L’Aventurier (1934) - film review

Étienne Ranson is the black sheep of his family.  Having made his fortune in Tunisia, he returns to France and receives a cool reception from his uncle, Achille Guéroy, the owner of a glove factory in Grenoble.   Guéroy is astounded when his nephew returns the money he had lent him and immediately looks at Étienne in a new light when it becomes apparent that he is now a very wealthy man.  However, when Ranson is arrested for his involvement in a bloody riot in Tunisia, the family is quick to disown him again.  When the charges against him are dropped, Ranson returns to Grenoble and intervenes to end a strike at the factory.  Ranson then learns that his cousin Jacques has lost the company’s entire cash reserves through  high-risk speculation.  Aware that the Guéroys face ruin and dishonour, Ranson agrees to bail them out, on one condition: that he can marry his adopted cousin Geneviève.  But she is already engaged to another man...

L’Aventurier was one of a number of stage plays adapted for cinema by director Marcel L’Herbier in the 1930s which, whilst moderately successful, gave him little scope for employing the visual flair that he had shown in his previous silent films.  With its unflattering portrayal of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, the film has echoes of L’Herbier’s previous masterpiece L’Argent (1929), although it lacks the force of that film.   An effective mix of melodrama and social satire, the film has an obvious anti-capitalist stance which would have appealed to a contemporary cinema audience.  At the time, left-wing sentiment was very much in the ascendant in France, and two years later the country would be governed by a coalition of leftist parties (the Popular Front).

L’Aventurier has a distinguished cast, although few of the illustrious actors in the castlist are remembered today.   The lead actor Victor Francen was a major star in French cinema at this time, but would go on to find greater fame in Hollywood, in such films as Madame Curie (1943), Passage to Marseille (1944), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and The Beast with Five Fingers (1946).  Francen’s brooding persona and unconventional good looks made him the ideal casting choice for the kind of character he plays in this film, the society outsider who has no truck with bourgeois morality.  This is a film that plays to Francen’s strengths and the actor gives what is easily one of his most memorable performances, one that is enhanced by the presence of his eye-catching co-stars Blanche Montel and Gisèle Casadesus.   L’Aventurier is by no means L’Herbier’s finest film, but it is competently directed, well-scripted and vividly reflects the mood of its time.  The sequence where striking factory workers riot around the Guéroy mansion instantly calls to mind the one in Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) in which revolutionaries attack the palace of Versailles.   The film anticipates a new revolution, in which the loathed bourgeoisie would be for the chop.

© James Travers 2010

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