L'entraîneuse

This is a delicate melodrama by Albert Valentin where Michele Morgan is wonderfully cast as Suzanne, a nightclub hostess -a job which does not pass for a noble one- who is on holiday on the Cote d'Azur thanks to a guest's generosity.There she meets young boys and girls from a good background.One of them falls in love with her and soon she becomes integrated into the group.Actually,among them she passes for the wisest ,the nicest girl who has ever been.

Alber Valentin often films on location and he uses the light of the Mediterranean coast to good effects.Suzanne ,for a while ,wants to believe she can get out of her dump:she knows that her new friends and her are worlds apart ,because they are part of a family.As any melodrama heroine,she never complains about the fact that everything could have been different had she been part of a family -we never hear about Suzanne's parents- The depiction of the nightclub is harsh :the girls' life here is no laughing party;the nightclub's program also features an alcoholic chanteuse ,Frehel (who plays her own character),and it's no coincidence if Morgan's face ,during the last sequence and a superb fade in-fade out ,turns into the singer's face bewailing "no more love for me".

Should appeal to people who have liked Mervyn Le Roy 's "Waterloo bridge" (1940;French title:'la valse dans l'ombre")

Suzy is a Parisian cabaret hostess, a profession which at that time was only slightly higher up the social ladder than street girl. She's bored and disillusioned, and dreams of escape. And for one brief summer, she does. Like Cinderella in reverse, she's transported away from the bright lights into a gentle country house world of picnics, ping-pong, bicycle rides and beaches, where all the young men fall instantly in love with her, knowing nothing of her background and seeing only a sweet young innocent woman.

But if there's one thing we've learnt from the movies, it's that you can never escape your past. And just as the jaunty music of the opening credits is repeatedly beaten down by the fatalistic cabaret song "Sans lendemain" (No Tomorrow), so Suzy's summer idyll turns out to be short-lived.

The impossibility of escaping your destiny was, of course, a familiar theme of the Poetic Realism movement, to which this film belongs; but the date of production, the storm clouds rumbling over the Paris nightclub, and the fact that this film was shot in Berlin, give it a premonitory sensibility: a nation enjoying a dream of happiness, about to be given a nasty wake-up call.

As Suzy, Michèle Morgan (a brunette for this picture) is a delight: cynical and sad as the nightclub girl, charming and natural among the country house crowd. Charles Spaak's screenplay is melodramatic, but contains some sharp stabs at the hypocrisy of bourgeois society who, while despising girls like Suzy, have their uses for her just the same.