Maman Colibri

A remake of Julien Duvivier's last silent movie(1929) , this melodrama made the French audience cry their eyes out .

Plot:Irène de Rysberg is a mother of two , two young men that is ;married to a man who could be her father , she 's neglected, reduced to a piece of furniture .Her eldest son's best friend , Georges De Chambry ,falls in love with her ; when he sails to Algeria to carry out his military service ,she follows him and she and her dashing officer live in a desirable mansion by the sea .But she's become an outcast ,nobody but a woman with a racy past entertains her in the fashionable circles .The superiors in the army look on this illicit affair in an unfavourable light and they tell the young man to be discreet .Anyway ,he meets an attractive Canadian girl and poor Irene has to withdraw and sail back to her native France .Soon pennyless , she learns that her eldest boy has just had a baby : but will the respectable family welcome the prodigal mom?Will she get her fervent wish : to see her grandson?

Dreville's directing is academic ,and his movie is inferior to its model ; Duvivier showed his higher skill in the masked ball (not featured in the remake ,when the movie begins , the mother of two and Georges are already lovers) where they meet by chance ; his sense of space in the desert scenes ,absent too. Romantic young male lead Jean-Pierre Aumont is rather bland but he's OK for this kind of part .Huguette Duflos's playing theatricals sometimes verge on ridicule, but most of the time ,she displays sensitiveness and looks restrained.