Le roman d'un mousse

Marquis Louis Leubas has dissipated his family fortune through dissipation. He has run out of assets to pledge and Maurice Luguet (always referred to as 'Usurer') refuses to lend him any more money. Fortunately for Leubas, he is struck by the carriage of the very wealthy Countess Angèle Lérida. While he recuperates at her estate, Leubas comes to an agreement for Luguet to subsidize his courtship of the lady; he will be paid fifteen million when she and her son, Adrien Petit are dead. While the Marquis and his new bride are honeymooning in Italy, she falls ill, because Leubas has been poisoning her water. Meanwhile, Luguet, as Petit's tutor, takes him to St. Malo, gets him to compose a series of letters about how he's running away to be a cabin boy, and arranges for him to be shanghaied and killed by a fishing captain in his debt. Happily, an old deckhand, Armande Dutertre, rises to the boy's defense.

I was struck that this opening was an euhemerized variation on Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, with Dutertre as the little men. More than that, it's a follow-up to director Leonce Perrett's success of the previous year, L'ENFANT DE PARIS, with enough changes to convince an audience they weren't seeing the same thing. Perrett's compositions are excellent, and a couple of crowded sequences are handled just shy of brilliantly. Alas, while his images are fine, he lacks the ability, or perhaps the confidence, to tell his story visually. Instead, the audience is subjected to an endless stream of long-winded titles, making this at best an example of the 'illustrated text' style of film making.

Made shortly after his celebrated " L'Enfant De Paris ", although less internationally known, "Le Roman D'Un Mousse " solved the main problem of the aforementioned work : what we can call the sense of "meanwhile ":whereas the second part of "L'Enfant De Paris" was almost entirely given over to Bosco's investigation ,forgetting the desperate father ,"Le Roman D'Un Mousse " set the record straight: the boy's fate intertwined with his mother's : as we get closer to the ending,the sequences concerning the son and the mother become shorter and shorter,culminating in the superb scene of the trial in which Charles -Henri and his friend Paimpol vindicate the innocent defendant .

Although ,at least to my eyes , "Le Roman D'Un Mousse "is formally ,technically ,superior to the 1913 work,both stories are similar : a child from a good background suddenly plunged in hell :a drunkard's mistreated slut for the girl, ship's boy for Charles-Henri whose captain wants to do away with him at sea;both find a helping hand: hunchback Bosco 's role is played by old sympathetic bearded sailorman Paimpol .

A visionary man,Perret ,long before the overrated Nouvelle Vague which happened almost half a century later ,already took the cinema out of the studio whenever he could :there are shots of Saint-Malo ramparts ,of Le Havre harbor ,and the final scene uses the sunset to startling effects.

Great scenes:

-the hateful marquis ,who lost his fortune in gambling and debauchery,visits pawn broker Werb :they sign a pact;Werb can be compared to the Devil ,and their cynicism knows no bound when they elaborate their ominous plan.

-Werb, hired as a would be private tutor for Charles -Henri ,has his pupil write an essay ,the subject of which is :"imagine you give your tutor the slip and you embark as a young sailor on a ship ":what a cunning alibi !

-Werb ,telling his pupil that smoking cigarettes make you a man and actually drugging him .

-Charles-Henri and his new pal Paimpol on their frail barque ,tossed by the raging sea (it's more convincing than in Perret's earlier effort " Le Mystere Des Roches De Kador",though the barque is not shown upon the waves ).

-The final scene ,filmed on location on a peaceful evening by the sea: Paimpol offers a puff from his pipe ,but the young boy,remembering the cigarettes, decidedly refuses.

A melodrama in four parts, it's very good storytelling ,well played (particularly the actor who plays Werb gives a masterful performance and the child actor rises to the occasion too)