Film Forum

(1938, Marcel Pagnol) When his drop-dead gorgeous young wife Ginette Leclerc (the disabled femme fatale of Clouzot’s Le Courbeau) runs off with a young shepherd, middle-aged Provençal village boulanger Raimu (César of Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy) goes on strike, refusing to produce another loaf until she comes back. The apotheosis of the great French actor Raimu (“The greatest actor of all time” – Marlene Dietrich; “For me, the greatest actor in history” – Orson Welles), in a film once extolled as the ne plus ultra of European filmmaking – with a risqué theme unimaginable in Hollywood movies at the time – but long unseen in any form. DCP restoration. Approx. 124 min.

Presented with support from the George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE

Reviews

“A perfect movie.”
– Orson Welles

“Raimu’s baker is an acting classic – a true tragicomic hero.”
– Pauline Kael

“One of the very greatest pictures ever made: pagan, poetic, and incomparably witty. If the cinema could only live up to its standards, we should all very soon be spoiled.”
– Frank Nugent, The New York Times

“The best entertainment to be seen at the moment in any cinema. The treatment is so authentic that it seems over far too soon, and the acting is superb... But the human actors are only part of the general setting – the well and the olive trees and the crude, crowded church and the Cercle Republicain with the tin advertisements, and the hunter going out in the dawn with his dog and his gun while the baker sleeps in his trough beside the oven.”
– Graham Greene

“Raimu makes of his conjugal love, of his overpowering grief at his wife’s absence, and of his resulting lapse into outrageous drunkenness, an epic portrait of a man, simple and human, and he gives Giono’s dialogue that poetic translucence which is its just due… No review can give a satisfactory explanation of the film’s beauty. Of all films since Vigo’s L’Atalante, it remains gratefully in the memory.”
– Basil Wright