Monsieur Brotonneau, Esway, 31/39
57 Monsieur le Maire, or Dr Herr Maire, Sévérac, (?)
58 Moulin Rouge, Hugon, 3/41
59 Musiciens du ciel, Les, Lacombe, 7/40*
60 Nadia, la femme traquée, Orval, 24/41
61 Narcisse, d’Aguiar, 13/40
62 Nord Atlantique, Cloche, 15/39
63 Notre Dame de la Mouise, Péguy, 15/41 #
64 Nuit de décembre, Bernhardt, 9/41
65 Nuits de bal, Litvak, (1939?)
66 Or du Cristobal, L’, Becker & Stelli, 15/40
67 Ôtages, Les, Bernard, 12/39
68 Paradis des voleurs, Le, Marsoudet, 24/39
69 Paradis perdu, Gance, 50/40*
70 Paris–New York, Mirande, 14/40
71 Pièges, Siodmak, 50/39*
72 Piste du Nord, La, Feyder, 9/42
73 Pour le maillot jaune, Stelli, 43/40
74 Président Haudecœur, Le, Dréville, 15/40
75 Quartier Latin, Chamborant, Colombier, & Esway, 34/39 #
76 Quartier sans soleil, Kirsanoff, (1945?)
77 Rappel immédiat, Mathot, 24/39
78 Règle du jeu, La, Renoir, 27/39*
79 Remorques, Grémillon, 48/41*
80 Sans lendemain, Ophüls, 12/40*
81 Saturnin, or Saturnin de Marseille, Noé, 2/41
82 Sérénade, Boyer, 9/40
83 Sidi-Brahim, Didier, (1945?)
84 Sixième Étage, Cloche, 22/41
85 Sur le plancher des vaches, or Le Plancher des vaches, Ducis, 7/40*
86 Tempête, Bernard-Deschamps, 14/40 #
 Filmography | 417
87 Tourbillon de Paris, Diamant-Berger, 49/39*
88 Tradition de minuit, La, Richebé, 16/39*
89 Trois tambours, Les, or Vive la nation, Canonge, 51/39
90 Une main a frappé, Roudès, 30/39
91 Veau gras, Le, Poligny, 15/39 #
92 Vous seule que j’aime, Fescourt, 26/39
93 Yamilé sous les cèdres, Espinay, 22/39

Note: After the declaration of war, the production of a further three feature films
was begun before the end of 1939:
94 Après Mein Kampf, mes crimes, Ryder, 10/40
95 Homme qui cherche la vérité, L’, Esway, 12/40*
96 Roi des galéjeurs, Le, Rivers, 17/40

SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF RELEGATED FILMS

29s1 Collier de la reine, Le, Lekain & Ravel,
42/29 Sonore
29s2 Requin, Le, Chomette, 11/30 Mostly sonore
29s3 Trois Masques, Les, Hugon, 42/29 Under 1 hour
30s1 Adieu les copains, Joannon Silent, later dubbed; unpub?
30s2 Âge d’or, L’, Buñuel, 49/30* Silent, later partly sonore
30s3 Au pays des basques, Champreux Doc, not narrative
30s4 Au pays des buveurs de sang, Gourgaud Doc, not narrative
30s5 Chiqué, Colombier, 14/30 Under 1 hour
30s6 Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, Le,
Berthomieu, 31/5 Silent, later partly sonore?
30s7 Étrange Fiancée, L’, Pallu Sonore, later dubbed; unpub?
30s8 Fumées, Benoît & Jaeger-Schmidt, 13/32 Silent, later dubbed; unpub?
30s9 Je t’adore, mais pourquoi?, Colombier, 4/31 Under 1 hour
30s10 Maison jaune de Rio, La,
Grüne & Péguy, 12/31 Under 1 hour
30s11 Méphisto, Debain & Winter, 29/31 Serial in 4 episodes
30s12 Paramount en parade, de Rochefort Compilation
30s13 Poignard malais, Le, Goupillières, 5/31 Under 1 hour
30s14 Saltimbanques, Les, Jaquelux & Land, 29/30 Sonore only
30s15 Servante, La, Choux, 17/31 Silent, later sonorized
30s16 Sirocco, Sévérac, 51/31 Arabic, with titles
30s17 Une femme a menti, Rochefort, 27/30 Under 1 hour?
31s1 Boudoir diplomatique, Le, de Sano No trace
31s2 Chanson du lin, La, Monca Under 1 hour?
31s3 Chant du Hoggar, Le, Ichac Primarily documentary
 418 | Filmography
31s4 Croisière jaune, La, Poirier & Sauvage Documentary
31s5 Fille du Bouif, La, Bussi Under 1 hour?
31s6 Je serai seule après minuit, Baroncelli Under 1 hour
31s7 Roi du camembert, Le, Mourre Under 1 hour
31s8 Y’en a pas deux comme Angélique, Lion Under 1 hour?
32s1 Affaire est dans le sac, L’, Prévert* Under 1 hour
32s2 Bidon d’or, Le, Christian-Jaque Under 1 hour
32s3 Brumes de Paris, Sollin Under 1 hour
32s4 Carillon de la liberté, Le, Roudès Belgian
32s5 Colette et son mari, Pellenc Under 1 hour
32s6 Cure sentimentale, La, Dianville & Weill No trace
32s7 Daïnah la métisse, Grémillon, 34/32 Under 1 hour
32s8 Léon . . . tout court, Francis, 13/33 Under 1 hour
33s1 Amour qu’il faut aux femmes, L’, Trotz, 9/34 Didactic, not narrative
33s2 Grillon du foyer, Le, Boudrioz Never rev or released?
33s3 Indésirable, L’, Ruelle Under 1 hour
33s4 Indiens nos frères, Les, Tatayna Doc, not narrative
33s5 Jofroi, Pagnol, 3/34* Under 1 hour
33s6 Nous les mères, del Torres, 41/33 Dubbed
33s7 Voleur, Le, Tourneur, 49/33 1 hour or less
33s8 Zéro de conduite, Vigo, 44/34* Under 1 hour
34s1 Hommes de la côte, Les, Pellenc Never made?
34s2 Malade imaginaire, Le, Jaquelux Under 1 hour
34s3 Voilà Montmartre, Capellani, 19/34 Revue, not narrative
35s1 Promesses, Delacroix Never made?
35s2 Marius et Olive à Paris, J. Epstein Under 1 hour (Le Film #5)
35s3 Napoléon Bonaparte, Gance, 19/35 Silent; later part dialogue
36s1 Une partie de campagne, Renoir* Under 1 hour
36s2 Vie est à nous, La, Renoir* Didactic, not narrative
37s1 Arabie interdite, Clément Doc, not narrative
37s2 Mystère du 421, Le, Simons Belgian
37s3 Un coup de rouge, Roudès, 47/37 Music-hall sketches
38s1 Jeannette Bourgogne, Gourguet Didactic; never released?
38s2 Mon père et mon papa, Schoukens Belgian
38s3 Sommes-nous défendus?, Loubignac, 45/38 Documentary/propaganda
38s4 Vie des artistes, La, Bernard-Roland, 36/38 Under 1 hour, biog sketches
39s1 Adieu Vienne, Sévérac Never reviewed or released?
39s2 Bach en correctionnelle, Wulschleger, 50/40? Compilation. Prod Dec 1939
39s3 Boutique aux illusions, La, Sévérac, 16/39 Compilation of silents
39s4 Chantons quand même, Caron, 9/40 Under 1 hour. Prod Nov 1939
 Filmography | 419
39s5 Courrier d’Asie, Gilbert & Marcilly, 10/41 Documentary/propaganda
39s6 Espoir, Malraux, 25/45* Spanish dialogue
39s7 France est un empire, La, Barrois et al. Primarily propaganda
39s8 Gardons notre sourire, Schoukens Belgian
39s9 Monde en armes, Le, Oser, 23/39 Propaganda montage
39s10 Monsieur Bossemans, Schoukens, 20/39 Belgian

SECTION THREE:
FILMS GIVEN THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
The following films have been left in the main filmography because the ev-
idence against them was not conclusive, or was conflicting. All were com-
pleted and either reviewed by the trade or passed by the censor.

29/1 Mon béguin Possibly only sonorized

30/14 Bodega, La Possibly only or mainly sonorized, later full
sound
30/15 Caïn Little dialogue, but deliberately so?
30/16 Capitaine jaune, Le Possibly only or primarily sonorized
30/45 Jimmy Different sources give 58 and 61 minutes
30/53 Miracle des loups, Le, Possibly shot silent, later (partly?) sonorized
30/54 Mon ami Victor Possibly only sonorized. Possibly under 1 hour
30/67 Princes de la cravache, Les Never released?
30/71 Razzia Not 100% talkie?
31/22 Calais-Douvres Either 1,360 or 2,360 m.
31/54 Ensorcellement de Séville, L’ Pinel claims 1936 release, unconfirmed
31/64 Gloria Early record says 800m, Chirat says 85 min
31/76 Magie moderne Just over one hour?
31/106 Pour un soir Just over one hour?
31/128 Sur la voie du bonheur No recorded screening
31/140 Une histoire entre mille Possibly released 1936. Just one hour?
31/147 Verdun, souvenirs d’histoire Silent film with voice over?
31/148 Vouloir No recorded screening. Only sonorized?
32/2 Adhémar Lampiot, No recorded screening
32/99 Or des mers, L’, Either 1,400 or 2,500 m. Mainly sonorized?
33/24 C’était un musicien Under one hour?
33/76 Liebelei Partially dubbed
35/23 Coqueluche de ces dames, La No recorded screening, but in a 1940
catalogue
35/108 Tampon du colonel, Le, Just over one hour?
36/29 Course à la vertu, La, No recorded screening
 420 | Filmography
36/41 Faiseur, Le Just over one hour?
36/43 Femmes No recorded screening, but in a 1945
catalogue. At base a Polish film
36/70 Madone de l’Atlantique, La 60 or 85 min; no recorded screening, but in
a 1941 catalogue
36/88 Mystérieuse Lady, La No recorded screening
36/131 Trois dans un moulin No recorded screening
37/51 Fraudeur, Le No recorded screening
37/109 Temps des cerises, Le No commercial screening (in the thirties)?
39/31 Empreinte du dieu, L’, Completed with modifications in 1940
39/15 Chemin de l’honneur, Le No recorded screening
39/52 Mahlia la métisse Only exteriors shot in 1939; completed 1942
39/56 Monsieur le Maire Alsace dialect; no recorded screening (in Paris)
39/70 Paris–New York Completed with modifications in 1940
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. J.-P. Jeancolas, 15 ans d’années trente (Paris: Stock, 1983).

2. F. Garçon, De Blum à Pétain: cinéma et société française, 1936–1944 (Paris: Les
Éditions du Cerf, 1984).
3. Geneviève Sellier, “Les non moins fantastiques années 30,” in “Théories du
cinéma aujourd’hui,” CinémAction (1988): 109.
4. Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington and Indi-
anapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
5. For figures cited in this paragraph, see J.-P. Jeancolas, “French Cinema of the
1930s and Its Sociological Handicaps,” in Ginette Vincendeau and Keith Reader (eds.),
La Vie est à nous!, NFT Dossier no. 3 (London: BFI, 1986), p. 69. See also R. Borde,
Positif, no. 296 (1985), where the survey results were reported.
6. Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, pp. 224–226.
7. Ibid., pp. 359–366.
8. Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1975), pp. 14–15.
9. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin and London: University of
Texas Press, 1968).
10. La Cinématographie Française, no. 616 (23 Aug. 1930).
11. Ciné Miroir (1929): 291.
12. Ciné Miroir (1929): 563.
13. Cinémonde (1931): 595.
14. Garçon, De Blum à Pétain, pp. 121–122.
15. Aspects of this analysis of the opening scenes of La Règle du jeu were first pre-
sented in a paper that I gave at the conference “A Century of Cinema” at Melbourne
University, April 1995.
16. Ginette Vincendeau, “The Popular Cinema of the Popular Front,” in Vincen-
deau and Reader, La Vie est à nous!
17. Michèle Lagny et al., Générique des années 30 (Vincennes: Presses Universi-
taires de Vincennes, 1986).
18. Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma
français: 1930–1956 (Paris: Nathan, 1996).
19. Jeancolas, 15 ans d’années trente.
20. Marc Ferro, “Introduction,” in Garçon, De Blum à Pétain, p. 10.
21. Geneviève Guillaume-Grimaud, Le Cinéma du Front Populaire (Paris: Lher-
minier, 1986).
22. Raymond Chirat, Cinéma des années 30 (Paris: Hatier, 1983).
 422 | Notes to pages 188–207

6. ART AND TRANSCENDENCE

1. Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington and Indi-
anapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
2. Ibid., p. 400.

7. CINEMATIC GENRES IN FRANCE

1. La Cinématographie Française, no. 620 (20 Sept. 1930).
2. Ciné Miroir (1929): 171.
3. Revue du Cinéma, no. 10 (1930).
4. Cinémonde (1932): 125.
5. Positif, no. 12.
6. Le Film Français, no. 14 (9 Mar. 1945); Image et Son, no. 108 (Jan. 1958).
7. Cinéma 59, no. 39 (Aug.–Sept. 1959).
8. See, for instance, Hugh Gray (ed. and transl.), What Is Cinema? (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974), vol. 1, p. 29.
9. Charles Ford, On tourne lundi (Paris: Jean Vigneau, 1947), p. 71.
10. See, for instance, Georges Sadoul, Le Cinéma français (1890–1962) (Paris:
Flammarion, 1962).
11. Georges Sadoul, Le Cinéma (Paris: La Bibliothèque Française, 1948).
12. Georges Sadoul, Les Merveilles du cinéma (Paris: Les Éditeurs Français Réunis,
1957), p. 168.
13. Léon Moussinac, Panoramique du cinéma (Paris: Sans Pareil, 1929; reprint, 1946).
14. Léon Moussinac, L’Âge Ingrat du Cinéma (Paris: Sagittaire, 1946).
15. René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopédique du cinéma (Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1958), pp. 381–412.
16. Georges Charensol, Renaissance du Cinéma Français (Paris: Sagittaire, 1946).
17. Pierre Leprohon, Présences contemporaines (Paris: Debresse, 1957).
18. Georges Charensol, “Le Film parlant (1930–1948),” in Denis Marion (ed.),
Le Cinéma par ceux qui le font (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1949), p. 65.
19. Claude Mauriac, Amour du cinéma (Paris: Albin Michel, 1954).
20. Roger Régent, Cinéma de France (Paris: Bellefaye, 1948).
21. Louis Chauvet, Le Porte-Plume et la caméra (Paris: Flammarion, 1950), pp. 5
and 98.
22. Jos Roger, Grammaire du cinéma (Bruxelles et Paris: EUF, 1956), pp. 147–149.
23. In Henri Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français (Paris: Cerf, 1953), p. 38.
24. Ford, On tourne lundi.
25. Georges Sadoul, “Les Ennemis du cinéma,” in Cinéma d’aujourd’hui (Paris and
Geneva: Trois Collines, 1945), p. 42.
26. Charles Spaak, “Le Scénario” in Marion, Le Cinéma par ceux qui le font, p. 113.
27. Ibid., p. 115.
28. P. Leprohon, L’Exotisme et le cinéma (Paris: Les Éditions J. Susse, 1945).
29. C. Pornon, Le Rêve et le fantastique (Paris: La Nef de Paris, 1959).
30. Georges Altman, Ça, c’est du cinéma (Paris: Les Revues, 1931).
31. J. Benoît-Lévy, Les Grandes Missions du cinéma (Montréal: Pariseau, 1945).
32. H. Agel and G. Agel, Précis d’initiation au cinéma (Paris: L’École, 1957).
33. Peter Bächlin, Histoire économique du cinéma (Paris: La Nouvelle Édition,
1947), p. 180.
 Notes to pages 208–223 | 423
34. Benoît-Lévy, Les Grandes Missions, p. 26. Emphasis in original.
35. Ibid., p. 326.
36. Altman, Ça, c’est du cinéma. See chapter 3, “La vie au cinéma.”
37. Ibid., p. 263. Emphasis in original.
38. Ibid., p. 85.
39. Jean Keim, Un nouvel art: le cinéma sonore (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947), p. 159.
40. Ibid., p. 178.
41. Ibid., p. 186.
42. Agel and Agel, Précis d’initiation au cinéma, pp. 18–20.
43. Ibid., p.167.
44. Ibid., pp. 168–170.
45. J. Rivette, “Six Characters in Search of Auteurs: A Discussion about the French
Cinema,” Cahiers du Cinéma 71 (May 1957), reprinted in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du
Cinéma: The 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 32.
46. A. Bazin, “De la politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (Apr. 1957),
reprinted in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 257.
47. Ibid.
48. Quoted in P. Duvillars, Cinéma: mythologie du XX e siècle (Paris: l’Hermite,
1950), p. 117.
49. André Malraux, Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma. Originally in Verve (1941),
reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier (ed.), Intelligence du Cinématographe (Paris: Corréa,
1946).
50. Ibid., p. 383.
51. Ibid., p. 382
52. André Boll, Le Cinéma et son histoire (Paris: Sequana 1941), p. 95.
53. Quoted in Duvillars, Cinéma, p. 109.
54. Duvillars, Cinéma, p. 30.
55. Ibid., p. 49.
56. Ibid., p. 29.
57. Henri Agel, “Activité et passivité du spectateur,” in É. Souriau (ed.), L’Univers
filmique (Paris: Flammarion, 1953) p. 49.
58. Mauriac, Amour du cinéma, pp. 229 and 237.
59. Chauvet, Porte-Plume, p. 98.
60. Raymond Barkan, “Une mythologie du quotidien,” L’Âge Nouveau, no. 93
(July 1955): 28.
61. Ibid., p. 34.
62. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957); originally published 1954–56
in the monthly Les Lettres Nouvelles.
63. Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1: 1907–1939, vol. 2:
1929–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
64. Keim, Un nouvel art, p. 190.
65. Ibid., p. 199.
66. Le Film Français, no. 159, special issue, Overview of 1947 (1947): 75.
67. Keim, Un nouvel art, p. 194.
68. Benoît-Lévy, Les Grandes Missions, pp. 329–331.
69. La Cinématographie Française, no. 778 (30 Sept. 1933).
70. La Cinématographie Française, no. 725 (1932).
71. Georges Charensol, Quarante ans de cinéma (Paris: Sagittaire, 1935), p. 197.
72. Michel Gorel, Le Monde truqué (Paris: Nilsson, 1931), p. 179.
73. Ibid., p. 28.
74. Ibid., pp. 94–96.
 424 | Notes to pages 223–232
75. La Cinématographie Française, no. 945 (12 Dec. 1936).
76. Cinéopse, no. 223 (Mar. 1938), p. 59.
77. Ciné Miroir, no. 863 (4 Nov. 1947).
78. J. Doniol-Valcroze, “De l’avant-garde,” in Agel et al., Sept ans, pp. 7–25.
79. J.-L. Tallenay, “Les Français n’ont-ils pas la tête comique?” in Agel et al., Sept
ans, pp. 51–52.
80. Mauriac, Amour du cinéma, p. 158.
81. Agel and Agel, Précis d’initiation au cinéma, pp. 189 et seq.
82. Étienne Fuzellier, “Le Comique cinématographique,” Âge Nouveau, no. 93 (July
1955).
83. Quoted in Jacques Chabannes, Les Coulisses du cinéma (Paris: Hachette, 1959),
p. 150.
84. La Cinématographie Française, no. 705 (1932); Cinémonde (1933): 359.
85. Marcel Carné, “Vingt ans de films policiers,” Cinémonde (1932): 443.
86. Ciné Miroir (1934): 146.
87. Altman, Ça, c’est du cinéma, pp. 143 et seq.
88. Cinéopse, no. 221 (Jan. 1938); La Cinématographie Française, no. 1039 (Sept.
1938).
89. Léon Moussinac, “État du cinéma international,” reprinted in Moussinac,
L’Âge Ingrat du Cinéma, pp. 165–166.
90. Cinémonde, no. 74 (1930); Cinémonde (1931): 551; Cinémagazine (Mar. 1930);
Alexandre Arnoux, Du muet au parlant (Paris: La Nouvelle Édition, 1946), p. 106;
Keim, Un nouvel art, p. 188.
91. Altman, Ça, c’est du cinéma, pp. 115–143.
92. Ibid., pp. 130–131.
93. Ibid., p. 116.
94. Ibid., p. 119.
95. Cinémonde, no. 83 (1930).
96. Cinémonde (1932): 772.
97. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1188 (28 Dec. 1946): 75.
98. Cinémonde (1934): 890.
99. Roger Leenhardt, Chroniques de cinéma (Paris: Étoile, 1986), p. 135.
100. See Altman, Ça, c’est du cinéma, pp. 44–47.
101. Alexandre Arnoux, “Films historiques” (1938), reprinted in Arnoux, Du muet
au parlant.
102. Keim, Un nouvel art, pp. 163–168.
103. Nino Frank, Petit Cinéma sentimental (Paris: La Nouvelle Édition, 1950), p. 180.
104. Altman, Ça, c’est du cinéma, pp. 43–48.
105. Leenhardt, Chroniques de cinéma, p. 24; originally in Esprit (Dec. 1934).
106. Keim, Un nouvel art, p. 200.
107. Lucie Derain, “La Satire à l’écran,” Cinémonde (1934): 421.
108. Image et son, no. 106 (Nov. 1957): 17.
109. Où va le cinéma français? (Paris: Éditions Baudinières, n.d. [1937]), pp. 213,
358, 362.
110. Charensol, Renaissance du cinéma français, p. 205.
111. L’Écran français, no. 14 (3 Oct. 1945).
112. Cinéma 59 (Aug.–Sept. 1959).
113. Image et son, no. 129 (Mar. 1960), p. 12.
114. Keim, Un nouvel art, pp. 139–140.
115. G. van Parys, “Le Musicien,” in Marion, Le Cinéma par ceux qui le font, pp.
265–266.
 Notes to pages 233–242 | 425
116. L’Écran français, no. 14 (3 Oct. 1945).
117. Leprohon, L’Exotisme et le cinéma, p. 80.
118. Ibid., pp. 135–137.
119. Ibid., p. 144.
120. Ibid., p. 196.
121. Ibid., pp. 296–297.
122. Ibid., pp. 297–298.
123. Ibid., p. 13.
124. See Ciné Miroir (Jan. and Feb. 1929); Revue du Cinéma, no. 7 (1929); Ciné-
monde (1931): 595, 725.
125. Cinéopse, no. 149 (Jan. 1932), editorial.
126. Cinémonde (1933): 138.
127. Cinémonde (1932): 612.
128. Ibid.
129. Eva Elie, Puissance du cinéma (La Chaux-de-fonds: Aux Éditions des Nou-
veaux Cahiers, 1942).
130. Régent, Cinéma de France, p. 171.
131. Le Film, no. 35 (28 Feb. 1942), no. 56 (Jan. 1943); Le Film Français, no. 84
(9 June 1948).
132. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1188 (28 Dec. 1946): 113.
133. See Leprohon, L’Exotisme et le cinéma, chapter 5, especially pp. 100, 199,
209–214.
134. Cinéopse, no. 201 (May 1936): 89–91; cf. Ciné Miroir (1935): 82.
135. Cinéopse, no. 149 (Jan. 1932), no. 160 (Dec. 1932), no. 165 (May 1933).
136. Cinéopse, no. 210 (Feb. 1937), no. 213 (May 1937).
137. Cinéopse, no. 233 (Jan. 1939).
138. Cinémonde (1931): 40–41.
139. Cinémonde (1933): 142.
140. Ciné Miroir (1934): 102 (1936): 77 (1939): 3.
141. La Cinématographie Française, no. 912 (25 Apr. 1936), no. 946 (19 Dec.
1936).
142. Ciné Miroir (1935): 277 (1939): 243.
143. Cinémonde (1939): 147.
144. Leprohon, L’Exotisme et le cinéma, p. 204.
145. Ibid., p. 208.
146. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1188 (28 Dec. 1946): 113.
147. Cinémonde, no. 85 (1930).
148. Cinémonde (1931): 595.
149. Arcy-Hennery, Destin du cinéma français (Paris: Société Française d’Éditions
Littéraires et Techniques, 1935), p. 135.
150. André Thérive, “Le populisme au cinéma,” Cinémonde (1930): 203.
151. Cinéopse, no. 172 (Nov. 1933).
152. Franck Servais in Cinémonde (1931), p. 595.
153. Ciné Miroir, no. 457 (5 Jan. 1934).
154. Pour Vous, no. 248 (17 Aug 1933), no. 276 (1 Mar. 1934), no. 303 (6 Sept
1934), no. 342 (6 June 1934), no. 347 (11 July 1935), no. 370 (Christmas 1935).
155. Pour Vous, no. 342 (6 June 1935).
156. See, for instance, Pour Vous, no. 347 (11 July 1935).
157. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1039 (Sept 1938): 88–89.
158. Claude Bernier in Ciné Miroir (1939): 323.
159. Ibid.
 426 | Notes to pages 242–254
160. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1066 (7 Apr. 1939).
161. Jean Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1974), vol. 1, pp.
196, 223 (1929 and 1930 interviews).
162. Ibid., p. 237; originally published in Pour Vous (Apr.–May 1933).
163. Cinéopse, no. 233 (Jan. 1939): 20.
164. Cinéopse, no. 223 (Mar. 1938).
165. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, pp. 231–237.

8. THE STARS IN THEIR (DIS)COURSES

Note: While every attempt has been made to refer the reader to relevant sources for
the statements made in this chapter, many of those statements do not relate to single
sources but to commonly repeated terms and phrases occurring in a number of differ-
ent sources. In general, the most useful sources were Ciné Miroir (1929–1940, but not
postwar), Pour Vous, Ciné Mondial (1940–44), L’Écran Français (1944–51), and Ciné-
monde (1951–1959, but not prewar).
1. Pour Vous, no. 59 (2 Jan. 1930).
2. Pour Vous, no. 89 (31 July 1930), no. 135 (18 June 1931), no. 150 (1 Oct.
1931), 77 (8 May 1930).
3. Pour Vous, no. 208 (10 Nov. 1932).
4. Pour Vous, no. 106 (27 Nov. 1930).
5. Pour Vous, no. 82 (12 June 1930).
6. Pour Vous, no. 121 (12 Mar. 1931).
7. Pour Vous, no. 169 (11 Feb. 1932).
8. Ciné Miroir (1935): 707.
9. Pour Vous, no. 370 (Christmas 1935).
10. Pour Vous, no. 78 (15 May 1930), no. 214 (22 Dec. 1932).
11. Pour Vous, no. 230 (13 Apr. 1933).
12. Cinémonde, no. 135 (1931): 135.
13. Pour Vous, no. 172 (3 Mar. 1932).
14. Ciné Miroir (1939): 19.
15. Ciné Mondial, no. 8 (26 Sept. 1941).
16. Ciné Miroir (1936): 35.
17. Pour Vous, no. 286 (10 May 1934).
18. Pour Vous, no. 89 (31 July 1930).
19. Pour Vous, no. 214 (22 Dec. 1932); see also no. 296 (19 June 1934).
20. Ciné Miroir (1931): 412; see also Pour Vous, no. 160 (10 Dec. 1931) on Pierre
Ney.
21. Ciné Miroir (1934): 67; see also Pour Vous, no. 173 (10 Mar. 1932).
22. Ciné Miroir (1939): 387.
23. Pour Vous, no. 260 (9 Nov. 1933).
24. Ciné Miroir (1934): 134.
25. Pour Vous, no. 157 (19 Nov. 1931).
26. Ciné Miroir (1931): 395.
27. Ciné Miroir, no. 306 (12 Feb. 1931).
28. Ciné Miroir (1939): 163.
29. Ciné Mondial, no. 82 (1943).
30. Ciné Miroir (1936): 67.
31. Pour Vous, no. 180 (28 Apr. 1932).
32. Ciné Miroir (1936): 6.
 Notes to pages 254–263 | 427
33. Pour Vous, no. 329 (7 Mar. 1935).
34. Ciné Miroir (1938): 478.
35. Ciné Miroir (1936): 6.
36. Pour Vous, no. 213 (15 Dec. 1932).
37. Ciné Miroir (1937): 299.
38. Ciné Miroir (1938): 443.
39. Ciné Miroir (1937): 635.
40. See Ciné Miroir (1938): 443.
41. Pour Vous, no. 275 (22 Feb. 1934).
42. Pour Vous, no. 271 (25 Jan. 1934).
43. Ciné Miroir (1934): 67.
44. Ciné Miroir (1936): 534.
45. Ciné Miroir (1935): 251.
46. Ciné Miroir (1935): 611.
47. Ciné Miroir (1936): 374.
48. Ciné Miroir (1936): 451.
49. Ciné Miroir (1936): 646.
50. Ciné Miroir (1936): 654
51. Ciné Miroir (1937): 587.
52. Pour Vous, no. 311 (1 Nov. 1934).
53. Pour Vous, no. 340 (23 May 1935).
54. Ciné Miroir—in August 1939 (!).
55. Ciné Miroir (22 Mar. 1940).
56. Ciné Miroir (Apr. 1940).
57. Ciné Miroir (1934): 67.
58. Ciné Miroir (1934): 19 (1935): 62.
59. Cinémonde (1930): 203.
60. Cinémonde (1931): 40–41; see also Cinémonde (1933): 170–172.
61. Ciné Miroir (1931): 123.
62. Cinéopse, no. 201 (May 1936): 89–91; see also Ciné Miroir (1932): 827
(1933): 170; La Cinématographie Française, no. 1020 (1938).
63. Cinéopse, no. 160 (Dec. 1932).
64. Cinémonde (1933): 172.
65. Cinéopse, no. 210 (Feb. 1937).
66. Cinéopse, no. 233 (Jan. 1939): 20.
67. Ciné Miroir (1936): 770.
68. Ciné Miroir, no. 769 (29 Dec. 1939): 834.
69. “Le Redressement moral du pays,” La Cinématographie Française, no. 1043
(28 Oct. 1938).
70. Ibid.
71. See Ciné Miroir (1939): 3, 66, 147, 163, 243, 354, 834.
72. Ciné Miroir (1939): 147.
73. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1093–94 (14–21 Oct. 1939).
74. Ciné Miroir (1938): 195.
75. Pour Vous, no. 97 (25 Sept. 1930).
76. Pour Vous, no. 157 (19 Nov. 1931).
77. Ciné Miroir (1938): 411.
78. Pour Vous, no. 217 (12 Jan. 1933).
79. Ciné Miroir (1936): 614 (1937): 283.
80. Ciné Miroir (1938): 52.
81. Ciné Miroir (1939): 675.
 428 | Notes to pages 263–283
82. Pour Vous, no. 125 (9 Apr. 1931); see also Pour Vous, no. 70 (20 Mar. 1930).
83. Pour Vous, no. 145 (27 Aug. 1931).
84. Ciné Mondial, no. 58 (2 Oct. 1942), no. 64 (13 Nov. 1942).
85. Ciné Mondial, no. 86 (23 Apr. 1943).
86. Ciné Miroir (1939): 115.
87. Ciné Miroir (1939): 675.
88. See, for instance, Pour Vous, no. 306 (27 Sept. 1934), on Françoise Rosay.
89. Ciné Miroir (1939): 115.
90. Ciné Miroir (1939): 226–227.
91. Ciné Miroir (1939): 579.
92. See, for instance, Ciné Mondial, no. 3 (22 Aug. 1941), on Ducaux; Ciné Mon-
dial, no. 16 (21 Nov. 1941), on Arletty; Ciné Mondial, no. 59 (9 Oct. 1941), on Mor-
lay and Darrieux; Ciné Mondial, nos. 135–136 (14–21 Apr. 1944), on Presle.
93. Ciné Miroir (1929): 691 (“Quel est le jeune premier que vous préférez, et pour
quelles raisons?”), 724 (results).
94. Ciné Miroir (1933): 195.
95. Ciné Miroir (1933): 802.
96. La Cinématographie Française, no. 847 (26 Jan. 1935), reporting on a Dépêche
de Toulouse survey.
97. Ciné Miroir (1934): 802.
98. Pour Vous, Nos. 355–360 (5 Sept. to 10 Oct. 1935).
99. Ciné Miroir (1935): 630; see also Ciné Miroir (1937): 115.
100. André Malraux, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” in Marcel L’Herbier
(ed.), Intelligence du Cinématographe (Paris: Corréa, 1946), pp. 382 et seq.
101. L’Écran Français, no. 223 (17 Oct. 1949).
102. Radio-Cinéma-Télévision (1 Oct. 1950).
103. André Bazin, “Le Jour se lève,” in Jacques Chevallier and Max Egly (eds.), Re-
gards neufs sur le cinéma (Paris: Seuil, 1956) (originally written 1947), p. 162.
104. P. Duvillars, Cinéma: mythologie du XX e siècle (Paris: l’Hermite, 1950), pp.
31–39 and 67–75. See also Raymond Barkan, “Une mythologie du quotidien,” L’Âge
Nouveau, no. 93 (July 1955): 29.
105. Claude Mauriac, “Jean Gabin, ou la mort d’un mythe,” in Claude Mauriac,
Amour du cinéma (Paris: Albin Michel, 1954), pp. 229 et seq.
106. Ciné Miroir (1938): 283.
107. Ciné Miroir (1939): 403.
108. Régent, Cinéma de France, p. 36.
109. Duvillars, Cinéma mythologie du XX e siècle, pp. 52–53.
110. Cinémonde (24 Nov. 1951).

9. BOX OFFICE SUCCESS IN THE THIRTIES

1. Ginette Vincendeau, “The Popular Cinema of the Popular Front,” in Ginette

Vincendeau and Keith Reader (eds.), La Vie est à nous, NFT Dossier no. 3 (London:
BFI, 1986), p. 75.
2. René Bonnell, Le Cinéma exploité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978), p. 32.
3. Cinéopse, no. 149 (Jan. 1932), no. 155 (July 1932), no. 161 (Jan. 1933).
4. Vincendeau and Reader, La Vie est à nous, p. 75.
5. See reports in La Cinématographie Française (Dec. 1957 special issue), La Ciné-
matographie Française, no. 1768 (Festival Special 1958), and Cinéma 58, no. 31 (Nov.
1958).
 Notes to pages 283–328 | 429
6. Bonnell, Le Cinéma exploité, p. 52. The surveys assume that it was more of a
working-class entertainment before this.
7. Cinéma 58, no. 31 (Nov. 1958).
8. Bonnell, Le Cinéma exploité, p. 47.
9. Ciné Mondial, no. 15 (14 Nov. 1941).
10. Roger Richebé, Au-delà de l’écran (Monaco: Pastorelly, 1977); P. Braunberger,
Cinémamémoires (Paris: Centre G. Pompidou, 1987).
11. See La Cinématographie Française, no. 622 (4 Oct. 1930); no. 623 (11 Oct.
1930), no. 632 (13 Dec. 1930).
12. La Cinématographie Française, no. 642 (21 Feb. 1931).
13. La Cinématographie Française, no. 794 (20 Jan. 1934).
14. La Cinématographie Française, no. 869 (29 June 1935).
15. See, for instance, Cinéopse, no. 205 (Sept. 1936): 171–172.
16. See, for instance, La Cinématographie Française, no. 817 (30 June 1934), no.
830 (20 Sept. 1934), and particularly no. 842/43 (22–29 Dec. 1934).
17. La Cinématographie Française, no. 895 (28 Dec. 1935), editorial. See also La
Cinématographie Française, no. 882 (29 Sept. 1935).
18. See Cinéopse, no. 219 (Nov. 1937); La Cinématographie Française, no. 973
(25 June 1937), editorial, no. 1012 (25 Mar. 1938), editorial.
19. La Cinématographie Française, no. 836 (10 Nov. 1934).
20. La Cinématographie Française, no. 947 (20 Dec. 1936), no. 964 (23 Apr.
1937).
21. La Cinématographie Française (June 1933).
22. La Cinématographie Française, no. 842/843 (22–29 Dec. 1934).
23. La Cinématographie Française, no. 985 (17 Sept. 1937).
24. Le Film, no. 16 (24 May 1941).
25. La Cinématographie Française, no. 798 (17 Feb. 1934).
26. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1039 (30 Sept. 1938).
27. “La Construction des salles devient une dangereuse aberration,” La Cinémato-
graphie Française, no. 1000 (31 Dec. 1937).
28. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1040 (7 Oct. 1938).
29. See La Cinématographie Française, no. 1048 (2 Dec. 1938) and no. 1075 (10 June
1939).
30. See La Cinématographie Française, no. 699 (26 Mar. 1932) for an account of
these processes.
31. La Cinématographie Française, no. 575 (9 Nov. 1929).
32. See Cinéopse, no. 200 (Apr. 1936); La Cinématographie Française, no. 907
(21 Mar. 1936), for an account of the case.
33. Où va le cinéma français? (Paris: Éditions Baudinières, n.d. [1937]), p. 306.
34. Ibid., p. 393.
35. Ciné Mondial, no. 43 (19 June 1942).
36. See Ciné Mondial, nos. 151–153 (4–11 Aug. 1944).
37. See La Cinématographie Française, no. 1677 (7 July 1956).
38. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1459 (15 Mar. 1952).
39. J.-P. Jeancolas, 15 ans d’années trente (Paris: Stock 1983), p. 13.
40. La Cinématographie Française, no. 996 (3 Dec. 1937).
41. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1012 (25 Mar. 1938).
42. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1032 (12 Aug. 1938).
43. La Cinématographie Française, no. 842/843 (22–29 Dec. 1934).
44. “L’Avenir appartient aux grands films,” La Cinématographie Française, no.
1000 (31 Dec. 1937).
 430 | Notes to pages 328–382
45. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1012 (25 Mar. 1938), no. 1039 (30 Sept.
1938).
46. See La Cinématographie Française, no. 1089 (23 Sept. 1939), no. 1090/92 (6
Oct. 1939), nos. 1093–94 (14–21 Oct. 1939), no. 1095–96 (28 Oct.–3 Nov. 1939),
no. 1099 (25 Nov. 1939), no. 1101 (9 Dec. 1939), no. 1103 (23 Dec. 1939).
47. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1077 (24 June 1939).
48. Reported in La Cinématographie Française, no. 884 (12 Oct. 1935).
49. Tables reprinted from Cinéma-Spectacle in La Cinématographie Française, no.
795 (27 Jan. 1934).
50. La Cinématographie Française, no. 1449 (5 Jan. 1952).

10. CONCLUSION

1. La Cinématographie Française, no. 760 (27 May 1933).

FILMOGRAPHY

1. Vincent Pinel, Filmographie des longs métrages sonores du cinéma français (Paris:
La Cinémathèque Française, 1985).
2. Raymond Chirat, Catalogue des films français de long métrage: films sonores de
fiction 1929–1939 (Brussels: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, 1975).
3. G. Sadoul, Le Cinéma français, 1890–1962 (Paris: Flammarion, 1962).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

The aim of this bibliography is to begin to develop a list of all books on the cinema
published in France and French-speaking countries between the years 1929 and
1939. It has not always been possible to discover all the bibliographic details.

1929
Arnoux, Alexandre. Le Cinéma. Paris: Crés, 1929.
Charensol, Georges. Panorama du cinéma. Paris: Sans-Pareil, 1929.
Coissac, Georges-Michel. Les Coulisses du cinéma. Paris: Paul Duval, 1929.
Florey, Robert. Histoire du cinéma américain. Paris, 1929.
Leloir, Maurice. Cinq mois à Hollywood avec Douglas Fairbanks. Paris: J. Peyronnet et
cie, 1929.
Moussinac, Léon. Panoramique du cinéma. Paris: Sans-Pareil, 1929.
Prévost, Jean. Polymnie. Paris: É. Hazan, 1929.
Schwob, René. Une mélodie silencieuse. Paris: Grasset, 1929.

1930
Billecoque, G. Régime fiscal du cinéma en France. Montpellier: Canne, 1930.
Coissac, Georges-Michel. Le Cinéma dans l’enseignement et l’éducation en France. Paris:
Le Tout-Cinéma, 1930.
(Collectif ). L’Art cinématographique. Paris: Alcan, 1930.
Ducom, Jacques. Le Cinématographe muet, sonore, parlant. Paris: A. Michel, 1930.
Gance, Abel. Prisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1930.
Henri-Robert, J. De la prise de vues à la projection. Paris: Paul Montel, 1930.
Jeanne, René. Tu seras star. Paris: Nouvelle Société d’Éditions, 1930.
Marotte, P. L’Application des droits d’auteurs et d’artistes aux œuvres cinématographiques
et cinéphoniques. Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1930.
Moris, R. Le Cinéma: étude économique. Montpellier: Canne, 1930.

1931
Altman, Georges. Ça, c’est du cinéma. Paris: Les Revues, 1931.
Coissac, Georges-Michel. L’Évolution du cinématographe et la réalisation de quelques
grands films. Paris: Le Tout-Cinéma, 1931.
 432 | Bibliography
Falco, A. Les Droits d’auteur et le film sonore dans la législation française. Paris: Joute et
Cie, 1931.
Gorel, Michel. Le Monde truqué. Paris: Nilsson, 1931.
Hemardinquer, Pierre. Le Cinématographe sonore. Paris: Librairie d’Enseignement
Technique, 1931.
Jeanne, René. Le Cinéma allemand. Paris: Alcan, 1931.
Mathos, P. Décors: du studio au plateau. Paris, 1931.
Soupault, Philippe. Charlot. Paris: Plon, 1931.

1932
Coissac, Georges-Michel. Le Cinéma au service de la civilisation et de la propagande.
Paris: Le Tout-Cinéma, 1932.
Fescourt, Henri (ed.). Histoire des spectacles II: Cinéma. Paris: Cygne, 1932 (sometimes
given as 1934).
Fescourt, Henri (ed.). Le Cinéma des origines à nos jours. Paris: Cygne, 1932.
Jeanne, René. Le Cinéma français. Paris: Cygne, 1932.
Lapierre, Marcel. Le Cinéma et la paix. Paris: Valois, 1932.
Salmon, André. Marlène Dietrich. Paris: La Nouvelle Librairie Française, 1932.

1933
Chevanne, A. L’Industrie du cinéma: le cinéma sonore. Bordeaux: Delmas, 1933.
Mesguich, Félix. Tours de manivelle. Paris: Grasset, 1933.
Noë, Yvan. L’Épicerie des rêves. Paris: Baudinière, 1933.
Vellard, R. Le Cinéma sonore et sa technique. Paris: Étienne Chiron, 1933.

1934
Bancal, Jean. La Censure cinématographique. Paris: José Corti, 1934.
Berthomé, J. Des droits d’auteur en matière de reproduction phonographique, ciné-
matographique et radiophonique. Nantes: Imprimeries des Presses de l’Ouest, 1934.
Félix, Jean. Le Chemin du cinéma. Paris: Édition film et technique, 1934.
Kossowski, A. L’ABC de la technique du cinéma. Paris: Chiron, 1934.
Lobel, Léopold et Dubois, M. La Technique cinématographique. Paris: E Dunod, 1934.

1935
Arcy-Hennery. Destin du cinéma français. Paris: Société Française d’Éditions Littéraires
et Techniques, 1935.
Bardèche, Maurice et Brasillach, Robert. Histoire du cinéma. Paris: Denoël et Steele,
1935.
Charensol, Georges. Quarante ans de cinéma. Paris: Sagittaire, 1935.
Epstein, Jean. Photogénie de l’impondérable. Paris: Corymbe, 1935 (brief essays).
 Bibliography | 433
Lang, André. Tiers de siècle. Paris: Plon, 1935.
Leprohon, Pierre. Charlot, ou la naissance d’un mythe. Paris: Corymbe, 1935.
Mayer, C. Aspects du droit d’auteur en matière cinématographique. Paris: Librairie Tech-
nique et Économique, 1935.

1936
Cendrars, Blaise. Hollywood, La Mecque du cinéma. Paris: B. Grasset, 1936.
De Carmoy, Guy. L’Industrie cinématographique en France. 1936.
Ehrenbourg, Ilya. Usines de rêves. Paris: Gallimard, 1936.
Jamelot, Y. La Censure des spectacles. Paris: Éditions Jel, 1936.
Petsche, Maurice. L’Industrie cinématographique. 1936.
Ruskowski, A. L’Oeuvre cinématographique et les droits d’auteur. Paris: Recueil Sirey,
1936.
Vellard, R. Le Cinéma sonore: théorie et pratique. Paris: Dunod, 1936.

1937
Kessel, J. Hollywood, ville mirage. Paris: Gallimard, 1937.
Où va le cinéma français? (Report of the Renaitour enquiry). Paris: Baudinière, 1937.
Le Rôle intellectuel du cinéma. Paris: Cahiers de la Société des Nations, IICI, 1937.

1938
Braun-Larrieu. Le Rôle social du cinéma. Paris: Éditions du Cinéopse et de Ciné-France,
1938.
Naumberg, Nancy (ed.). Silence, on tourne! Paris: Payot, 1938.
De Rothschild, P. Le Cinéma: les techniques au service de la pensée. Paris: F. Alcan, 1938.
Vivié, Jean. Le Cinéma d’amateur. Paris: Cinéma Pour Tous, 1938.

1939
Arroy, J., and Reynaud, J-C. Attention, on tourne. Paris: Tallandier, 1939.
Jeannot, Fred. Le Film de cinéma. Paris: Étienne Chiron, 1939.
Lhermitte. L’Image de notre corps. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939.
Vincent, Carl. Histoire de l’art cinématographique. Bruxelles: Trident, 1939.
Watts, Stephen (ed.). La Technique du film. Paris: Payot, 1939.
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to tables or figures. All references to specific films are found in
the separate Film Index.

Abel, Richard, 217 Annabella, 127, 325

Abstract films, 209 Anouilh, Jean, 137
Accidents/accidental encounters, 23–24, Apaches, xxiii, 63, 84–85, 240
136–37, 349. See also Destiny Arabs. See Middle Eastern characters and
Achard, Marcel, 130 settings
Acrobats. See Circuses and circus folk Arcy-Hennery, René, 240
Actors/actresses, as film characters, 64, Aristocracy. See Nobility
171–72, 185–86, 340–41. See also Film Arletty, 83, 92, 171, 265, 273
stars Arnoux, Alexandre, 226, 228
Adultery themes, 16 Artistic genius. See Creativity
Adventure films, 152, 203, 210, 219, 244, Artists and the artistic life, 340; bourgeois
334. See also Exotic films world and, 77–78, 90, 174, 176, 185,
African settings, 46–47 341; character type discourses of, 248,
Agel, Henri, 207, 210–11, 215, 224, 242 253–55; critiques of, 184–85; high cul-
Albatros (production company), 35, 322 ture and, 40, 44, 166–67, 173, 176,
Alcover, Pierre, 126 213; identity and, 10, 22, 179; as mar-
Algeria. See North African characters and ginal figures, 64, 158, 179; nature and,
settings 133; popularity of films about, 334; re-
Allégret, Marc, 318–19 flexivity and, 120, 179–85; transcen-
Alpine films, 197 dence of, 166–79, 190–91, 338
Alsace-Lorraine, 59, 337 Asian characters and settings, 33–35, 42,
Altman, Georges: on capitalism, 151; on 45, 68, 79, 103, 135–36, 148–49, 172,
comedies, 222, 229–30; on genres, 235
207–209, 212; on historical films, 228; Audiences: aspirations of, xvii; differences
myth and, 212, 217; on nature, 257; on in, 282–84; gender preferences in
war films, 226–27 actors/actresses of, 270–72; identity
American characters and settings, 31, 33, narratives and, 7–9; size of, 191, 224,
37–39, 48, 97 279–82, 284–88, 289, 291–92,
American cinema, 37–38, 213, 338; audi- 298–99, 303–304, 320, 328–30,
ence size and, 282; crime/detective films 342–44
in, 151, 225; escapist qualities of, Aumont, Jean-Pierre, 49, 127
222–23; French competition with, 270, Aunt-nephew relationships, 127
284–85; genre as characteristic of, xiii, Austrian characters and settings, 31,
203–205, 212; import of French films 33–34, 44, 71, 176
and, 325–26; musical comedies in, 204, Authority, 72–82; back-to-the-land theme
231–32; remakes of, 310–11; spoofs of, and, 195; as character discourse, 248,
187; sports in, 252; youth in, 241–42 261–62, 271; identity narratives and,
Angelo, Jean, 267, 271 13; political, criticisms of, 40–42, 104,
Animal-tamers. See Circuses and circus 230–31, 322
folk Automata. See Mechanical creatures
 436 | Index
Aviators, xiii, xxi–xxiii, 22, 94, 252–53, Borde, Raymond, xii
340, 347–48 Borel, Germaine, 261
Awards and prizes, 325–26, 377–79 Borrowed plumage narratives, 14–15, 348
Aznavour, Charles, 232 Bosses. See Bankers/financiers/industrialists/
bosses
Babies, 5, 7 Boudrioz, Robert, 313
Bach: character type discourses and, 250, Boulevard comedies, xiii, 220, 229–33,
256, 345–46; directors and, 310, 319; 240, 244; characters in, 120, 141, 154,
films of, 100, 150, 310; popularity of, 172, 179; class in, 105–106, 120, 131,
334, 346 346; gender relationships in, 138–39;
Bächlin, Peter, 207 narrative mechanisms in, 99, 125; popu-
Baker, Josephine, 50, 171, 175, 232 larity of, 131, 346; settings for, 60
Balin, Mireille, 114, 116, 263, 264 Bourdet, Simone, 249
Bankers/financiers/industrialists/bosses, Bourgeoisie, 72–82; artists/artistic life and,
11, 73–79, 120–21, 136, 164, 77–78, 90, 174, 176, 185, 341; cinema-
340–41 going and, 283; criminality and, 63, 84,
Baquet, Maurice, 252 140, 146–47; family dysfunction in,
Bardot, Brigitte, 266, 273, 277 130–39; film star preferences of, 271;
Barkan, Raymond, 215–16, 275 identity narratives and, 13, 17; nobility
Baroncelli, Jacques de, 316 contrasted with, 73–74; revitalization of,
Baroux, Lucien, 150, 254, 271 83–84
Barrault, Jean-Louis, 109, 254–55, Bourvil, 334
271–73 Box-office success, xvi, 279–337; audience
Barthes, Roland, 216–17 size and, 191, 279–82, 284–88, 289,
Batchef, Pierre, 271 291–92, 298–99, 303–304, 320,
Baur, Harry: character type discourses and, 328–30, 342–44; double programs and,
261–62, 271; films of, 36, 94, 122, 126, 292; failures/flops at, 191, 312–13, 315,
146, 191; popularity of, 271–72 320, 325, 335; measurement of,
Bazin, André, 203, 207, 211–12, 243, 279–82; rankings of, 304–32;
274–75 receipts/export earnings and, 285,
Beaugé, André, 171 288–91, 298–299, 300, 325–27, 329,
Becker, Jacques, 218 342–44; ticket price competition and,
Belgian characters and settings, 33 292–93
Belgian cinema, 382–83 Boyer, Charles, 85, 271–72, 334
Bélières, Louis, 69 Brassens, George, 232
Bell, Marie, xxii, 161, 252, 254 Braunberger, P., 288
Benoît-Lévy, J., 207–208, 219, 242, 317 Brecht, Bertolt, 188, 189
Bernard, Raymond, 132, 137, 326 Bresson, Robert, 230
Bernier, Claude, 242 British characters and settings, 31, 34–35,
Bernstein, Henry, 180 68
Berry, Jules: directors and, 277; films of, British cinema, 151, 282, 326
15, 116, 147, 150–51, 181, 183; popu- Brooks, Louise, xx
larity of, 271 Brother-sister relationships, 19, 129
Big bands, 175–76, 336, 347 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 205
Bigamous relationships, 20 Brunoy, Blanchette, 267
Biographical films, 176 Burch, Noël, xxv
Blackmail narratives, 147–48 Bureaucrats, 81–82
Blanchar, Pierre, 254–55, 258, 267–68, Burgère, André, 69
271–73, 325
Blier, Bernard, 266–67, 334 Cahiers de la Cinémathèque de Toulouse,
Boarding schools, 155, 342 xxvi
Boll, André, 214 Cahiers du Cinéma, 211
Bonnell, René, 284 Camus, Albert, xxiv
 Index | 437
Canadian characters and settings, 33, 63, Ciné Mondial, 226, 235, 263, 265, 267,
96–97, 148 285, 298–99
Canal boats, 95 Cinéma 54 (55, 56, etc.), 204, 232
Capitalism, industrial, xiv, 27, 79–81, 101, Cinématographie Française, La: box-office
103, 148, 151, 223 success data and, xvi, 288, 292, 298–99,
Carco, Francis, 189 381, 385; character type discourses in,
Carette, Julien, 278 258–60; genres in, xiv, 203, 220, 223,
Carné, Marcel, 4, 128, 146, 225, 227, 323 226–27, 236, 237–39, 242; on quality
Carol, Martine, 267, 272 of films, 289; studio strikes in, 290; the-
Cars, 23–24 ater manager polls and, 300, 301, 345
Cartoons, 207, 209, 211 Cinémonde: character type discourses in,
Casarès, Maria, 264 246, 258–59, 276; genres in, 203,
Casinos, xiii, 101–102 226–28, 235, 237–38, 240; reader polls
Catelain, Jacque, 253, 267–68, 271 and, 266–68
Catholic Church, 48, 191 Cinéopse: character type discourses in,
Cavalcanti, Alberto, 316–17 258–59; on cinema-going audiences,
Celebrations, xix–xxi, 73, 90 283; genres in, xiv, 226, 235, 238, 241,
Censorship, 42, 230–31, 242, 259, 261 243; propaganda and, 223, 236–37,
Centre National de la Cinématographie 243; on quality of films, 289–90
(CNC), xvi, 283–84, 297, 299 Circus films, 121
Chabrol, Claude, 218 Circuses and circus folk, 77–78, 87, 158,
Champreux, Maurice, 145 167–70, 340
Chantal, Marcelle, 127, 249, 252–54 Civilization expansion themes, 40, 45–51,
Chaplin, Charlie, 76, 208, 270 193–94, 320. See also Colonial charac-
Character type discourses, xv, 246–66; age ters and settings
of film stars and, 271; femininity, Clair, René: export success of, 326; films
264–65; maturity/authority, 261–62, of, 27, 40, 80, 86, 94, 110, 114, 181,
271, 346; nationalism/moral 230; honors/awards for, 326; popularity
regeneration, 258–61, 265; nature, of films by, 307, 310, 315, 336; sound
255–57; popular vitality/youthful inno- films and, 181, 382
cence, 248–51, 345; sensitive artist, Clowns, 168–69
253–55; sensuality/femme fatales, Colombier, Pierre, 310, 319–20, 336
262–64; sportifs, 22, 88–90, 150, Colonial characters and settings, xiii,
251–53, 255 33–35, 45–51, 149, 210, 233, 236–39,
Charensol, Georges, 205, 220, 231 244, 258, 339
Chauvet, Louis, 205, 215 Comédie dramatique, 218–19, 220, 221,
Chevalier, Maurice: character type dis- 224
courses and, 250–51; films of, 310, 345; Comedies, 217–18, 220–24; boulevard,
honors/awards for, 326; popularity of, xiii, 60, 99, 105–106, 120, 125, 131,
xx–xxi, 267, 271; singing background 138–39, 141, 154, 172, 179, 220,
of, 171, 232 229–33, 240, 244, 346; characters in,
Childhood themes, 16, 132–33, 153–59, 45, 73, 150–51, 179, 211, 250, 345;
164, 339 destiny in, 24; marriage relationships in,
China. See Asian characters and settings 135; musical, 170, 204, 217, 223, 229,
Chirat, Raymond, xxvi, 14, 128, 380–84, 231–33, 244, 335–36; narrative mecha-
386 nisms in, 5, 100; popularity of, 222,
Chomette, Henri, 308 309–10, 314–15, 334, 345; settings for,
Choux, Jean, 313 59; slapstick, 229–33. See also Farces;
Ciné Magazine, 203, 226 Military vaudevilles
Ciné Miroir: character type discourses in, Communist Party, 56
246, 251–53, 256, 259, 271; film stars Companeez, J., 206
in, xx–xxi, 274–76; genres in, 203, Constantine, Eddie, 226, 272
223–25, 235, 237–38; youth in, 241 Continental (film company), 222
 438 | Index
Cooper, Gary, 270 Double life narratives, 16–19, 130, 148,
Costume dramas. See Historical films 340
Counts. See Nobility Double programming, 292
Courteline, Georges, 81–82 Dramas, 211, 217–20, 221, 223–24; des-
Creativity, xii, xvi–xvii, xxv, 44, 182, tiny in, 24; Freudian, 16–19, 46, 49,
204–205, 215 113, 123–25, 127, 129–30, 162–63; in-
Crime films, 76, 186, 210–11, 225–29, ternational conflict in, 52; narrative
244. See also Detective films; Murder mechanisms in, 100; popularity of, 272,
mysteries 309, 320; realist, 80, 90, 99–100, 171,
Criminals and criminality, 130, 140–53, 239–41. See also Melodramas;
240, 340; artists and, 179; bourgeoisie Psychodramas
and, 63, 84, 140, 146–47; crimes of pas- Dramatists, 167
sion and, 146–47, 179; exotic types of, Drames d’atmosphère. See Poetic realist films
148–50; father-son relationships and, Dreyer, Carl, 79
132; identity and, 6, 17, 22; men and, Dreyfus, J. P., 203
13–14, 145, 160; orphans and, 87–88; Drug-smuggling films, 148–49, 334
women and, 84, 108–109, 113–15, 140, Dubost, Paulette, 251, 278
156, 171; working class and, 17, 60, 63, Dumas, Jean, 237
82–95, 140, 147, 169–70 Durand, J., 283
Duvallès, Frederic, 150
Dalio, Marcel, 70–71, 278 Duvillars, Pierre, 213–15, 275–76
Damia, 171 Duvivier, Julien: films of, 58, 79, 93, 133,
Damita, Lily, 248, 251 185–86; honors/awards for, 326; popu-
Darfeuil, Colette, 127, 256 larity of films by, 191, 316, 323,
Darrieux, Danielle, 127, 143, 248, 257, 335–36; technical practices and, xxiii
264, 270, 272–73
Daumary, 313 East Asia. See Asian characters and
Dauphin, Claude, 254 settings
Davis, Dolly, 267 East European characters and settings,
Déa, Marie, 264 33–34, 264
Dearly, Max, 277 Écran Française, L’, 231–32
Decoin, Henri, 257 Éditions du Cerf, Les, 244
Dekeukelaire, Charles, 213–15 Education themes, 153–59, 164, 339
Demazis, Orane, 256–57 Egypt. See Middle Eastern characters and
Dépêche de Toulouse, La, 301, 302 settings
Depression, economic, 74, 76, 79, 103, Élie, Eva, 235
288, 344, 346 Emplois (theatrical character types), xv, 248
Derain, Lucie, 220, 230, 235 Engineers and engineering feats, 45–46,
Deréan, Rosine, 249 339–40, 347
Desert settings, 194 Enigma narratives, 5, 7, 16
Destiny, xxiv, 22–30, 102, 136–38, 342, Epic films, 209
348–49 Epstein, Jean, 242–43, 317
Detective films, 7, 14, 140, 145–46, Epstein, Marie, 197, 242, 317
150–51. See also Crime films; Murder Eroticism. See Sensuality/sexuality
mysteries Escape fantasies, 6–7, 92, 95–106, 185,
Dietrich, Marlene, 111, 213, 263, 268 342, 347–48
Dini, Gennaro, 313 Exile themes, 36, 50–51, 98, 155, 342
Documentaries, 49, 207, 209, 233, 236, Exotic characters and settings, 39, 42–44,
239, 242, 384 103
Doniol-Valcroze, J., 224 Exotic films, 34, 148–50, 210, 233–36,
Doomed figures, xxiii–xxiv, 86–87 244. See also Adventure films
Dorziat, Gabrielle, 112 Expressionism, xxiii, 68, 79–80, 146, 155,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xxiv, 108 167–68, 197, 240
 Index | 439
Fairgrounds, 167–70, 340 Flowers and florists, 87, 91–92, 109, 199,
Fairy tale endings, 9–11, 38, 41, 72 340
Families, 107; adopted sons/daughters and, Folktales, xvii–xviii
87, 121; curse of inheritance and, 100; Ford, Charles, 204–206, 245
dysfunctions in, 87–88, 130–39, 148, Foreign legion films, 3–4, 46–47, 237–38,
341; in identity narratives, 16; incestu- 259, 334, 339–40
ous representations of, 119–30, 341; in- Forrester, Jack, 313
ternational conflict and, 52; legitimacy Francen, Victor, 43, 126, 258
of children and, 16, 132–33; parental Franck, Dr. Rudolf, 197
absence in, 131–32; women as dis- Frank, Nino, 229
rupters of, 117 Free will and freedom themes, xiii, 5, 22,
Fantastic films, 207, 209, 217, 219 78, 103. See also Destiny
Fantasy kingdoms/nations, 40–41, 102 Fréhel, 50, 110, 171, 232
Far East. See Asian characters and settings French cinema: censorship of, 42, 230–31,
Farces, 4, 18, 220, 334–35 242, 259, 261; competition and, 270,
Father-daughter/son relationships, 19, 49, 285; directorial/artistic creativity in, xii,
121–23, 125, 132–35 xvi–xvii, xxv, 44, 182, 204–205, 215;
Fauchois, René, xxiv export of, 325–27; genres and, xiv–xv,
Femininity (character type), 248, 264–65 203–12, 244; number of films pro-
Femme fatales, 171, 248, 262–64, 346. See duced/released in, 285, 289, 295, 308,
also Sensuality/sexuality 331, 342, 343, 385–86; problems in
Fernandel: directors and, 277, 319; films study of, xi–xii, 244–45, 279–82,
of, 15, 22, 80, 89, 91, 100, 141, 297–99, 301, 303, 380–87; production
150–51, 186–87, 190; popularity of, system of, xii–xiv, 37–38, 59, 290, 308,
261, 266, 270–73, 322, 334, 336, 346; 344–45; in provincial regions, 282,
singing background of, 171 335–37; publicity and, xv, 254, 290,
Ferro, Mark, xxvi 295; quality of, 289–90, 315, 318, 320,
Feu Mathias Pascal (Pirandello), 25 325–28, 345, 377–79; rankings and,
Feuillade, Louis, 145 304–32; reflexivity and, 3, 44, 166,
Feuillère, Edwige, 161, 226, 263–64, 270, 185–90; remakes and, 310–11, 326;
272 sound introduction in, 132, 240, 308,
Feyder, Jacques, 124, 128, 162, 230, 290, 315, 380–82; technical practices and,
318, 325, 335 xiii, xxiii, 53, 146, 152, 188–90; textual
Field, Alice, 127 system of, xii–xvi, 210, 212–17, 266,
Figaro, Le, 266 273–78, 338–42, 345–50. See also Audi-
Film, Le, 235 ences; Box-office success; Film stars
Film Français, Le, xiv, xvi, 204, 218, Fresnay, Pierre, 254, 258, 273, 277–78
235–36, 266, 270 Freudian dramas, 46, 49, 129–30; identity
Film magazines, xiv–xv, 185, 246, 266–71, in, 16–19; Oedipal relationships in, 19,
300, 301–303. See also specific titles 49, 113, 123–25, 127; repression in,
Film stars: child/adolescent, 241–42; film 162–63. See also Psychodramas
magazines and, xv, 185, 246; gender/age Fuzellier, Étienne, 224, 244
preferences by audiences for, 270–72;
glamour of, 185, 215; identity narratives Gabin, Jean: character type discourses and,
and, 10; in older man/younger woman 251, 256, 258, 261–62, 265; films of,
roles, 126–27; popularity of, 266–72; xxi, xxiv, 14–15, 27, 47, 49, 70, 85–87,
production system surrounding, xiv, 96, 114, 116, 119, 146, 191, 240, 330,
213–14; publicity and, xv, 254; reflexiv- 346; as mythic stereotype, xxv, 215–16,
ity and, 185–87 273–78; popularity of, 271–72, 278,
Films d’atmosphère. See Poetic realist films 334; singing background of, 171, 232
Financiers. See Bankers/financiers/industri- Gabrio, Gabriel, 126, 254
alists/bosses Gaël, Josseline, 127, 249
Florelle, 127, 171, 251, 277 Gaietés de l’escadron, Les (Courteline), 82
 440 | Index
Gambling, 23, 42, 89, 99–102, 340 Gun-running narratives, 148–50, 334
Gance, Abel: films of, 44, 52, 56, 58, 66, Guynemer, Georges, 253
119, 178, 183, 318; on modern mythol- Gypsies, 31, 40, 42, 68, 158, 167
ogy, 213
Gangster films, 85, 203, 210 Harlé, P.-A., 288, 298–99
Garat, Henri: character type discourses Harvey, Lilian, 249, 256, 267, 310, 314,
and, 249, 258; films of, 10, 14, 141–42, 345
145, 152, 314, 345; popularity of, 267, Hayakawa, Sessue, 34, 42–44
271, 310; publicity and, 254; singing Hélian, Jacques, 336
background of, 171 Hemingway, Ernest, xxi
Garbo, Greta, 269 High culture, 40, 44, 166–67, 173, 176,
Garçon, François, xi, xxii, xxv–xxvi 213
Gender, 107, 338; audience preferences Hirigoyan, Rudy, 232
and, 270–72; character type discourses Historical films, 57–58, 72–73, 209, 219,
and, 265; identity narratives and, 9–22; 227–29, 320, 335
as opposition metaphors, 20, 45, 94–95, Hitler, Adolf, 238, 259
171–73; social relationships and, Hollywood. See American cinema
120–21. See also Men; Women Holt, Jany, 254
Generational films, 134, 164 Honors. See Awards and prizes
Genevois, Simone, 252 Horror films, 5, 203, 219, 338
Gentleman-crook narratives, 13–14, 145 Horse racing, 89–90, 102, 340
German characters and settings, 31, Hungarian characters and settings, 31,
52–57, 71 33–34, 42, 63, 176
German cinema, 37–38, 338; audience size Husbands, brutal, 134, 136
and, 282; fantasy kingdoms/nations in,
41; French competition with, 285; genre Identity narratives, 3–30, 338; artists in,
as characteristic of, 203; remakes of, 10, 22, 179; categories of, 6–7; class and
310–11; shame narratives in, 16; youth gender in, 9–22; destiny and, 22–30;
in, 134, 241–42. See also Expressionism disguises/concealment in, 6, 10, 78;
Gieure, René, 232 double lives in, 16–19, 130, 148, 340;
Gil, Gilbert, 127 enigmas in, 5, 7, 16; mistaken, 6, 20,
Gilbert, John, 271 30, 348; pleasurable mechanisms of, 7–9
Giono, Jean, 195 Illery, Pola, 114, 248
Glory, Marie, 69, 256 Image et Son (film magazine), 204, 230–31
Godard, Jean, 313 Incestuous relationships, 19, 119–30, 341
Godard, Jean-Luc, 188 India. See Asian characters and settings
Goebbels, Joseph, 222–23 Industrialists. See Bankers/financiers/indus-
Good-time girls, 22, 83, 108, 113, 340 trialists/bosses
Gorel, Michel, 222 Ingénues (character type), xv, 248, 345
Goya, Mona, 256 Inheritances, 23, 78, 99–102, 340
Gravey, Fernand, 141–42, 249, 254, 258 Inkijinoff, Valéry, 34
Greco, Juliette, 232 Inspectors. See Detective films
Grégor, Nora, 277 Inter-racial narratives, 46, 48–49, 130
Grémillon, Jean, 69, 144, 169, 335 Internationalist films, 51, 55–57, 339
Gréville, Vanda, 263 Italian characters and settings, 31, 33, 44,
Guarino, Joseph, 313, 386 147, 264
Guétary, Georges, 232 Italian cinema, 237, 259, 282, 285
Guibert, Yvette, 171
Guillaumet, Henri, 253 Jaeger-Schmidt, André, 313, 386
Guitry, Sacha: films of, 56, 58, 60, 73, 99, Jarville (union official), 298
101, 105, 112–13, 122–23, 126, 130, Jeancolas, J.-P., xii, xxv, 303
179–80, 229; popularity of, 271, Jeanne, René, 205, 245
322–23; technical practices of, 189 Jeanson, Henri, 179
 Index | 441
Jewish stereotypes, 40, 68–71, 75, 258 Luguet, André, 251
Joannon, Léo, 313 Lumière, Louis, 326
Jouvet, Louis: character type discourses Lynen, Robert, 316
and, 261; directors and, 277; films of, 4,
17, 93, 142, 179–80, 192; popularity of, MacDonald, Jeanette, 267
266, 271, 277–78 Mad doctors, 79
Joyeux, Odette, 267 Malraux, André, xxi, xxiv, 42, 213,
274–75, 331
Keim, Jean, 209–10, 217–20, 226, 228, Manès, Gina, 267
230, 232 Marais, Jean, 272–73
Kidnapping narratives, 148 Marca-Rosa, Youly, 386
Korène, Véra, 254, 264 Marèse, Dany, 248
Mariano, Luis, 336
Lady-killers, 114, 119, 160, 182–84 Marion, Denis, 205, 243
Lagardère, 126 Marriage relationships, 20, 107, 122,
Lagny, Michèle, xxv 135–38
Lagrange, Louise, 267 Mathot, Léon, 144, 271, 326
Lamarr, Hedy, 315 Mauriac, Claude, 205, 215, 224, 275
Lamy, Charles, 69 Mechanical creatures, 7, 27–30
Land, importance of, as theme, 195–96 Media, 65, 151–53, 258, 339
Lang, Fritz, 79, 97, 146, 316 Mediterranean characters and settings, 264
Lange, 151, 188 Meerson, Lazare, 86, 320
Lanvin, Lisette, 254, 264 Melodramas, xiii, 211; children in, 154,
Larquey, Pierre, 152, 277 157; class in, 80, 85–86, 88; destiny in,
Laundresses, 91, 93, 99, 340 24; family dysfunction in, 130–31; iden-
Lawyers, 14, 17, 141–43 tity in, 5, 7, 10; law/legal system in, 144;
Le Vigan, Robert, 6, 23, 47, 191 popularity of, 334–35; prostitutes in,
Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 242 109; settings for, 59; urban-rural con-
Lebanon. See Middle Eastern characters flicts in, 64
and settings Men: criminality and, 13–14, 145, 160; as
Lebon, Yvette, 264 lady-killers, 114, 119, 160, 182–84;
Leclerc, Ginette, 116 masculinity of, 132–35, 341; misogyny
Leenhardt, Roger, 228, 230 of, 112–13, 147; sexual indiscretions of,
Lefèvre, René, 249–50, 277, 310, 334, 345 160–61; social class and, 108; treach-
Left Bank/Montparnasse (Paris), 58, 65–66 ery/betrayals by, 118
Legal institutions, 14, 82, 133, 140–53, 164 Middle class. See Bourgeoisie
Legitimacy of children, 16, 132–33 Middle Eastern characters and settings,
Lemonnier, Meg, 251 33–34, 45–46, 48, 148
Leprohon, Pierre, 205, 207, 233–34, 236, Military vaudevilles, 229, 231, 244; iden-
238–39, 243, 244 tity in, 19–20; international conflict
Leroux, Gaston, 152 and, 55, 238; popularity of, 191, 310,
L’Herbier, Marcel, 25, 57, 180, 225, 253, 334, 339, 345
318, 323, 335 Milton, Georges, 90, 250, 309–10, 319,
Liberty themes, xiii, 78, 103 334, 345
Lille, France, 336 Mirande, Yves, 105, 179, 229, 323
Litvak, Anatole, 323 Mireille, 255
Location films, 242 Misogyny, 112–13, 147
Lorre, Peter, 149 Misraki, Paul, 176
Loti, Pierre, 49 Mistaken identity, 6, 20, 30, 348
Lottery wins, 23, 26, 78, 99–100, 102, Mistinguett, 171, 175, 176, 232
340–41, 348 Mittler, Leo, 313, 386
Love, transcendence of, 78, 136, 196–97, Modot, Gaston, 278
199 Monca, Georges, 386
 442 | Index
Mongolia. See Asian characters and the provinces as, 51, 57–68; political
settings criticism and, 40–42
Montage sequences, 152 Nationalism, 51, 248, 258–61, 265, 320
Montand, Yves, 232 Nature: artists and, 133; character type dis-
Montesquieu, C.-L. de Secondat, baron de, course and, 248, 255–57; exoticism and,
xxiv 234; tramps and, 76; transcendence of,
Montherlant, H.-M.-J. Millon de, xxi 196–200, 338; urban-rural conflicts
Montmartre/Pigalle (Paris), 36, 58, 65–66, and, 63, 67–68; working class and,
98, 340 91–93. See also Open road settings
Moral regeneration (character type), 248, Navarro, Ramon, 267, 271
258–61, 265, 346 Negroes, 175, 347
Morand, Paul, xxiv Nightclubs, xiii, 64, 85, 101, 191, 340
Moreno, Marguerite, 112 Nobility, 10, 17, 22, 33–34, 72–74, 120
Morgan, Michèle: character type discourses Noël-Noël, xxiii, 318, 348
and, 255; films of, 96, 117, 119, 127, Noguero, José, 252
330; as mythic stereotype, 273–78; pop- Nord Films, 386
ularity of, 267, 270, 272 North African characters and settings, 33,
Morin, Edgar, 207–208 45, 48–51, 63, 98–99, 148
Morlay, Gaby, 257, 335 Nostalgia, 39, 50–51, 98–99, 159, 227
Morocco. See North African characters and
settings Ocean liners, 24
Mosjoukine, Ivan, 267, 271 Oceania. See Asian characters and settings
Mother-son relationships, 19, 127–29 Oedipal relationships, 19, 49, 113,
Mountain films, 197 123–25, 127
Mourre, Antoine, 313 Older man/woman–younger woman/man
Moussinac, Léon, 204, 226 relationships, 113, 119–29, 154,
Murat, Jean: character type discourses and, 340–41
xxii, 251–52, 256, 258, 261; films of, Open-air restaurants (guinguette), xiii, 67,
126, 141, 152, 320; popularity of, 92–93, 199, 340
267–68, 271 Open road settings, 12, 76–77, 103, 199,
Murder mysteries, 5, 35, 111, 140, 152, 340–41
209, 219, 244. See also Crime films; De- Operettas, xiii, 170, 220
tective films Ophüls, Max, 28, 183, 190, 316, 323
Music and musicians: as artists, 166–67; Oppositions, 342; of city/country, 62–68,
background, xiii, 176; big bands and, 161, 173, 187, 199; of gender, 20, 45,
175–76, 336, 347; destiny represented 94–95, 171–73; of identity, 9; of mas-
by, 27–28, 30; identity and, 10–11; culinity, 132–35, 341; musical, 77–78,
Negro, 175, 347; oppositions and, 133, 176; of nature/society, 199; of
77–78, 133, 176; singers and, xiii, night/day, 199; of public
77–78, 90–91, 170–73, 340, 347 celebration/private despair, xix, 73; of
Musical comedies, 170, 204, 217, 223, the real and the recorded, 181; of sincer-
229, 231–33, 244, 335–36 ity and glamour/money, 78–79, 101,
Musset, Alfred de, xviii–xix 110–11, 341–42; of technical practices,
Mussolini, Benito, 237, 259 xxiii; of true love, 136, 197
Mythology, modern. See French cinema, Orientals. See Asian characters and settings
textual system of Orphans or abandoned children, xiii, 5,
87–88, 131–32, 157, 340–41
National stereotypes, 31–71, 339–40; Otherness, 34, 115, 117, 233–36
artistic culture and, 40, 44; erotic desire Outsiders, xxiv, 71, 141, 168, 346
and, 39, 42–44; French civilization ex-
pansion and, 40, 45–51; functions of, Pabst, George, 42, 56, 85, 316
39–57; international conflict and, Pacific area characters and settings, 33–34,
51–57; nostalgia and, 50–51; Paris and 79, 103, 148
 Index | 443
Pacifist films, 52, 54, 238 Predictions and prophecies, 24–25, 348
Pagnol, Marcel: films of, 59, 61, 65, 74, Préjean, Albert: character type discourses
81, 126, 134, 195, 218, 330; and, 249–51, 253, 256, 345; films of,
popularity of films by, 79, 155, 316, 50, 86, 146, 150, 152; popularity of,
318, 323; satire of American cinema 271
by, 187 Presle, Micheline, 267, 273
Painters/sculptors, 167, 176 Pretext narratives, 19–21
Pallu, Georges, 313, 386 Prévert, Jacques, 79, 86, 131, 179, 230,
Paris: film audiences in, 282; theaters in, 312
291, 294–95 Prim, Suzy, 263, 277
Parisian characters and settings, 57–68; Prisons and prisoners, 144–45, 155–57,
neighborhoods and, 36, 58, 65–66, 98, 164, 342
340; nostalgia for, 51–52, 98–99; the Private despair. See Public celebration and
poor and, 80; Russian exile and, 36; private despair
urban-rural conflicts and, 63–68, 161, Private detectives. See Detective films
173, 187, 199 Prizes. See Awards and prizes
Parlo, Dita, 254–55 Professors, 120–21, 154–55, 164
Péguy, Robert, 386 Propaganda films, 236–37, 239, 243, 259,
Period films. See Historical films 384
Perojo, Benito, 313, 386 Prostitutes, 108–109, 113
Pétain, Philippe, 250 Provence, film industry in, 336
Petrovitch Ivan, 268, 271 Provincial characters and settings, 57–68,
Philipe, Gérard, 182, 272–73 173; Camargue region, 61–62; Côte
Piaf, Edith, 171, 232 d’Azur, 59–60, 62; Marseille, 60, 62,
Pinel, Vincent, 380–84, 386–87 336; Midi region, 58–62. See also
Poetic realist films, xi, xxiii, 72, 84, 86–87, Urban-rural conflicts
133, 222, 238, 243–44, 347 Psychodramas, 79, 115, 178, 193, 209–10,
Police dramas, 76 217–18, 334, 345. See also Freudian
Polish characters and settings, 33, 37, 115, dramas
322 Public celebration and private despair, xix,
Political authority, criticism of, 40–42, 73
104, 230–31, 322 Pujol, René, 386
Polynesia. See Pacific area characters and Pygmalion stories, 15–16
settings
Poor (social class), 80–81, 88, 92, Racism and racial stereotypes, 16,
100–101 34–35
Popescu, Elvire, 112, 129, 264 Raimu: acting ability of, 273; character
Popular culture, 166, 216, 266, 347 type discourses and, 261; films of, 70,
Popular Front, xi, xxiv, xxv, 72, 87, 290, 126, 134, 161; honors/awards for, 326;
322 popularity of, 267, 271–72
Popular heroes, xx; aviators, xiii, xxi–xxiii, Realist dramas, 80, 90, 99–100, 171,
22, 94, 252–53, 340, 347–48; 239–41
doomed figures, xxiii–xxiv, 86–87; Reflexivity, 138–39; on artists/artistic life,
engineers, 45–46, 339–40, 347; 120, 179–85; on filmmaking, 3, 44,
sportifs, 22, 88–90, 150, 248, 251–53, 166, 185–90
255, 340 Reformatories, 155–56, 342
Popular vitality (character type), 248, Régent, Roger, 205, 235, 276
249–51, 345 Reichmann, Max, 313
Pornon, C., 207 Religious films, 15, 92, 191–95, 244, 265,
Ports/docks/wharves, 96, 340 338–39
Positif (film magazine), 203–204 Rellys, 100, 250, 345
Pour Vous (film magazine), 241, 246, 252, Renaitour inquiry, 231, 298
257, 267, 273–74, 301 Renaud, Madeleine, 249
 444 | Index
Renoir, Jean: actors and, 277; films of, Semaine de Paris, La, 303, 385
xviii, xxi–xxv, 12, 30, 104–106, 109, Sensuality/sexuality: adopted sons/daugh-
146, 179, 198, 200, 330, 348; ters and, 87; boulevard comedies and,
honors/awards for, 326; popularity of 138; character type discourse and, 248,
films by, 312–13, 316 262–64; exoticism and, 39, 42–44, 136,
Renoir, Pierre, 27, 126, 146, 277 264; nature and, 199; shame narratives
Reporters, 151–53, 340, 348 of, 160–63; transgender roles and,
Reri, 235 18–21; urban-rural conflicts and, 63
Retour de flamme (Louwyck), xxii Sentimentalism, 84, 86, 218
Revenge narratives, 132 Servais, Franck, 240
Revolutionary narratives, 37 Servais, Jean, 254, 261
Revue du Cinéma, La (film magazine), Sévérac, Jacques, 313, 386
203 Shame narratives, 16, 159–65
Rice, Elmer, 206 Sherbane, Vera, 248
Richard-Willm, Pierre, 43, 141, 251, 254, Simon, Michel: directors and, 277; films
256 of, 83, 92, 117, 134, 181, 310, 330;
Richebé, Roger, 59, 288 popularity of, 334
Rivers, Fernand, 229 Simon, Simone, 129, 254, 263, 277
Rivette, J., 211 Sincerity, 78–79, 101, 110–11, 137,
Roanne, André, xxii, 127, 150, 249, 252, 182–84, 341–42
268, 271 Singers, xiii, 77–78, 90–91, 170–73, 340,
Robin Hood figures, 145, 208, 226 347
Robinson, Madeleine, 255 Siodmak, Robert, 85
Roger, Jos, 205 Slapstick comedies, 229–33
Rogers, Charles, 268, 271 Social classes: bourgeoisie, 13, 17, 63, 72,
Rohmer, Eric, 218 73–84, 90, 130–40, 146–47, 185, 271,
Role reversal films, 13 283; character type discourses and, 265;
Romains, Jules, 41 identity narratives and, 9–22; men de-
Romance, Viviane, 116, 127, 263, 264 fined by, 108; nobility, 10, 17, 22,
Rosay, Françoise, 112, 127–28, 169, 254, 33–34, 72–73, 120; as organizing prin-
272 ciple, 104–106, 338; poor, 80–81, 88,
Rosca, Gabriel, 386 92, 100–101; working class, 17, 21, 60,
Rossi, Tino, 66, 116, 171, 173, 175, 63, 82–106, 140, 147, 169–70, 185,
231–32, 335 265, 271, 283
Roudès, Gaston, 383, 386 Social mobility, 65
Rozier, Jacques, 331, 386 Social realism, 84–86, 96, 157. See also Re-
Russian characters and settings, 31, 33, alist dramas
35–37, 68, 79, 103, 115, 135, 148, 322, Socio-political transformation films,
334 102–104
South American characters and settings,
Sadoul, Georges, 204–205, 245, 382 33, 51, 148
St. Cyr, Renée, 127, 249 Southeast Asia. See Asian characters and
St. Exupéry, A.-M.-R. de, xxi–xxii, 45, settings
194, 253 Spaak, Charles, 69, 206
Same-sex relationships, 21 Spanish characters and settings, 33, 42, 68,
Satires, 230 147, 193, 264
Schools. See Education themes Sportifs (character type), 22, 88–90, 150,
Schoukens, 383 248, 251–53, 255, 340
Science fiction films, 219, 338 Sporting arenas, 88–89, 340
Scriptwriting and writers, 120, 185, 206, Spy films, 21, 35, 52–54, 90, 115, 192,
240 226, 322, 330, 334, 339–40, 346
Sellier, Geneviève, xi, xxv Stand-in narratives, 12–13
 Index | 445
Stars. See Film stars Tunisia. See North African characters and
Street films, 85–87 settings
Street singers, xiii, 90–91, 170 Twins, xiii, 5–6, 108, 340
Streets, as dangerous locales, xxiii, 34, 240
Students and student life, 63, 64, 158–59 Uncle-niece relationships, 122, 125
Sudan. See Middle Eastern characters and Understudy narratives, 12
settings Urban-rural conflicts, 62–68, 92, 109,
Surrealism, 79, 155 161, 173, 187, 199
Swashbuckler films, 211, 228 Urbanization themes, 154, 169
Swing music. See Big bands
Sydney, Sylvia, 249 Valentino, Rudolph, 268, 271
Syria. See Middle Eastern characters and Vamps, 53, 116, 130, 149, 263, 340, 346
settings van Parys, G., 232
Vanel, Charles: character type discourses
Tallenay, J.-L., 224 and, 256, 258, 261–62; films of, 49,
Tarride, Abel, 146 116, 126, 163, 181, 238; popularity of,
Tati, Jacques, 224, 273 267, 271–72
Taxi drivers/chauffeurs, 93–94, 347 Vaudevilles, xiii, 172, 220
Teachers. See Professors Ventura, Ray, 176, 336
Technical practices, xiii, xxiii, 53, 146, Vernay, Anne, 264
152, 188–90 Vernay, Robert, 313
Technology themes, 27, 77, 347 Vernon, Suzy, 249, 267
Temple, Shirley, 269 Vichy period, xi, xxv, 62, 195, 231, 243
Terac/Bussi, Solange, 313 Vincendeau, Ginette, xxv, 282
Tessier, Valentine, 277 Voltaire, xxiv
Theaters: double programs and, 292; num- von Stroheim, Eric, 54–55, 57, 115, 155,
bers of, 291, 293–95; release patterns in, 198, 277–78
294–97, 301, 303–305, 320, 331–32;
seating capacity of, 303–304; sound Wahkevitch, Georges, 320
conversion in, 291, 315, 380; ticket Walsh, Raoul, 46
price competition, 292–93 War films, 51–52, 54–57, 210–11, 217,
Thérive, André, 240 219–20, 225–29, 322, 330
Thieves, gentlemen, 13–14, 145 Weill, Pierre, 313, 386
Ticket prices, 292–93 Westerns, xvii–xviii, 46, 51, 209–10, 212,
Tissier, Jean, 267 219
Torre, Giulio del, 313 Women: criminality and, 84, 108–109,
Toulouse, film industry in, 336 113–15, 140, 156, 171; as disrupters of
Tourneur, Jacques, 317 families, 117; duplicity/treachery of, 17,
Tourneur, Maurice, 86, 222, 317 53, 61, 115–19, 144, 340; as femme fa-
Toutain, Roland, xxii, 152–53, 252–54, tales, 171, 248, 262–64, 346; as good-
278 time girls, 22, 83, 108, 113, 340; as
Tragedies, 24, 211, 217–18 lawyers, 143; misogyny and, 112–13,
Trains, 24, 95 147; physicality of, 108–11; power of,
Tramps, xiii, 22, 25, 76–78, 340 111–13; quasi-religious iconography of,
Transvestism and transgender roles, 18–21 91–92; as revitalizing agents, 83, 108;
Trapeze artists. See Circuses and circus sexual indiscretions of, 160–62; as spies,
folk 53, 115; as vamps, 53, 116, 130, 149,
Trauner, Alexandre, 320 263, 340, 346
Trénet, Charles, 98, 173, 232, 249–50, Working class: character type discourses
254 and, 265; cinema-going and, 283;
Tricksters, 6, 21–22, 150–51, 179 creativity of, 185; criminality and,
Truffaut, François, 218, 328 17, 60, 63, 82–95, 140, 147, 169–70;
 446 | Index
escape for, 92, 95–106; film star Wright, Will, xvii
preferences of, 271; nature myth and, Writers, 167, 184–85
91–93; sportifs and, 88–90; street Wulschleger, Henry, 310, 319–20
singers and, 90–91, 170; taxi
drivers/chauffeurs and, 93–94; tricksters Youth films, 211, 241–42, 244, 339
and, 21 Youthful innocence (character type), 248,
World wars, xi, 52, 222–23, 328–31 249–51, 345
 FILM INDEX

The index includes films mentioned in the text regardless of country or date of produc-
tion. The numbers in parentheses refer to the chronological Filmography.

À l’ouest rien de nouveau, 226–27 Amants terribles, Les (36.4), 319

À mi-chemin du ciel (30.1), 147, 168 Åme de clown, or Teddy et partner (33.5),
À minuit le 7 (36.1), 144, 146 169
À nous deux, Madame la vie (36.2), 102 Ami Fritz, L’ (33.6), 112, 120, 316
À nous la liberté (31.1), 12–13, 27, 76–77, Amour chante, L’ (30.3), 154
80, 103, 145, 199, 230 Amour en cage, L’ (34.4), 12
À Venise une nuit (37.1), 137, 150 Amour en vitesse, L’ (32.5), 13
Abbé Constantin, L’ (33.1), 38, 78, 192 Amour et la veine, L’ (32.6), 99
Abus de confiance (37.2), 91, 131, 143, Amour guide, L’ (33.7), 197
156, 170, 188, 332 Amour qu’il faut aux femmes, L’ (33s1), 384
Accord final (38.1), 23, 179, 296 Amour . . . amour (32.7), 13
Accroche-Cœur, L’ (38.2), 14, 101, 145 Amoureuse aventure, L’ (31.7), 17
Accusée, levez-vous! (30.2), 171, 308, 310 Amoureux sont seuls au monde, 266
Acrobaties aériennes, Les, xxii Amours de minuit, Les (30.4), 171
Adémaï au Moyen-Age (35.1), 22 Amours de Pergolèse, Les (32.8), 44, 176
Adémaï aviateur (34.1), 318, 326 Andalousie, 335
Adieu les beaux jours (33.2), 240 Åne de Buridan, L’ (32.9), 119
Adieu Vienne (39s1), 34, 176, 313 Ange du foyer, L’ (36.5), 122
Adrienne Lecouvreur (38.3), 318 Ange gardien, L’ (33.8), 95
Affaire du courrier de Lyon, L’ (37.3), 148 Ange que j’ai vendu, L’ (38.6), 175, 187
Affaire est dans le sac, L’ (32s1), 230, 312, Angèle (34.5), 59, 61, 66, 134, 257, 318,
381 332
Affaire Lafarge, L’ (37.4), 134, 136, Anne-Marie (36.6), xxii, 45
296–97 Antonia, romance hongroise (34.6), 127
Affaires publiques, Les, 230 Appel de la vie, L’ (37.10), 126, 154
Afrique vous parle, L’, 233 Appel du silence, L’ (36.7), 46, 48, 50,
Åge d’or, L’ (30s2), 383 69–70, 189, 193–94, 237, 320
Agonie des Aigles, L’ (33.3), 58 Après l’amour (31.8), 120, 124, 154
Ah! Quelle gare (32.3), 383 Argent, L’ (36.8), xxiv, 74, 118, 253
Aiglon, L’ (31.3), 58, 314 Ariane, jeune fille russe (31.9), 36, 120, 159
Ailes blanches, Les, xxii Aristo, L’ (34.7), 77
Air pur, 242 Arlette et ses papas (34.8), 137
Alerte au sud, 332 Around the World in Eighty Days, 284
Alerte en Méditerranée (38.4), 55, 149, Arsène Lupin, detective (37.11), 14, 81, 150
237, 238, 259, 326, 330 Arthur (30.9), 109
Alexis, gentleman-chaffeur (37.5), 94 As du turf, Les (32.10), 88, 99, 102
Algiers, 326 Assaut, L’ (36.9), 147, 160
Alibi, L’ (37.6), 21, 175, 198, 199 Atalante, L’ (34.9), 20, 28, 66–67, 95, 318
Aloha, le chant des îles (37.7), 44 Athlète incomplet, L’ (32.11), 22
Altitude 3200 (38.5), 197, 242, 317, 334 Atlantide, L’ (32.12), 111, 194, 312, 336
 448 | Film Index
Atlantis, 310 Belle de Montparnasse, La (37.15), 122
Atout-cœur (31.10), 334 Belle Équipe, La (36.17), 92, 97, 99–101,
Au bonheur des dames, xix 104, 116, 191, 273, 322–23, 326
Au bout du monde (33.10), 37 Belle Étoile (38.10), 148
Au-delà des grilles, 274 Belle Marinière, La (32.20), 95
Au grand balcon, xxii Belle Revanche, La (38.11), 178
Au nom de la loi (31.11), 115, 149, 225, Ben Hur, 332
312 Berlingot et Cie (39.4), 77, 87, 168–69
Au pays des buveurs de sang (30s4), 233 Bête humaine, La (38.12), xix, 5, 27, 123,
Au pays du soleil (33.11), 60 146, 148, 219, 278, 329–30
Au service de Tsar (36.10), 37, 322 Bibi la Purée (34.14), 14, 132
Au soleil de Marseille (37.12), 59, 61 Bichon (35.11), 320
Au son des guitares (36.11), 77, 116, 173 Bidon d’or, Le (32s2), 22, 252
Aux jardins de Murcie (35.4), 33 Big House (30.12), 145, 311
Aux yeux du souvenir, xxii Big Trail, 46
Avec l’assurance (32.14), 60 Billet de logement, Le (32.21), 18
Avec le sourire (36.12), 171 Blanc et le noir, Le (30.13), 16, 113, 175
Aventure à Paris (36.13), 78, 183 Blanchette (36.19), 64, 80, 109, 186
Aventures du roi Pausole, Les (33.12), 41, Bleus de la marine, Les (34.16), 82, 231
82, 103, 199 Bleus de l’amour, Les (32.22), 112
Aventurier, L’ (34.12), 160, 318 Bleus du ciel, Les, or L’Avion blanc (33.18),
Aviateur, L’ (31.13), 22, 39, 152, 253 94
Avion de minuit, L’ (38.7), xxii Bluffeur, Le (32.23), 81
Azaïs (31.14), 22, 24 Bodega, La (30.14), 146, 308
Bois sacré, Le (39.5), 112, 331
Baccara (35.5), 56, 102, 114, 137, 320, Boissière (37.16), 56, 124
323 Boîte de nuit, 335
Bach en correctionnelle, 310 Bonheur, Le (35.12), xx, 25, 111, 151,
Bach millionnaire (33.13), 78, 310, 334 180–81, 183, 318
Baleydier (31.16), 187 Bonne Aventure, La (32.24), 25
Bande à Bouboule, La (31.17), 90, 94, 309, Bonne Chance (35.13), 93, 99, 123, 137,
314 167
Bandera, La (35.6), 23–24, 47–48, 51, Bossu, Le (34.17), 73, 121, 228
191, 273–74, 312, 320, 323, 325–26 Bouboule 1er roi nègre (33.19), 90, 309
Banque Némo, La (34.13), 81 Boudu sauvé des eaux (32.25), xxiv, 77, 84,
Bar du sud (38.8), 47, 149, 238, 261 190, 199, 313
Barcarolle (35.7), 137 Boulanger de Valorgues, Le, 336
Bariole (32.16), 177 Boulot aviateur (37.17), 94
Barnabé (38.9), 179 Bourrachon (35.14), 118, 154
Baron Münchausen, 285 Bourrasque (35.15), 48
Baron Tzigane, Le (35.8), 42 Bout de chou (35.16), 64
Baroud (31.18), 48 Boutique aux illusions, La (39s3), 93, 313,
Barranco, Ltd, or Le Bon Filon (32.17), 77 347, 384
Bas-Fonds, Les (36.15), 15, 36, 76, 86, Branlebas de combat, 237, 259
108, 199, 273, 278, 312, 322, 325–26 Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo (39.6), 46, 237
Bataille, La (33.16), 315 Brevet 95–75 (34.18), xxii, 148
Bataille silencieuse, La (37.14), 152, 159, Bridge on the River Kwai, 332
326 Brigade en jupons, La (36.20), 157
Battement de cœur (39.2), 131, 331 Brigade sauvage, La (39.7), 36, 56
Beaux Jours, Les (35.9), 319 Brumes de Paris (32s3), 383
Béguin de la garnison, Le (32.18), 172
Belle Aventure, La (32.19), 137 Café de Paris (38.14), 76, 79, 147, 151,
Belle de Cadix, La, 332 326
 Film Index | 449
Café du Port, Le (39.8), 173 Chanteur de Mexico, Le, 336
Caïn, aventure des mers exotiques (30.15), Chanteur de minuit, Le (37.20), 159
44, 335, 382 Chanteur de Séville, Le (30.20), 33, 193,
Camp volant (31.23), 144 311
Campement 13 (39.9), 125 Chanteur inconnu, Le (31.29), 336
Cap perdu, Le (31.24), 124, 126 Charlemagne (33.29), 13, 336
Capitaine Benoît, Le (38.15), 54, 320, 330 Charrette fantôme, La (39.12), 193
Capitaine Craddock, Le (31.25), 60 Chasseur de chez Maxim’s, Le (32.32), 16
Caprice de princesse (33.20), 9, 78 Chaste Suzanne, La (37.21), 154
Caravane (34.20), 42, 100 Château de rêve (33.30), 10
Carillon de la liberté, Le (32s4), 383 Châtelaine du Liban, La (33.31), 317, 320
Carnet de bal (37.117), 142, 147, 197 Chemin de l’honneur, Le (39.15), 18, 47
Carrefour (38.16), 13, 26–27, 108, Chemin de Rio, Le, or Cargaison blanche
147–48, 162–63, 175, 326 (36.23), 148, 152
Cartouche (34.21), 148, 197 Chemin du bonheur, Le (33.32), 159
Cas du docteur Brenner, Le (32.27), 13, 144 Chemin du paradis, Le (30.21), 81, 189,
Casanova (33.21), 57 231–32, 308, 310
Casbah, 326 Chemineau, Le (35.19), 142
Caserne en folie, La (34.22), 10 Chéri de sa concierge, Le (34.27), 11, 24
Cavalcade d’amour (39.11), xxiv, 137–38, Chéri-Bibi (37.22), 96, 99, 144
180 Chevaliers de la montagne, Les (30.23), 197
Cavalerie légère (35.17), 175 Chevauchée héroïque, La, 237
Cavalier Lafleur (34.23), 119 Chez les mangeurs d’hommes, 233
Cendrillon de Paris (30.17), 120, 125 Chien jaune, Le (32.33), 146
Ces messieurs de la Santé (33.23), 13, 70, Chienne, La (31.31), xix, 85, 109, 146,
74–75, 149, 230 313, 326
César (36.21), 59–60, 124, 132, 318, 320, Chipée (37.23), 137, 183
323, 332 Chiqué (30s5), 39, 85, 308, 383
Cessez le feu, or Amis comme autrefois Chômeur de clochemerle, Le, 334
(34.24), 56 Chotard et Cie (32.34), 74, 177, 313
C’était un musicien (33.24), 179 Chouchou poids plume (32.35), 12, 39, 88
Cette sacrée gamine, 266 Christine, 332
Cette vieille canaille (33.26), 15, 121, 126, Ciel est à vous, Le, xi, xx, xxii–xxiii, 253
170, 323 Cigalon (35.20), 59, 61, 93, 323
Ceux du ciel, xxii Cinderella (37.25), 16, 110, 284
Chabichou, 385 Cinq gentlemen maudits, Les (31.32), 25
Chacun sa chance (30.18), 14–15, 147, 189 Cinq Sous de Lavarède, Les (39.16), 22, 89,
Chacun son tour, 335 100, 149, 153, 187
Chair ardente (32.29), 17 Circonstances atténuantes (39.17), 17, 83,
Chaleur du sein, La (38.18), 39, 134–35, 90, 142–43, 328, 330
171 Citadelle du silence, La (37.26), 37, 103,
Champion du régiment, Le (32.30), 15 318
Champions de France (38.19), 89, 252 Claudine à l’école (37.27), 297
Chance, La (31.27), 101 Cleopatra, 284
Chanson de l’adieu, La (34.25), 44, 176, Clown Bux, Le (35.21), 169
178 Club de femmes (36.24), 156
Chanson des nations, La (30.19), 56 Club des fadas, Le (39.18), 62
Chanson du lin, La (31s2), 386 Cœur de Lilas (31.34), 85, 92, 117, 142,
Chanson du souvenir, La (36.22), 171 182, 198, 225, 240, 323, 334
Chanson d’une nuit, La (32.31), 334 Cœur de Paris, Le (31.35), 79
Chansons de Paris (34.26), 91, 170 Cœur dispose, Le (36.26), 136
Chant de l’amour, Le (35.18), 93 Cœur ébloui, Le (38.22), 159
Chant du destin, Le (33.28), 11 Cœurs joyeux (31.36), 39, 85, 144
 450 | Film Index
Cœur sur la main, Le, 334 Dans les rues (33.41), 85–86, 102, 160,
Cognasse (32.39), 103 170, 196, 240–41
Colette et son mari (32s5), 120, 126, 150 Danseuse rouge, La (37.32), 334
Collier de la reine, Le (29s1), 57, 227, 307, Danton (32.48), 57
381–82 Danube bleu, Le (39.20), 51
Colomba (33.35), 57, 313 David Golder (30.27), 77, 335
Compartiment de dames seules (34.29), 19, De Mayerling à Sarajevo (39.21), xx, 34,
24, 128 323
Complice, La (32.40), 95 Debout là-dedans (35.29), 13
Comte Obligado, Le (34.30), 10, 12, 76, Dédé (34.34), 84–85, 142
78, 99–101, 110, 142 Défenseur, Le (30.28), 81, 144
Condition humaine, La (31.11), 149 Dégourdis de la 11e, Les (37.33), 322
Conduisez-moi, Madame (32.41), 73, 81 Demi-Vierges, Les (36.31), 64, 161
Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 325 Dernier Milliardaire, Le (34.35), 40, 80,
Congrès s’amuse, Le (31.38), 9–10, 83, 101, 315, 325
231–32, 310, 314, 332 Dernier Tourant, Le (39.23), 24, 90, 116,
Coquecigrole (31.39), 87, 131, 180 183, 349
Coralie et Cie (33.37), 316 Dernière Heure (34.36), 134
Corbeau, Le, xi, 222 Dernière Jeunesse (39.24), 121, 126
Côte d’Azur (31.42), 11, 59 Dernière Nuit, La (33.42), 160
Coucher de la mariée, Le (33.38), 137, 315 Dernière Valse, La (35.30), 36
Count of Monte Cristo, The, 144 Dernières Vacances, Les, xi
Coup de feu à l’aube (32.42), 186 Derrière la façade (39.25), 76, 143, 323
Coupable, Le (36.27), 14, 81, 92, 95, Désiré (37.34), 105, 130, 172
132–33, 142, 160, 322, 334 Deux combinards, Les (37.35), 13, 81
Coups de roulis (31.43), 83, 172 Deux Favoris, Les (36.32), 89
Courrier d’Asie (39s5), 49, 384 Deux fois vingt ans (30.30), 127
Courrier-Sud (36.28), xxi–xxii, 194, 253 Deux Gamines, Les (36.33), 154, 157
Crainquebille (33.39), 154, 316 Deux Gosses, Les (36.34), 154
Crime de Monsieur Lange, Le (35.27), 4, Deux Mondes, Les (30.31), 69
15, 79, 85, 87, 93, 97, 102–104, 151, Deux ‘Monsieur’ de Madame, Les (33.44),
171, 322 100, 137
Crime du Chemin Rouge, Le (32.45), 142, Deux Orphelines, Les (32.50), 10, 24, 80,
144, 313 87, 131, 227, 336
Crime et châtiment (35.28), 23, 36, 86, Deuxième Bureau (35.31), 53–54, 320,
108, 159, 318, 325–26 328, 332
Crise est finie, La (34.31), 66, 78, 81, 85, Deuxième Bureau contre Kommandantur
90, 175, 190, 223 (39.27), 54, 90, 192, 320, 330
Croisière jaune, La (31s4), 233, 325, 384 Direct au cœur (32.51), 88–89
Croisière noire, La, 242, 384 Disparu de l’ascenseur, Le (31.49), 169
Croix de bois (31.45), 52, 54–55, 226, 312, Disparus de St. Agil, Les (38.25), 57,
314, 326, 332, 336 96–97, 146, 153, 155, 242, 349
Croix du sud, La (31.46), 49 Disque 413, Le (36.35), 35
Cure sentimental, 313 Divine (35.34), 64, 171, 323
Domino vert, Le (35.35), 144
Dactylo (31.47), 11, 73 Dompteur, Le (38.26), 100, 320
Dactylo se marie (34.32), 73 Don Camillo, 224, 266
Dakota 308, xxii Don Juan, 332, 334
Dame de chez Maxim’s, La (32.47), 17, 66, Donogoo (36.36), 41
83 Dora Nelson (35.36), 12
Dame de Malacca, La (37.30), 43, 136, Drame de Shanghaï, Le (38.27), 17–18,
155, 319 34–35, 37, 42, 96, 108, 117, 152,
D’amour et d’eau fraîche (33.40), 23 163–64, 175, 177
 Film Index | 451
Drôle de drame (37.37), 14, 18–19, 35, 92, Étrange Monsieur Victor, L’ (37.40), 13, 79,
185, 192, 230, 323 144, 147, 334
Du haut en bas (33.45), 240, 316, 326 Eusèbe, député (38.33), 65
Duchesse de Langeais, La, xix Ève cherche un père (33.49), 122–23
Duel, Le (39.28), 193 Exstase (32.57), 315

Échec au roi (31.51), 167 Face au bolchevisme, 285

École buissonnière, L’, 266 Faiseur, Le (36.41), 75
École des cocottes, L’ (35.37), 320 Famille Duraton, La (39.37), 65
École des contribuables, L’ (34.37), Famille Pont-Biquet, La (35.44), 142
81–82 Fanfan la Tulipe, 224
Éducation de prince (38.29), 28, 40–41, Fanfare d’amour (35.45), 20, 179
157, 159, 198, 332 Fanny (32.58), 59–60, 121, 124, 314, 318,
Embrassez-moi (32.53), 315 321, 336
Embuscade, L’ (39.29), 124, 132 Fantômas (32.59), 13
Émigrante, L’ (39.30), 197 Faubourg-Montmartre (31.55), 67–68, 80,
Empreinte du dieu, L’ (39.31), 157 86, 108, 171, 334
Empreinte rouge, L’ (36.38), 169 Faut-il les marier? (32.60), 146, 154
En bordée (31.53), 310 Fauteuil 47 (37.42), 112, 127–28, 167,
En effeuillant la marguerite, 266 172
En rade, 241 Femme du boulanger, La (38.34), 59, 61,
Enfant de l’amour, L’ (30.33), 132, 147, 124, 195, 199, 330
171, 308, 332 Femme du bout du monde, La (37.43), 134
Enfants du paradis, Les, xi, xix, 4, 15, 179, Femme d’une nuit, La (30.36), 9
228, 285 Femme en homme, La (32.61), 20–21
Enfer des anges, L’ (39.32), 154, 242, 331 Femme nue, La (32.62), 315
Énigmatique Mr. Parkes, L’ (30.34), 13, Femmes collantes, Les (38.35), 142
145 Fessée, La (37.44), 103
Ensorcellement de Séville, L’ (31.54), 385 Feu! (37.45), 47, 149
Entente cordiale (39.33), 35, 57, 318, 328, Feu de paille, Le (39.38), 242
330, 335 Feu Toupinel (33.54), 64
Entraîneuse, L’ (38.30), 16 Feux de joie (38.36), 175–176
Entre 11h et minuit, 266 Fièvres, 335
Entrée des artistes (38.31), 93, 179–80, Fille de la Madelon, La (37.46), 52, 56
183–85, 319, 330, 332, 334–35 Fille de Madame Agnot, La (35.47), 136
Épervier, L’ (33.46), 146, 315, 318, Fille du Bouif, La (31s5), 383
334–35 Fille du puisatier, La, 331
Époux célibataires, Les (35.40), 137 Fille du régiment, La (33.55), 20
Époux scandaleux, Les (35.41), 24 Fille et le Garçon, La (31.57), 102, 310
Équipage, L’ (35.42), 19, 25, 49, 52, 118, Filles du Rhône, Les (37.47), 59, 134
124, 320, 323, 332 Fils de l’autre, Le (31.58), 123–24
Équipe, L’, 386 Fils improvisé, Le (32.63), 19, 120, 123,
Ernest le rebelle (38.32), 80, 91, 102 128, 315
Escale, L’ (35.43), 87, 97, 115, 117, 149, Fin du jour, La (38.37), 12, 163, 180, 191,
175, 312 199, 330, 334
Esclave blanc, L’ (36.40), 194 Fin du monde, La (30.38), 56
Esclave blanche, L’ (39.34), 103 Finis terrae, 242
Espoir (39s6), 42, 331, 381, 383 Firmin, le muet de Saint-Pataclet (38.38),
Espoirs, 331 47, 61
Et Dieu créa . . . la femme, 266 Flagrant Délit (30.39), 14, 120, 145, 167
Étienne (33.47), 124 Flamme, La (36.44), 35, 171
Étoile de Valencia, L’ (33.48), 148 Fleur d’oranger, La (32.64), 134, 142
Étrange Fiancée, L’ (30s7), 79 Flofloche (34.44), 83, 171
 452 | Film Index
Folies-Bergère (35.48), 12 Grande Passion, La, 252
Folle Nuit, La (32.65), 21 Grandes Manœuvres, Les, 182–83
Forfaiture (37.48), 42–43, 45, 101, 318 Grands, Les (36.50), 127
Fortune, La (31.59), 170 Greluchon délicat, Le (34.45), 159
400 Coups, Les (33.14), 156 Gribouille (37.55), 36, 117, 125–26, 319
Fra Diavolo (30.41), 102, 145 Grisou, or Les Hommes sans soleil (38.48),
France est un île, La, 237, 259 118
Franco de port (37.49), 61, 148 Grock (31.66), 169
François Ier (37.50), 190 Guerre des gosses, La (36.51), 61
Frères Karamazov, Les (31.60), 36, 108, Guerre des valses, La (33.63), 34, 176
125, 197 Gueule d’amour (37.57), 5, 114, 119, 183,
Fric-Frac (39.39), 79, 83–84, 92, 198, 198
328, 330
Fumées (30s8), 386 Hardi les gars! (31.67), 252
Hélène (36.52), 121, 159, 317
Gagne ta vie (31.62), 24 Hercule (37.59), 104, 151
Gaietés de la finance, Les (35.49), 13, 314 Héritier du Bal Tabarin, L’ (33.64), 18, 100
Gaietés de l’escadron, Les (32.67), 314 Héros de la Marne, Le (38.49), 52, 56, 129
Gaietés de l’escouade, Les, 314 Heureuse Aventure, L’ (35.56), 197
Gaietés de l’exposition, Les (38.41), 314 Hilterjunge Quex, 285
Gaietés du palace, Les (36.45), 77, 314 Homme à abattre, L’ (36.53), 54, 320, 322
Gais Lurons, Les (36.46), 137, 310 Homme à L’Hispano, L’ (33.65), 23, 78,
Galeries Lévy et Cie (31.63), 69 350
Gardez le sourire (33.57), 94 Homme à l’oreille cassée (34.46), 57, 58–59
Gaspard de Besse (35.51), 145, 193 Homme de nulle part, L’ (36.54), 25, 73, 97
Gendre de Monsieur Poirier, Le (33.59), 69, Homme du jour, L’ (36.55), 111, 186
73–74, 125, 136–37, 198, 316 Homme du Niger, L’ (39.44), 46, 237
Gens du voyage, Les (37.53), 99, 124, 162, Hommes de proie, Les (37.60), 147–48
168–69 Hommes nouveaux, Les (36.57), 318, 323
Georges et Georgette (33.60), 21 Hôtel du Libre Échange, L’ (34.47), 142
Gibraltar (38.43), 35, 330 Hôtel du Nord (38.50), xix, 4, 87, 95, 330
Gigolette (36.48), 131
Gitanes (32.69), 42, 146–47 IF 1 ne répond plus (32.72), 45, 314, 337
Glu, La (38.44), 59, 128 Ignace (37.62), 320, 322
Golem, Le (35.52), 69–70, 79, 323, 335 Il a été perdu une mariée (32.73), 78
Golgotha (35.53), 25, 75, 189, 191, 323, Il est charmant (31.68), 66, 141–42, 159,
325, 335–36 336
Gondole aux chimères, La (35.54), 129 Il était une fois (33.67), 109, 336
Gone with the Wind, 284 Ils étaient neuf célibataires (39.45), 331
Goualeuse, La (38.46), 147 Impossible Aveu, L’ (35.57), 171
Goupi Mains-Rouges, 220 Incognito (33.69), 10, 179
Grains de beauté (31.65), 21 Inconnue de Monte Carlo, L’ (38.51), 86,
Grand Élan, Le (39.41), 197 146
Grand Jeu, Le (33.62), 3–4, 18, 24, 26, 47, Inconstante, L’ (31.69), 110
98, 315, 318, 332 Indésirable, L’ (33s3), 20, 383
Grand-Père (38.47), 157 Iris perdue et retrouvée (33.70), 184
Grand Refrain, Le (36.49), 176, 178 Itto (34.48), 49, 317–18, 334
Grande Caravane, La, 233
Grande Illusion, La (37.54), xi, xxi–xxii, J’accuse (37.64), 52, 56
20, 55, 70, 73, 104–105, 238, 273, 278, Jacques et Jacotte (36.60), 154
320–22, 325–26 J’aime toutes les femmes (35.58), 11
Grande Inconnue, La, 242 Jazz Singer, The, 307
Grande Mare, La (30.42), 38, 308, 311 Je chante (38.52), 36, 173
 Film Index | 453
Je t’adore mais pourquoi (30s9), 383 Liberté (37.65), 176
Je te confie ma femme (33.71), 315 Liebelei (33.76), 24, 28, 160, 178–79, 183,
Je vous aimerai toujours (32.74), 64 316, 323
Jean de la Lune (31.70), 92, 308–10, 332, Liliom (34.55), 85, 97, 170, 316
345 Loi, c’est la loi, La, 334
Jenny (36.62), 25, 101, 128, 199, 323 Lopez, le bandit (30.49), 145
Jenny Lind (31.71), 177 Lost Horizons, 284
J’étais une aventurière (38.53), 161, 326, Louis XIV, 229
332 Louise (39.49), 44, 66, 125, 176, 178, 334
Jeunes Filles à marier (35.60), 10, 122 Loups entre eux, Les (36.68), 53, 322
Jeunes Filles de Paris, or La Vie n’est pas un Lucrèce Borgia, 320
roman (36.63), 78, 198 Lumière d’été, xix, 335, 349
Jeunes Filles en détresse (39.47), 154–55 Lumières de Paris (38.58), 11, 67, 173
Jeunesse (34.52), 80, 92, 97, 170, 241–42 Lyautey L’Africain, 237
Jeux interdits, xi
Jim la Houlette (35.62), 14–15, 127, 141, Ma cousine de Varsovie (31.74), 181
145, 167 Ma femme, homme d’affaires (32.77), 112
Jimmy (30.45), 383 Ma petite marquise (37.66), 11
Jocelyn (33.72), 193, 336 Ma sœur de lait (38.59), 186
Jofroi (33s5), 61, 195, 316, 381 Ma tante, dictateur (39.50), 112, 173
Joker, Le (30.46), 145, 150 Macadam, xix
Joli monde (35.63), 60, 186 Macao, l’enfer du jeu (39.51), 79, 101,
Josette (36.64), 157 152–53, 331
Joueur d’échecs, Le (38.54), 28–29, 37, 73, Madame Bovary (33.77), 316
103 Madame ne veut pas d’enfants (32.78),
Joueuse d’orgue, La (36.65), 129 315
Jour se lève, Le (39.48), xi, xvii, 21, 87, 92, Mademoiselle Docteur (36.69), 52–53, 115,
97, 116, 132, 146, 149, 274–75, 328, 153, 322, 334
330 Mademoiselle Josette ma femme (33.78),
Joyeux Garçons, Les, 232 100, 122–23, 315
Juanita (35.66), 42, 178 Mademoiselle ma mère (37.67), 122–24,
Judex 34 (33.73), 36, 81, 145 129–30, 150
Jugement de minuit, Le (32.75), 142 Mademoiselle s’amuse, 336
Juif polonais, Le (31.72), 69, 334 Magie moderne (31.76), 167
Juif Süss, Le, 285 Main du diable, La, 220, 222
Jumeaux de Brighton, Les (36.66), 100 Maison dans la dune, La (34.56), 118
Justin de Marseille (34.53), 59–61, 86, 149, Maison d’en face, La (36.71), 74
189 Maison du Maltais, La (38.60), 50–51, 98,
147, 149, 171
Katia (38.56), 10, 36, 72, 330 Maison du mystère, La (33.79), 19
Kermesse héroïque, La (35.67), 56, 318, Maison jaune de Rio, La (30s10), 148, 181,
320, 325 384
King Kong, 284 Maître Bolbec et son mari (34.57), 143
King Solomon’s Mines, 284 Maître de forges, Le (33.80), 73–74, 137,
Kœnigsmark (35.68), 320 315
Malade imaginaire, Le (34s2), 136
Lac aux dames (34.54), 129, 241, 315, 318 Maman Colibri (37.68), 127
Laurette ou le cachet rouge (31.73), 57 Mam’zelle Nitouche (31.77), 19–20, 23,
Légions d’honneur (38.57), 49, 118, 136, 175, 177, 319
237–38, 261 Man Who Knew Too Much, The, 284
Léopold le bien aimé (33.75), 119 Maquillage, or Je t’attendrai (32.79), 169
Letzte Mann, Die, 16 Marchand d’amour (35.72), 181, 188
Lévy et Cie (30.48), 69 Mardi gras (31.79), 20, 24, 313
 454 | Film Index
Margoton du bataillon, La (33.82), 231, Million, Le (31.84), 15, 99, 184, 307–308,
314 310
Mari garçon, Le (33.83), 315, 317 Mioche, Le (36.81), 334
Maria Chapdelaine (34.60), 191, 318, 323, Miquette, 331
325–26 Miquette et sa mère (33.90), 39
Maria de la nuit (36.73), 33, 51 Mirages (37.74), 50, 110
Mariage à responsabilité limitée (33.84), Mirages de Paris (32.87), 64
100 Mireille (33.91), 59, 124
Mariages de Mlle Lévy, Les (36.74), 69 Misérables, Les (33.92), 13, 20, 23, 80,
Marie, légende hongroise (32.81), 191 227, 325, 385
Marie des Angoisses (35.73), 112 Miss Helyett (33.93), 23, 154
Marine Française, La, 237, 259 Mister Flow (36.82), 142
Marinella (36.75), 12, 58, 66, 92, 175, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 284
320 Moana, 234
Marions-nous (31.80), 172 Modern Times, 280, 284
Maris de ma femme, Les (36.76), 13 Moïse et Salomon parfumeurs (35.81), 69
Marius (31.81), 59, 60, 96, 312, 318, 321, Mollenard (37.75), 34, 76, 112, 129,
336, 350 149–50, 334
Marraine de Charley, La (35.76), 20, 320 Mon amant l’assassin (31.86), 14
Marraine du régiment, La (38.62), 20, 100 Mon ami Tim (30.89), 383
Marseillaise, La (37.69), 57–58, 102, 105, Mon béguin (29.1), 9, 382
223, 243 Mon cœur balance (32.90), 19, 137
Marseille mes amours (39.53), 59 Mon cœur et ses millions (31.87), 11, 78
Marthe Richard (37.70), 54, 115, 322 Mon cœur incognito (30.55), 9, 102
Mascotte, La (35.78), 193 Mon curé chez les riches (32.91, 38.64),
Masque d’Hollywood, Le (31.82), 186 192, 310
Masque qui tombe, Le (33.85), 76 Mon gosse de père (30.56), 38, 123
Maternelle, La (33.86), 131, 157, 241–42, Mon oncle et mon curé (38.65), 192
315, 317, 325, 336 Mon père avait raison (36.83), 113, 121
Maternité (34.61), 241 Monde en armes, Le (29s9), 384
Matricule 33 (33.87), 53 Monsieur Brotonneau (39.56), 112, 120,
Maurin des Maures (32.84), 119 126
Mayerling (36.77), 10, 34, 136, 159, 170, Monsieur Coccinelle (38.66), 82, 97–98
320, 323, 325, 332 Monsieur de cinq heures, Le (38.67), 11, 20
Mélo (32.85), 17 Monsieur de minuit, Le (31.88), 137
Mélodie du monde, La, 234 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (32.93), 64–65,
Ménilmontant (36.78), 81, 86, 153–54, 227
157–58, 241, 251 Monsieur le Duc (30.57), 39, 120
Mensonge de Nina Petrovna, Le (37.71), Monsieur le Maire, or Dr Herr Maire
124, 161, 183, 197 (39.57), 59
Méphisto (30s11), 129, 148, 385 Monsieur Personne (36.84), 145
Merlusse (35.79), 59, 155, 323 Monsieur Ripois, xi, 280, 332
Mermoz, xxii Monsieur Sans-Gêne (35.82), 137
Merry Widow, The, 183 Mort du cygne, La (37.79), 242, 317
Merveilleuse Journée, La (32.86), 60, 99 Mort en fuite, Le (36.85), 103, 144, 178,
Merveilleuse Tragédie de Lourdes, La 181
(33.88), 191 Mot de Cambronne, Le, 323
Messager, Le (37.72), 49, 127 Moulin dans le soleil, Le (38.68), 125
Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir (36.80), 81–82, Moune et son notaire (32.95), 120, 126
323 Moutonnet (36.86), 65
Metropolis, 27 Musiciens du ciel, Les (39.59), 19, 80, 90,
Métropolitain (38.63), 97, 116, 175, 181 146, 193
Miarka, la fille à l’ourse (37.73), 23, 131 Musique en tête, 335–36
 Film Index | 455
Mutinés de l’Elseneur, Les (36.87), 80, 103 Ordonnance, L’ (33.98), 120, 147, 336
Mystère de la chambre jaune, Le (30.59), 14, Orphée, 335
146, 152, 225
Mystère Imberger, Le (35.83), 313 Paix sur le Rhin (38.72), 55
Mystères de Paris, Les (35.84), 10, 154, Pantins d’amour (36.94), 111
334 Panurge (32.100), 93
Mystérieuse Lady, La (36.88), 152 Papa sans le savoir (31.96), 39
Paprika (33.99), 334
Nadia, la femme traquée (39.60), 37, 103, Paquebot Tenacity, Le (34.75), 316
320 Paradis de Satan, Le (38.73), 76
N’aimer que toi (34.67), 11, 179 Paradis des pilotes perdus, Le, xxii
Nanook, 233 Paradis perdu (39.69), xix, 52, 169, 178
Naples au baiser du feu (37.80), 21, 25, Paramount en parade (30s12), 384
115–16, 173 Parents terribles, Les, 335
Napoléon Bonaparte (35s3), 58, 318 Parfum de la dame en noir, Le (30.62), 20,
Narcisse (39.61), 100 146, 152, 225
Neiges de France, 242 Paris (36.95), 11, 94
Neuf de trèfle (37.81), 40 Paris Béguin (31.97), 84–85, 174, 181,
Nicole et sa vertu (31.91), 17 240
Nitchevo (36.89), 149, 162, 332 Paris-Camargue (35.87), 59, 61, 64, 156,
Noix de coco (38.69), 16–17, 60, 130, 161 172
Nord Atlantique (39.62), 238 Paris la nuit (30.63), 85, 181, 240
Notre-Dame d’Amour (36.90), 61 Paris-Méditerranée (31.98), 9, 60, 190,
Notre Dame de la Mouise (39.63), 154, 157 312, 314
Nous irons à Monte Carlo, 336 Paris–New York (39.70), 331
Nous irons à Paris, 336 Paris-St Germain des Prés, 336
Nouveau Testament, Le (36.91), 113, Paris-Soleil (32.101), 92, 109, 186
122–23, 127 Partir (31.99), 96
Nouveaux Messieurs, Les, 230 Pas besoin d’argent (33.101), 39
Nu comme un ver (33.96), 315 Pas de femmes, or Pas besoin de femmes
Nuit de décembre, La (39.64), 123, 331 (32.102), 77
Nuit du carrefour, La (32.97), 13, 28, 146, Pas sur la bouche (31.100), 39
225, 312–13 Passage du Rhin, Le, xi
Nuit est à nous, La, 252, 307, 332 Passé à vendre (36.96), 147
Nuits de feu (37.84), 318, 322, 323 Passeport 13.444 (31.101), 37, 102
Nuits de Port Saïd, Les (31.93), 240 Passeurs d’hommes (37.88), 54
Nuits de Venise (31.94), 10 Passionnément (32.103), 38
Nuits moscovites, Les (34.70), 53, 73, 101, Patriote, Le (38.74), 37
114, 318 Pattes de mouche, Les (36.97), 136
Pax (32.104), 80, 103
Occident, L’ (37.86), 48, 238, 261 Peau d’un autre, La (36.98), 13
On a trouvé une femme nue (34.71), 158, Pêcheur d’Islande (33.102), 59, 197
315 Pension Mimosas (34.76), 101, 128–29,
On a volé un homme (33.97), 316 318, 326
On purge bébé (31.95), 313 Pepe le Moko (36.99), xi, xxiii, 27–28,
Oncle de Pékin, L’ (34.72), 179 49–50, 81, 87, 98–99, 114, 118, 171,
Opéra de quat’sous, L’ (30.61), xi, 85, 109, 273, 320, 322–23, 326, 332
141, 190, 240, 307, 312, 334–35 Père célibataire, Le (30.64), 132
Or, L’ (34.74), 79 Père Lampion, Le (34.77), 12, 41
Or dans la montagne, L’ (38.71), 197 Perle, La (32.105), 383
Or dans la rue, L’ (34.73), 86 Perles de la couronne, Les (37.89), 58, 73,
Or des mers, L’ (32.99), 243, 382 189, 321–23, 325–26, 332
Orage (37.87), 24, 64, 117, 198, 319 Petit Café, Le (30.65), 11, 310–11
 456 | Film Index
Petit Chose, Le (38.76), 154 Prince des Six Jours (33.108), 22, 88
Petit Écart, Le (31.102), 141 Prince Jean, Le (34.82), 47
Petit Jacques, Le (34.78), 13, 144 Princes de la cravache, Les (30.67), 12, 88
Petit Roi, Le (33.104), 60, 316 Princesse, à vos ordres (31.108), 17, 310,
Petite Chocolatière, La (31.103), 82–83, 334
120, 126, 319, 336 Princesse Czardas (34.83), 136, 172
Petite Dame du wagon-lit, La (36.100), 18, Princesse Tam-Tam (35.92), 10, 16, 50, 86,
24 175, 190
Petite de Montparnasse, La (31.104), Prison sans barreaux (37.95), 88, 96–97,
120–21, 124, 136, 172 156, 326
Petite Lise, La (30.66), xix, 25, 69, 80, 144, Prisonnier de mon cœur (31.109), 190
175 Prisons de femmes (38.83), 88, 121, 156,
Peur, La, or Vertige d’un soir (36.102), 160, 162, 189
147 Prix de beauté (30.69), xx, 110, 151, 181,
Picador, Le (32.106), 121, 125 383
Pièges (39.71), 5, 27, 175, 331 Procureur Hallers, Le (30.70), 14, 23, 25
Pilote de guerre, xxi Professeur Cupidon (33.109), 22, 126, 155
Pirates du rail, Les (37.90), 45 Promesses (35s1), 157
Piste des géants, La (31.105), 46 Puritain, Le (37.96), 109, 193
Piste du nord, La (39.72), 331, 335
Piste du Sud, La (38.78), 47 Quadrille (37.97), 39, 121, 172
Place de la Concorde (38.79), 10, 72, 94 Quai des brumes (38.84), xvii, 59, 80, 87,
Plaisirs de Paris (32.107), 159 96, 117, 126, 146, 170, 243, 259–60,
Pluie d’or (35.91), 131, 157 325, 328
Plus Belle Fille du monde, La (37.92), 11, Quai des Orfèvres, 266
109 Quand nous étions deux, 308
Pocharde, La, or Le Crime de la Pocharde Quand on est belle (31.111), 79
(36.103), 144 Quand te tues-tu? (31.112), 100
Poil de Carotte (32.109), 67, 93, 112, 133, Quartier latin (39.75), 14, 58, 66
153, 219, 316, 326 Quartier sans soleil (39.76), 80, 85–86
Pomme d’Amour (32.110), 170 Quatorze juillet (32.116), 27, 86, 92, 94,
Pontcarral, 220, 228 114, 336
Port-Arthur (36.104), 322 Quatre de l’infanterie, 226–27
Porte du large, La (36.105), 124, 237, 259, Quatre jours à Paris, 336
318, 323 Quatre vagabonds, Les (31.113), 144
Porte-Veine, Le (37.94), 148 Quo Vadis, 284
Porteuse de pain, La (34.80), 144
Postman Always Rings Twice, The, 116 Raphaël le tatoué (38.85), 18, 89–90
Poule, La (32.111), 60 Rappel immédiat (39.77), 39
Pour être aimé (33.106), 10, 78 Razzia (30.71), 148, 313
Pour le maillot jaune (39.73), 89 Rebecca, 284
Pour un soir, or Stella maris (31.106), 171, Rebelle, Le (30.72), 37, 159
386 Récif de corail, Le (38.86), 96, 330
Pour un sou d’amour (31.107), 10, 78, 80, Regain (37.100), 59, 62, 67, 81, 129,
97 195–96, 326
Pour vivre heureux (32.113), 178, 184 Règle du jeu, La (39.78), xi, xvii–xxv, 4, 28,
Prélude à la gloire, 332 70–71, 73, 104–106, 138, 164–65,
Prends la route (36.106), 137 199–200, 253, 277–78, 328, 348–50
Président Haudecœur, Le (39.74), 134, 142 Remontons les Champs-Élysées (38.87), 25,
Présidente, La (38.80), 64 56, 58, 73, 180, 189, 323, 330, 332
Prête-moi ta femme (36.107), 100 Remorques (39.79), 117, 197, 272, 331,
Prince Bouboule (38.81), 36, 90, 94, 309 335
Prince de minuit (34.81), 10 Remous (34.87), 129
 Film Index | 457
Réprouvés, Les (36.111), 47, 313 Route est belle, La (29.5), 174, 307–308
Requin, Le (29s2), 308, 381 Route heureuse, La (35.99), 66
Requins du pétrole, Les (33.111), 76 Route impériale, La (35.100), 35, 318,
Retour au paradis (35.94), 67, 197 335
Retour de flamme, xxii Routes aériennes, Les, xxii
Rêve, Le (30.75), 10, 134 Rue sans joie, La (38.93), 75, 81, 86, 110,
Rêve éternel (34.88), 154, 197 152, 171, 312
Rien que des mensonges (32.118), 171 Rue sans nom, La (33.114), 80, 85–86, 90,
Rigolboche (36.112), 154, 171, 175–76 97, 114–15, 118, 240
Rivaux de la piste (32.119), 88, 252 Ruisseau, Le (38.94), 80
Rive gauche (31.115), 66, 78, 178
Robe rouge, La (33.112), 144 Sa meilleure cliente (32.126), 19, 128, 159,
Roche aux mouettes, La (32.121), 59 336
Roger la Honte (32.122), 118, 144 Sacré Léonce (35.101), 108
Roi, Le (36.113), 76, 309, 320–21, 332 Saltimbanques, Les (30s14), 121, 169,
Roi bis, Le (32.123), 12, 40 308
Roi de Camargue (34.89), 42 Salto mortale, 310
Roi de Paris, Le (30.76), 184 Samson, 320
Roi des aulnes, Le (30.77), 23 Samson and Delilah, 284
Roi des facteurs, Le, 309 Sans famille (34.92), 15, 80, 144, 154,
Roi des galéjeurs, Le (39.96), 173, 309 177, 332, 334
Roi des palaces, Le (32.124), 309 Sans lendemain (39.80), 17, 96, 108–109,
Roi des resquilleurs, Le (30.78), 10, 21–22, 117, 157, 163, 199, 323
90, 100, 109, 250, 308–310, 319, 321, Sapho (34.93), 21, 64, 161
345 Sarati le terrible (37.103), 25, 49, 51, 98,
Roi du camembert, Le (31s7), 383 121–23, 126
Roi du cirage, Le (31.116), 90, 99, 309 Scandale, Le (34.94), 315, 318
Roi Pandore, Le, 332, 334 Schpountz, Le (37.104), 39, 59, 65, 187
Rois de la flotte, Les (38.90), 309 Secret de L’émeraude, Le (36.119), 35
Rois du sport, Les (37.102), 61, 66, 89, Secret du docteur, Le (30.82), 97
309, 320 Secret d’une nuit, Le (34.96), 60, 86
Roman de Werther, Le (38.91), 118 Sept hommes . . . une femme (36.121), 78,
Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre (35.95), 105–106, 138
78 Serge Panine (38.96), 134
Roman d’un spahi (36.114), 49, 118 Sergent X (31.120), 47, 237, 334
Roman d’un tricheur, Le (36.115), 13–14, Serments (31.121), 102
52, 60, 131, 189, 326 Service de nuit (31.122), 124
Romarin (36.116), 61 Sexe faible, Le (33.115), 112
Ronde, La, 332 Si j’étais le patron (34.97), 12, 103
Ronde des heures, La (30.80), 76, 125, 169, Si l’empereur savait ça (30.83), 335
177–78, 308, 310, 334 Si Paris nous était conté, 323
Rosaire, Le (34.91), 127 Si tu reviens (37.106), 61
Rose (35.96), 59 Si tu veux (32.127), 184
Rose effeuillé, La, or La Vie de Sainte Si Versailles m’était conté, 323
Thérèse de Lisieux (36.117), 93, 191 Sidonie Panache (34.98), 20, 334, 385
Rosier de Madame Husson, Le (31.118), Sierra de Teruel, 331
65–66, 112, 187, 312 Sign of the Cross, 284
Rosière des halles, La (35.98), 15, 64–65, Simone est comme ça (32.128), 79, 81
84, 167, 182, 184–85 Simoun, Le (33.116), 19, 45, 49, 123
Rothchild (33.113), 12, 70, 75, 77 Sirocco (30s16), 10, 313, 381, 383
Rouge et le noir, Le, 280 Sixième Étage (39.84), 119
Route enchantée, La (38.92), 97–98, 112, Snow White, 284
173 Sœurs d’armes (37.107), 54, 334
 458 | Film Index
Sœurs Hortensias, Les (35.102), 18 Théodore et Cie (33.124), 17, 20, 89, 100,
Sola (31.124), 17, 127 102, 250, 314, 319, 321, 345
Sommes-nous défendus? (38s3), 57, 189, Thérèse Martin (38.101), 191
242, 384 Tigre du Bengale, Le (37.110), 42, 385
Son altesse impériale (33.118), 36 Tire-au-flanc (33.125), 315
Son Altesse l’Amour (31.125), 73 Titin des Martigues (37.111), 59
Son autre amour (33.119), 134, 155 To Catch a Thief, 284
Son Excellence Antonin (35.103), 78 Toboggan (34.100), 89, 118, 252
Son oncle de Normandie (38.97), 38 Toi que j’adore (33.126), 11
Sonate de Kreutzer, La (37.83), 36 Toine (32.133), 124, 171
Sonette d’alarme, La (35.104), 122 Tombeau hindou, Le, 385
Sortilèges, xix Toni (35.110), xi, 25, 59, 61, 97, 115,
SOS Sahara (38.95), 49, 194, 238, 261 134, 146, 257, 278
Sous la griffe (35.105), 87, 121, 125, 131, Topaze (Gasnier) (32.134), 22, 79, 147,
168 155, 193
Sous la Terreur (35.106), 57 Topaze (Pagnol) (36.129), 59, 79, 81, 147,
Sous le casque de cuir (31.126), xxii, 53 155, 323
Sous les toits de Paris (30.84), 25, 86, 91, Toto (33.127), 86, 197
114, 170, 307 Touchez pas au grisbi, 280
Sous les yeux d’Occident (36.123), 103, 159, Touchons du bois (33.128), 18
319 Tour de Nesle, La (37.112), 111
Spectre vert, Le (30.85), 308, 318, 335 Tourbillion de Paris (39.87), 101, 176
Stradivarius (35.107), 100 Tout ça ne vaut pas l’amour, or Un vieux
Stupéfiants (32.130), 149, 169, 172 garçon (31.129), 120–21
Sur le plancher des vaches (39.85), xxiii Tout pour l’amour (33.129), 178
Surprises du divorce, Les (33.120), 122, Tout va très bien Madame la Marquise
123, 315 (36.130), 64, 109, 176
Surprises du sleeping, Les (33.121), 24 Toute sa vie (30.88), 141
Symphonie des brigands, La (36.124), Tovaritch (35.112), 36, 37
148 Tradition de minuit, La (39.88), 14, 66,
Symphonie exotique, 233 88, 97, 160, 170, 328
Symphonie malgache, La, 237 Tragédie de la mine, La (31.131), 56, 241
Tragédie impériale, La (37.113), 36, 194,
Tabu, 235 318
Tampon du capiston, Le (30.86), 78, 310 Train de 8h47, Le (34.101), 82, 310, 315
Tarass Boulba (36.125), 37 Train de plaisir (35.114), 24
Tartarin de Tarascon (34.99), 22, 59, 61 Treizième Enquête de Grey, La (37.114), 39,
Tempête (39.86), 147 111
Tempête sur l’Asie (38.99), 80, 103 Triangle de feu, Le (32.135), 146
Temps des cerises, Le (37.109), 56, 58, 67, Tricoche et Cacolet (38.103), 76, 150–51
80, 102, 104, 190, 198, 322 Troïka sur la piste blanche (37.115), 322,
Ten Commandments, The, 284 334
Tendre Ennemie, La (35.109), 60, 97–98, Trois artilleurs au pensionnat (37.116), 20
164, 168–69, 190, 323, 383–84 Trois cents à l’heure (34.102), 22, 172
Tendresse, La (30.87), 124, 126, 154 Trois dans un moulin (36.131), 159
Terre de feu (38.100), 147, 179 Trois de St. Cyr (38.106), 238, 260–61,
Terre des hommes, xxi 330
Terre qui meurt, La (36.127), xxiv, 67, 142, Trois jours de perm’ (36.132), 20, 81
195–96 Trois Masques, Les (29s3), 132, 307–308,
Testament du docteur Mabuse, Le (33.123), 383
146 Trois Mousquetaires, Les (32.136), 227
Testament du Dr Cordelier, Le, 5 Trois pour cent (33.133), 334
Tête d’un homme, La (32.132), 146 Trois tambours, Les (39.89), 57, 58
 Film Index | 459
Trois valses (38.107), 25, 129, 181, 186, Une nuit au Paradis (31.142), 24
330, 332 Une nuit de noces (35.119), 94
Tumultes (31.134), 27, 80, 85, 118–19, Une partie de campagne (36s1), 67, 92,
145, 312, 337 198, 381
Tunic, The, 284 Uniformes et grandes manœuvres, 336
Tunnel, Le (33.134), 45, 55–56, 76, 134, Untel père et fils, 58
198
20,000 Leagues under the Sea, 284 Vacances du diable, Les (30.93), 64, 110
Vagabond bien aimé, Le (36.140), 136
Ultimatum (38.108), 34 Vainqueur, Le (32.149), 24, 99, 102
Un caprice de la Pompadour (30.90), 57 Valse éternelle (36.141), 34, 176
Un carnet de bal (37.117), 323, 325–26 Vampyr (31.146), 34, 79, 108
Un chien qui rapporte (31.135), 21, 182, Variétés (35.121), 168
312 Veille d’armes (35.122), 144, 259, 318,
Un coup de mistral (33.136), 59 320, 326
Un de la Canebière (38.109), 11, 20–21, Verdun, souvenirs d’histoire (31.147), 52,
59–61 55, 189
Un de la légion (36.134), 47, 322, 334 Verdun, visions d’histoire, 52, 226
Un de la montagne (33.137), 197 Vertige, Le (35.123), 134
Un déjeuner de soleil (37.118), 137 Veuve joyeuse, La (34.111), 183
Un fichu métier (38.110), 12, 40 Vidocq (38.116), 145
Un fils d’Amérique (32.138), 19, 86 Vie est à nous, La (36s2), 58, 102, 104,
Un gosse en or, or Cœur de gosse (38.111), 190, 322, 384
87, 154 Vie est magnifique, La (38.117), 199
Un grand amour de Beethoven (36.135), 44, Vie parisienne, La (35.124), 36
176, 177–78, 193, 326 Vieille d’armes (35.122), 237
Un jour viendra (33.139), 10 Vierge du rocher, La, or Le Drame de Lour-
Un mauvais garçon (36.136), 14, 23, 143, des (33.144), 191
198 Vierge folle, La (38.118), 121
Un peu d’amour (32.141), 197, 383 Ville dorée, La, 285
Un rêve blond (32.142), 39, 110, 310 Vingt-huit jours de Clairette, Les (33.145),
Un Seul Amour, 349 11, 20
Un soir à Marseille (37.121), 59, 169 Violettes impériales (32.151), 179, 227, 336
Un soir au front (31.138), 53–54 Virages (30.94), 386
Un soir de bombe (35.117), 12, 77, 179, Visages de femmes (38.119), 89
198 Visiteurs du soir, Les, xi, 4, 228
Un soir de rafle (31.139), 89, 308, 310 Vogue mon cœur (35.125), 35, 78
Un tour de cochon (34.106), 100 Voie sans disque, La (33.147), 53
Un train dans la nuit (34.107), 24 Voilà Montmartre (34s3), 384
Un trou dans le mur (30.91), 94, 141 Voile bleu, Le, 335
Une belle garce (30.92), 125, 168 Voix qui meurt, La (32.152), 154, 178
Une étoile disparaît (32.143), 111, 186 Voix sans visage, La (33.149), 144, 146–47,
Une faible femme (32.144), 89, 178 179
Une femme a menti (30s17), 155, 308 Vol de nuit, xxi
Une femme au volant (33.141), 88, 336 Voleur, Le (33s7), 127
Une femme chipée (34.108), 148 Voleur de femmes (37.123), 119, 183
Une femme qui se partage (36.137), 11 Volga en flammes (33.150), 80
Une femme sans importance (37.122), 35, Vouloir (31.148), 196, 386
132 Vous n’avez rien à déclarer (36.143), 108,
Une gueule en or (36.138), 109, 320 129
Une heure près de toi (32.145), 310 Vous seule que j’aime (39.92), 20, 87, 121,
Une java (38.113), 144 131
Une nuit à l’hôtel (31.141), 60, 240 Voyage de noces (32.154), 110
 460 | Film Index
Westfront, No Man’s Land, 226 Yoshiwara (37.124), 35, 80, 108, 167, 323

Yamilé sous les cèdres (39.93), 136 Zéro de conduite (33s8), 155, 318, 381
Y’en a pas deux comme Angélique (31s8), Zone, La, 241
120–21, 124, 383 Zouzou (34.115), 87, 93, 129, 131, 147,
Yeux noirs, Les (35.127), 16, 326 175, 178, 240, 319
Before his recent retirement, C C was Associate Professor of Film
and Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, which he joined when
it first opened in 1975, and where he served as Chairman and Dean of Hu-
manities, and later as Acting Provost and Director of the Queensland Col-
lege of Art. He has published a number of books on the French cinema, and
notably The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960, which the present work
supplements by its consideration of genre and myth in the first decade of
the French sound cinema.