Toni

A booming Provence draws workers from Spain and Italy, among them Charles Blavette. He quickly acquires a job at a quarry and a wife, Jenny Hélia, but nurses a passion for the sluttish Celia Montalván, When her uncle dies and Blavette is adamant that he will carry out his wishes that Blavette do his duty as Celia's daughter's godfather, his life goes to pieces. He thinks he can put it together again with a hare-brained scheme that involves Celia, the baby and him running away to South America, but there are complications in her household he doesn't imagine.

Jean Renoir's frequently overlooked movie is competently done, but ignored because, although it clearly has film noir elements in it, including the usual femme fatale, everyone is. to put it unkindly, so stupidly selfish as to be unworthy of much dramatic consideration. The situations go beyond pathos into bathos, and if it were not for the grace notes that Renoir inserts into the production, like the workers' songs, and the actors' ability to inhabitant these foolish characters, it would not be worth the time to look at the movie.

It's a well-meaning effort, based on some ethnographic notes that an old school friend of Renoir's, Jacques Levert took; Marcel Pagnol is listed as executive producer, so clearly someone thought that this was something on the order of the Fanny trilogy in showing the lower classes as they really were. Unfortunately, it shows them as dopes and little more.