This little known Pathé film by a little known director Jean Choux might not in the first instance seem very promising. It is a rather hagiographic biography of a heroine of the Great War Louise de Bettignies who spied for the British in occupied France until she was arrested in 1915. And it has all the expected failings - sentimentality, patriotism, even religious fervour.
But actually the film manages rather remarkably to transcend all that and become a very tense and interesting account. Strictly speaking it is a biofiction (the character is called Geneviève de Vendeville in the film and her fate differ somewhat from that of the real-life spy) but there is no doubt that it is based on de Bettignies. At one point we not only see the statue that adorns her memorial (her body was repatriated in 1920) but the director really quite elegantly recreates the tableau the statue represents (a soldier kissing the hand of a woman whose face is turned away) in the action of the film. And there are many similar elegant touches throughout the film, plus some very good cinematography and rather impressive acting.
There is a very clever piece of audience entrapment where you believe a girl has been caught pickpocketing a German officer but as the officer approaches, his image changes to that of her boyfriend and she explains that she must have had a dream and has in fact completed the task and covered her tracks already (which the audience has not known till that moment). The escape across the border of a young couple is superbly filmed. The arrest of the heroine is also a brilliant moment.
It even goes a little deeper than most hagiographic accounts of war-partisans in that it explores a sort of semi-religious desire for martyrdom that seems to inspire the heroine (she frequently envisages a violent death and sees herself at one point as Jeanne d'Arc), which is entirely psychologically plausible. To offset her saintliness there is rather good woman villain (the German counter-espionage agent no, 125) who does her espionage while reposing elegantly rather like the detective who solves the crimes while sleeping in Carné's wonderful Drôle de drame.
This film is is not a masterpiece but it is a much, much better film than one might have expected from its total obscurity and from its subject-matter. It's a good deal better, for instance, than Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac.
The version I saw was produced for the Pathé-Rural, a new non-flammable 17.5mm projection system launched in 1927 not so much for home-projection like the 9mm Pathé-Baby but for projection in halls in rural areas. It was renamed Pathé Junior in 1933 (and sound-enabled) but banned by the Germans in 1941. Plus ça change.......
