The heart-warming story of two sisters, one blind, being separated and subjected to cruel ordeals, in a terrible mess of intrigues, involving abduction and wicked crooks of the gutter surviving by deceit, begging and villainy - this is an extensive plot of immense complications, but well made, well acted and endorsed by adorable music by Nino Rota - this is somehow the ideal melodrama, containing everything, a bit of Victor Hugo, a bit of Abbé Prévost and his "Manon Lescaut" (the action is in Paris 1784), and a bit of Eugène Sue's "The Mysteries of Paris" with all its gutter people. The complexities are almost unsurveyable in their constantly worsening complications, but the story is great. The orphan sister Luisa is not blind to begin with, she attracts her blindness by an illness at 15, they grow up in the country after the death of the other's parents and then go to Paris, where Riquette, the seeing sister, gets abducted, leaving her blind sister to manage on her own, and she is well taken care of by a family of lewd crooks, who use her blindness to increase their income by begging. The abducted sister eventually gets imprisoned and sentenced to be deported to Louisiana - the mess is assuming tremendous proportions, and who could possibly find any way out of it? Well, there are a few exceptions among all the rat pack of scoundrels, who fortunately act their own way, and even the severest patron of authority proves to have some human conscience. It's an amazing maze of human entanglements, but the author actually succeeds in accomplishing a satisfying winding up of the inextricable tangle. This film is a must for everyone who can enjoy a good heart-warming sob story.
