Tout ça ne vaut pas l'amour

The very first of the four movies Jacques (Jack) Tourneur made in France ;the director himself thought these minor works would not be handed down to posterity.For sure ,they pale next to his brilliant American films in the forties and fifties.

Like "Toto" ,it's a harmless unpretentious little comedy (which,oddly, begins like a melodrama:the pregnant unwed girl who gives birth to a stillborn baby and who is taken in by a pharmacist ) This man is too kind-hearted for his own good :and the happy end is only half a happy end ,following a very funny case of mistaken identity.

When a little boy comes to get his father's prescription filled ,not only the brat receives his medicine for free (and gumdrops at that),but he also tells the good man: "dad told me that the pharmacists are all thieves ".He acts like a doctor and cures a fat lady who comes every day cause she digests her food with difficulty.(she washes it down with a whole bottle of wine)

His neighbor (Gabin in his unsung Pre -Duvivier days ) sells Wireless and deafens our good man with the music he plays all day ,but he is not a spiteful person:he buys a set.

Now that he's got a Young girl at home,he opens up:he tries to learn to drive with disastrous results ,he takes her to the ball and to the fair .Little by little,he falls in love with her ,but his Young neighbor will have to be reckoned with....When he declares his love for his protégée to Gabin's mother ,there're two unpleasant surprises in store for him.

Half happy end indeed!

Notable as the first film directed by Jaques Tourneur still in the shadow of the father, whose fame his own would surpass, this plodding early French sound film has very little else going for it.

Direction is certainly competent, even advanced for it's day. Jean Gabin is already second billed for a small part and he and the ill fated Gael make a presentable set of juveniles but the rest of the cast are grossly theatrical - and occasionally gross as well.

We get one striking sequence in the visit to Gael's father's factory, where Tourneur and the designers spring to life, but the rest is a succession of often elaborately staged, unfunny comic tableaux in which chemist lead Marcel Lévesque (from the Feuillade serials) humiliates himself trying to win the girl he has befriended.

The film does have an odd place in history as the one scheduled for screening the night of the Cinémathèque riot.