Marius

Morning comes to Marcel Pagnol's Marseille, the old generation slumbers while the young one scans the horizon, there's a whole ocean just behind the beaded curtains. The town is divided into bistro and wharf and al fresco market, chuckling and shrugging at each other's picturesque colorfulness is a full-time job. César (Raimu) embodies the comfy vielle garde, meanwhile his son Marius (Pierre Fresnay) hears the siren call of the barge and longs to escape, even if it means leaving behind chère Fanny (Orane Demazis). The nesting/roaming tension is but the center of a circus of provincialism, full of jocular melancholia ("Honor is like a match, it can only be used once") and cutaways to trapeze artists like the gasbag suitor (Fernand Charpin) and the grounded mariner (Paul Dullac) and the brassy matron (Alida Rouffe). "The right poem at the right time lends tone to a conversation." Filming the play head-on, Alexander Korda attempts a few face-saving directorial flourishes, like a composition cleaved in half by bobbing shadows and a blubbering Gallic rendition of "Blow the Man Down." The auteur remains Pagnol, of course, his is a tragicomedy not of camera angles but of bodies and voices (even non-French ears should feel the rollercoaster of accents), of brawls curtailed by champagne bottles and of caps and aprons worn like uniforms or armors. Mixing a drink is a ritual, flaunting a new hat or cheating at cards even more so. The Walsh of Me and My Gal and The Bowery is quite close in timbre, Capra has his own version of the dilemma in It's a Wonderful Life. Fainting fille and departing ferry at the close, father's call in the distance. "And they say that we Marseillais exaggerate!" With Alexandre Mihalesco, Robert Vattier, Édouard Delmont, and Milly Mathis. In black and white.