Promise at Dawn

This is a delicate film on a delicate story, all true, the story of the author Romain Gary and his mother, a very determined but hopelessly impractical woman, who by her imagination tricks herself and her son through impossible difficulties in Leningrad, Poland and France from after the revolution to the second world war. It's one of the most famous mother portraits in the history of literature, and the film renders it justice on the whole. Jules Dassin was himself from a Russian Jewish family, he knew this background and environment by heart, and Melina Mercouri is perfect as the total mother. Jules Dassin plays himself the silent screen star and director in Leningrad and succeeds in having fun in quite a few comedy scenes. Some scenes are simply overwhelming in their human candor and beauty and are very appropriate illustrations of the book. Romain Gary himself would have been pleased with this film - it would be interesting to know if he said anything about it.

This movie should have been called An overbearing mother. Not very enjoyable as Melina Mercouri just kills every scene with her overacting.

Filmed in different styles (sometimes like a silent movie) in which it tries to reproduce the Twenties setting. The music by the usual dependable Delerue is also a disappointment.

This is a great film, though i was relegated to watching it on YouTube.. with a 4 second delay between sound and sight.

Apart from thinking it uniquely captures the spirit of the time, I am mostly just left wondering if M. Mercouri along with a fair bit of the "female" cast were transgender. So instead of accusing her/him of "overacting", I'd tend to call it passion forged on the anvil of painful experience.., which in a sense might even be called the theme of the entire movie.

Melina Mercouri as a silent movie actress in the Soviet Union and unmarried mother of a little boy who relocates to France and champions her son to be a success in all areas: ballet, table tennis, stage performing (she also beams with pride when he shows an early adolescent lust for the opposite sex). The youngster, a precocious brat played at 8 by the non-photogenic child actor François Raffoul, grows up to be writer Romain Gary, whose memoirs this movie is based upon (but that doesn't make the film any more interesting). Gary's autobiography, first produced on the stage in 1961 as "First Love" with a book by Samuel A. Taylor, is a valentine to mothers and sons, but all we really take away from the picture is the mother's indulgent, maniacal personality. Producer-director Jules Dassin, who also adapted the screenplay with uncredited assist from film critic Andrew Sarris, cast real-life spouse Mercouri in the mother's role; she is an unrestrained actress whose presence was guaranteed to steal the spotlight from the actors portraying her son. By shifting the film's focus, Romain Gary becomes a supporting player in his own story, while Mercouri's theatrical hamming just seems self-serving (and she continues to sound like a hoarse version of Maria Ouspenskaya). A fairly dreadful film, it is maybe most especially bad when World War II begins and everyone turns solemn, bowing their heads while listening to the radio broadcasts (yet even here, Mercouri, aged by makeup, has to steal the show). Remade in 2017 as a French-Belgian co-production. *1/2 from ****

This is the story of Romain Gary. This films shows the relationship between Romain Gary and his Mother, Nina Kacew. Melina is excellent, some critics thought that she deserved an Oscar for her performance. Rex Reed named Melina as the 'Mercourial Melina'.She plays an overbearing mother, and she is excellent at this role. Her love for her son is driving her to do things that non-one else could have thought, as to write hundreds of letters to be sent to her son, daily, after her death, in order for him not to understand the loss of his mother. Melina's best friend, Despo Diamantidou plays Aniela, and Melina's husband and director Jules Dassin plays Romain's friend. It's a very good movie, based on Melina's character.