BLACK DIAMOND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 523, 1 July 1949, Page 14

BLACK DIAMOND

(Exclusive Films) ‘THE high standard of acting maintained in this French film by a cast recruited largely from the "legitimate stage makes it a little more interesting than Fiévres, which came from the same producer, Jean Delannoy. A very fine performance is given by Charles Vanel, of the Comédie Francaise, in the part of a prosperous banker whose life is ruined because of an imagined infidelity, of his wife’s. She is killed at the beginning of the film in a motor accident, and a package of letters is found in her purse with instructions that they be destroyed in case of death. Like a good husband Vanel throws them on the fire unopened, but he can’t help reading certain words that show as the pages curl up in the flames. He imagines, naturally enough, that they are from his wife’s lover, and he receives a terrible shock when he sees a reference to "our" daughter. Can it be that their beautiful child, the only person he cares for now that his wife is dead, is not really his at all? In revulsion he turns away from his daughter, and sends her to a convent, But the child still loves him, and when she escapes from the convent one night and sees her father embracing her former, governess, who has become his mistress, she is so shocked that she decides to take the veil. Towards the end of the picture a middle-aged woman-. an old friend of Vanel’s wife who has been abroad-calls to ask for certain letters she had entrusted to his wife before she went away. When Vanel realises that he has been duped by circumstances and that the child is really his own, he suffers a stroke that turns his hair grey. Finally father and daughter are reunited and the film ends with the outbreak of war in 1939 and everyone going off to do their bit pour la patrie. { © This melodramatic plot doesn’t, however, detract from’ the quality of the film as a whole, and once again certain Gallic characteristics-the dramatic use of irony and the prominence of the re-\ ligious motif-stand out. One shouldn’t overlook the skilful performance of Gaby Morlay in the unsympathetic role of the governess. Two sisters take the part of the daughter-Helen Garletti as the precocious. eight-year-old at the beginning of the picture, and Louise Garletti as the beautiful young girl who wins back her father’s love and finally ejects~ the governess from their life. She does not, incidentally, carry out her intention of becoming a nun.