Entrée des artistes (1938) - film review

Isabelle dreams of becoming a great actress and so she is over the moon when she is accepted into the Conservatoire, France’s leading drama school.  Her talents are immediately spotted by her drama instructor, Professor Lambertin, who is appalled to hear that Isabelle may have to abandon her studies so that she can earn her keep in her adopted parents’ laundrette.  Isabelle’s guardians have a change of heart when Lambertin visits them in person and convinces them that his is a noble profession and that their ward has the makings of a fine actress.  At the school, Isabelle falls in love with an older student, François, who has a reputation as a lady’s man.  When François begins an affair with Isabelle, his former girlfriend Cécilia is consumed with anger and jealousy.  She plans to use her theatrical training to inflict on her former lover a cruel and deadly revenge...

One of the high points of director Marc Allégret’s career, Entrée des artistes offers both a compelling melodrama and a rare insight into the training of actors at France’s leading drama school, the Paris Conservatoire.  The first half of the film functions almost as a documentary and covers both the gruelling entrance exam (in which wannabe actors must perform in front of a hard-to-please panel, like Christians entering the lions’ den) and meticulous re-enactments of drama lessons.  It is this half of the film that is of most interest - what comes afterwards is a pretty conventional (and slightly far-fetched) piece of circa 1940 melodrama.  Not only does this offer sound advice to any budding actor (always respect the text, always find the truth in the character you are playing), it is also performed and staged so authentically that you could easily mistake it for a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

And who better than Louis Jouvet to play the part of the leading drama instructor?  A renowned actor of stage and screen, Jouvet has a natural authority and leaves us in no doubt that he knows of what he speaks, although his character (a rather pompous and vain thesp of the old school) is far from sympathetic, a caricature of Jouvet himself.  Surrounding Jouvet is a chorus made up of highly talented young actors, most of whom are sadly all but forgotten today.  Janine Darcey is stunning as the fragile, kind-hearted Isabelle, the perfect contrast to Odette Joyeux’s vixen-like Cécilia.  Claude Dauphin is perhaps a little too long in the tooth to be entirely convincing as the student actor, but his charisma and boyish charms make him an obvious choice for the part of the naïve lover boy François.   Other familiar faces to watch out for include Bernard Blier, Noël Roquevert, Roger Blin and Julien Carette.  Marcel Dalio almost steals the final act as an investigating magistrate - it is incredible to think that his scenes were re-shot with another actor once Dalio had been fingered as a Jew during the Nazi Occupation.  (Fortunately, the scenes with Dalio were reinstated after the war.)   

Entrée des artistes was to be one of Marc Allégret’s most personal films, primarily because it dealt with a subject that was very close to his heart.  Allégret had a legendary knack for spotting and nurturing talent, and French cinema owes him a great deal.  Among the many great actors that Marc Allégret plucked from obscurity and set on the way to stardom are: Raimu, Michèle Morgan, Gérard Philipe, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Louis Jourdan.  Intelligently scripted by Henri Jeanson and André Cayatte, Entrée des artistes is not only one of Allégret’s more inspired, more humane films, it is also one of cinema’s most insightful tributes to the acting profession, a classic in the true sense of the word.

© James Travers 2012

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