Blanchette (1921) User Reviews

Cutdown

[boblipton · 6/10 · 16 March 2019]

Pauline Johnson has graduated with a degree to teach elementary school. However, there are no openings, and she has ideas above her station that do not comport with her poor tavern-keeping parents.

To look at a 26-minute Pathe-Baby cutdown of a feature movie based on a twelve-act play by Eugène Brieux is not the way to get a satisfactory opinion of the work; far too many scenes are reduced to a title card and a brief clip. Even when the movie boasts of a cast drawn from the Comedie Francaise. Nonetheless, what is there -- what remains -- is quite satisfactory, with good attention to the technical aspects of film-making, and the acting and situations well performed.

Pauline Johnson's real name was Katherine Johnson. Her career as a film actress lasted only ten years, spanning the 1920s. Her last movie was THE FLYING SCOTSMAN, a part-takie railroad movie. After that, she seems to have retired. She died in 1947, aged 47.

French naturalism of the twenties

[kekseksa · 9 July 2018]

Eugène Brieux' 1897 play on which this film is based is fairly typical of the mildly didactic that was becoming fashionable in France at this time and it appeared at the leading "naturalist" theatre the théâtre Antoine. Such works (and André Antoine's own films) now alimented an important current of naturalist films which would have a strong influence also in Italy, Spain and Portugal and even in Germany (although it may not be the kind of film for which the German industry is today best known), a tradition that would never disappear (Pagnol in the thirties) and would very naturally re-emerge in the 1940s in the form of Italian "neo-realism", launching a major recovery of the European film tradition. The idea that European film dies of the death and that it reappeared as some kind of marginal "art cinema" is a grotesquely (and deliberately) false view of film history imposed by a combination of canny US critics (for whom it was an ideal strategy marginalising non-US film) and extremely ostrich-braiined European ones (who were flattered by that weasel word "art").

It is the story of a girl from a rural working-class family who has qualified, to the delight of her parents, as a teacher. Unfortunately qualifying and getting the job in the French system where teachers are state employees are two different things. The months go by and she has still not been assigned to a post (she is two hundred and something on the waiting list). She is also alienating her parents and all around her by her affected airs and graces. She is employed as a tutor by the local bourgeois (whose daughter was a college-mate) but, when the son of the house starts having ideas about marrying her, is immediately sent packing.

She tries to find work in Paris but, without qualifications for office-work, ends up as a slavey to a horrendous old spinster. There is however no melodrama; she is not seduced, made pregnant and abandoned or anything of that kind (naturalism is often distinguishable by what it does not do). She simply returns home in the end, a chastened woman, ready to marry the honest artisan's son she previously turned her nos up at.