Once a ubiquitous Art House perennial, now relegated to some six-pack Criterion DVD set moldering on a back shelf at your public library. A shame since this Jacques Feyder classic is as lively, funny & magnificently realized as its faded rep claims. (There’s reason Preston Sturges tried to fashion a B’way musical from it.) It’s 17th Century Low Lands, and the biggest headache in the prosperous city of Boom sees the mayor’s daughter in love with young master painter Julien Breughel, currently immortalizing Mayor & Town Elders on canvas, just as the girl’s engagement to one of the portrait sitters, a well-to-do butcher, is being finalized. (Part of a kickback arrangement involving the mayor’s cattle.) But a bigger crisis looms when a military advance man crashes into town with news of an armed Spanish Regiment due to arrive within the hour . . . and on Carnival Day! Rape, pillage, looting, disaster!; or so it was not so many years ago. But since every crisis is also an opportunity, while the mayor plays dead and hopes the column will pass; the women, led by the mayor’s clever wife, think up an entirely different scheme: entertainment, welcome, beer; mutual benefit assured. With plotting as witty & elaborate as the film’s spectacular physical design (legendary art direction from Alexander Trauner; gorgeous layered cinematography by Harry Strandling; near continuous multi-plane action for hundreds in shot after shot, ably assisted by Marcel Carné (no doubt taking notes for future work); and a plus perfect cast (standouts include Françoise Rosay in a signature role as Le Mayor’s unflappable wife and Louis Jouvet as a pragmatic Spanish Priest with Inquisition duties in his past). A feast of a film. And if it occasionally slips into middle-brow cultural cliché, Feyder’s tastes are eccentric enough, his technique strong enough to keep any impersonal restrictions of state subsidized art at bay.
DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Based on a story by Charles Spaak, it’s also allegory for the times, asking Europe to move beyond past differences and live together. An idea Spaak would return to in GRAND ILLUSION/’37, co-scripting with director Jean Renoir, as Germany moved ever closer to war.
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