La Tare (1911)
** (out of 4)
Anna Moulin (Renee Carl) finds herself working as a waitress in a Parisian nightclub when she just happens to meet a doctor (Henry Collen) who is kind hearted enough to get her out of the slummy scenery. He takes her back to his office, teaches her the trade and soon she's a highly-respected woman in the field but a man from her past notices who she really is and soon a scandal breaks out. This morality play is very much in the same form as the type of films Griffith had been making at Biograph the past several years. There's no doubt that this film was trying to copy them but what I can't understand is why they needed 42-minutes to tell a story that is so predictable and at times unoriginal that you could have told the exact same thing in no more than 15-minutes. I'm going to guess that Gaumont and director Feuillade just wanted to say they were filming something longer than normal because I really can't think of any other reason for this thing to go on as long as it does. Each scene is pretty familiar as the bad girl meets the good man who then turns her into a good girl only to have a rat try to make her out to be the bad one. Each one of these scenarios just keeps going on and on for no reason other than to expand the running time. It takes forever for the doctor to get her out of the nightclub and the expanded stuff doesn't add up to anything and in the end doesn't even matter. I think both Carl and Collen are very good in their roles and their strong performances help keep you focused on the film a lot more than you would have with lesser performers. I was a little shocked to see that there really wasn't any style and even less imagination as it really seems like Feuillade was trapped by trying to copy something from the States without adding anything new. Other reviewers have pointed out the strange ending and I'd have to agree that it makes very little sense to end the film the way they did.
