Gervaise

Everything happens to Gervaise. At the beginning of this grim dramatization of a Zola story, the "best-looking man in the neighborhood"--to whom the lame Gervaise has been informally married for seven years--runs off with another woman, leaving the destitute heroine with two children. At the end, with her legal husband--with whom she had spent a few happy years--dead, Gervaise is homeless and penniless, sitting dazed and sullen in a small bar.

Between these points, her life has its tough spots--as has the film--but it is a relentless series of misfortunes. Director Rene Clement and his star, Maria Schell, have played this exhausting saga for every sob, every simper and every sordid detail. They have come with up an absorbing, at times sickening, film, but one which never reaches its goal of tragedy and which is more depressing than it is genuinely moving.

Miss Schell, as the unfortunate Gervaise, gives a virtuoso performance, pulling out every emotional stop, but with a restraint that makes her suffering convincing. Her tears and her simpers are no doubt the best of their kind in the motion picture business, but whereas her recent Hollywood directors (who know a good thing when they see one) have restricted Miss Schell's efforts almost exclusively to these two talents, M. Clement allows his star a fuller range of expression--with much more satisfactory results.

The supporting cast, headed by Francois Perier as the shiftless husband and Suzy Delair as Gervaise's scheming enemy, is impeccable, and M. Clement's direction achieves its effects brilliantly. In term of motion picture artistry. Gervaise constitutes a nearly perfect effort (although the Brattle's projection technique leaves something to be desired.) Clement's slight humorous touches (which are almost forgotten in the depression of the climax) are masterstrokes: a beggar quietly switching his sign from "Aveugle" to "Sourd et Buet," the ridiculously bad singing of a guest at Gervaise's birthday party.

But while Clement introduces his humor with admirable subtlety, he plays his horror with brutal directness. Such scenes as the washing-house fight between Gervaise and her rival (where Miss Schell tears an earring out through Miss Delair's bleeding earlobe) and the bedroom where M. Perier has vomited the results of an all-day drinking spree--photographed in careful detail--are moments the viewer would like to, but cannot, forget.

With hamhanded touches of horror like these, M. Clement destroys the tragedy and poignancy of his situation. Gervaise is a fine, very nearly moving, motion picture; if you can stomach (and forget) the sordid detail, it is a worthwhile experience.