User Reviews

"La Tare" would make a great double-feature along with 1925's "Red Kimona". Both films are about "fallen women" who have made a fresh start and mended their ways--only to have their past haunt them and a society unwilling to give them a second chance despite their dramatic change towards good.

The film begins with Anna working in a dance hall, however, from the intertitle cards, such a place was probably more a place for prostitution than innocent fun. However, she is rescued from this seedy life by a doctor and she gets work with him caring for his sick patients. She becomes so indispensable that eventually she becomes head of nursing at the hospital. But, despite all the good she does, it all comes crashing down on her when a jerk from her past recognizes her and tries blackmailing her. She refuses and in turn he destroys her reputation and the weasels at the hospital fire her!

The only serious problem about this film is the ending. I assume that perhaps the ending was lost, but if it wasn't, then the director was insane!! Instead of a good resolution to the film's dilemma, an intertitle card appears and tells, in a couple sentences, what 10 extra minutes of film should have shown!! Does anyone know if this was the way the film really ended?!

The film obviously was made as a rebuke against such unfairness and draconian ideas of morality and propriety. And, as such, it succeeds pretty well. One reviewer felt that it was a bit too slow, but for a film from 1911, it's not bad at all in its pacing. When you compare it to the 1925 film (which was set at about the same time "La Tare" was set--the 1910s), you can see that pacing has improved quite a bit as well as the ability to tell a story--but is still not THAT different.

Also, while the film might have been tightened up a bit, compared to the director's pieces like "Judex" and "Les Vampires" (which are between 5 and 6 1/2 hours each), this story IS told very compactly!!

The plot of La Tare - a good woman's guilty past returning to haunt her - is one that the cinema has retold countless times over the years, but this offering from Louis Feuillade must be one of the earliest. Its pacing is slow by modern standards, and the ending is jarringly abrupt, but Feuillade's growing confidence with the medium is fascinating to watch. The composition and lighting of the sombre final scene is particularly striking.

LA TARE (literally, "The Flaw") is a 43-minute film about Anna, a woman who is rescued from a Parisian dance hall to work in a charitable hospital. Over the years, she rises to become the head of the institution, but when an old habitué of the dance hall recognizes her picture, he attempts to blackmail her. When she refuses, he publishes a letter in the paper and the good local people who make up the hospital's board demand her resignation.

Feuillade directs this movie at a very slow place that makes me wish he would simply get along with the story; Feuillade, who had pushed his earlier comedies at a great clip, handled this is a bit of an experimental film, trying to produce an interesting film that uses the slow, deliberate pace of works like JUDEX and LES VAMPIRES. However, the story and details do not sustain majority of the scenes, although the pay-off, when Anna contemplates suicide, helps to make sense of the overall pacing.

Still, as a whole, the film could easily have been cut to a shorter film, perhaps three or even two reels.

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.