Le maître de forges

The cast and credits read "a film by Fernand Rivers supervised by Abel Gance".

Gaby Morlay in one of her countless melodramas .She plays a young aristocrat whose family is completely broke.Her fiancé,a duke marries her rival,a rich lumpish bourgeois.So she marries in money with a wealthy manufacturer but she refuses to consummate the marriage .She will soon discover that her hubby has got a big heart.

Gance might have filmed the short sequences which take place in the factory,with the molten metal,which are more inventive than the rest which is routine melodrama.Best sequences are those when the Bourgeois tries to become a Gentihomme:as Molière proved it in the Seventeenth century,it's "mission:impossible".He overturns the countess's cup of tea,and ,during the posh meal,his crude manners cannot fool his refined son-in-law and the servants.

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"Les Affaires Sont les Affaires" Jean Dréville 1942

"Le Roman D'Un Jeune Homme Pauvre " Abel Gance 1935

"The skin game" Alfred Hitchcock 1931