Le Voile bleu (1942) - film review

France, 1914.  Not long after her husband is killed in the war, Louise Jarraud gives birth, but her newborn baby lives only a few hours.  The experience has a profound effect on Louise and, her maternal instinct aroused, she decides to dedicate the rest of her life to caring for children.  She finds a position as a nurse with a solitary widower, Emile Perrette, but when he offers to marry her she leaves and works for another household.   Louise knows that she can never marry again, that she lives only for the infants who are placed in her trust...

It may be hard to believe today but Le Voile bleu was a phenomenal box office hit when it was first released in France during the Nazi occupation.  Audiences were enraptured by this creaking, overly sentimental melodrama which offered Gaby Morlay the greatest film role of her career.  A shameless tear jerker, this is the French equivalent of the schmaltzy women’s pictures that stars such as Bette Davis had been churning out on the other side of the Atlantic, presumably to keep the manufacturers of pocket handkerchiefs in business.  It is a sign of how much audiences have changed over the past half a century that this kind of film now fails to have any real emotional impact and feels false and excruciatingly contrived.

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