....there is a grasping matronly woman(Rosay) and her gentle daughter,some kind of Cinderella.Their hotel is called "Bijou"(sic)(=jewel).The guests include a gangster(Meurisse) and his moll(Signoret who will team up again with Meurisse in the celebrated "diabolique"),an old man and a very young woman,a guy dressed up as a sailor and more.
This work strongly recalls pre-war movies ,particularly Carné's :"Jenny" (1936) and of course "hotel du nord"(1938),but Blistène is no match for the master of the realisme poétique;for instance ,Françoise Rosay overplays and her hairdo (a wig?) makes her look like some kind of Madame Mim in "sword in the stone";Signoret cannot do anything very exciting with her part of a bad gal;the rest of the cast follows suit,with the eventual exception of the remarkable Andrée Clément.
SPOILERS The ending will surprise the audience though, because here Blistène does not follow the rules of melodrama:the romantic male lead chooses ...the bad girl -and the dough!-and the virtuous daughter ,the ugly duckling ,turns into an elegant woman running a revamped chic hotel -gone is her mother's crummy house.
This work strongly recalls pre-war movies ,particularly Carné's :"Jenny" (1936) and of course "hotel du nord"(1938),but Blistène is no match for the master of the realisme poétique;for instance ,Françoise Rosay overplays and her hairdo (a wig?) makes her look like some kind of Madame Mim in "sword in the stone";Signoret cannot do anything very exciting with her part of a bad gal;the rest of the cast follows suit,with the eventual exception of the remarkable Andrée Clément.
SPOILERS The ending will surprise the audience though, because here Blistène does not follow the rules of melodrama:the romantic male lead chooses ...the bad girl -and the dough!-and the virtuous daughter ,the ugly duckling ,turns into an elegant woman running a revamped chic hotel -gone is her mother's crummy house.