Marius (1931)

Marius is a French romantic film drama first released in 1931, directed by Alexander Korda and Marcel Pagnol.  The film stars Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, Orane Demazis, Fernand Charpin and Alida Rouffe.  It has also been released under the title: La Trilogie.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


César is the owner of a café in the French port of Marseilles, which he runs with his twenty-year-old son Marius.  Marius resents being tied to the bar all day and longs to travel to foreign lands by sea.  The only thing that holds him back is his love for Fanny, the girl who looks after a neighbouring fishmonger stall for her mother.  When he sees Fanny in the company of the old shopkeeper Honoré Panisse, Marius is consumed with jealousy and prompts Fanny into revealing her love for him.  Marius knows he should marry Fanny and stay with her in Marseilles, but the call of the sea is too strong for him to resist.  Deciding to put her lover’s happiness before her own, Fanny persuades Marius that he should follow his heart’s desire...

Marius was the first instalment in a series of classic films scripted by the great French playwright and film director Marcel Pagnol which came to be known as The Marseilles Trilogy, or simply La trilogie.  Along with its sequels, Fanny (1932) and César (1936), Marius offered an unembellished slice of life in the southern French port which came as a breath of fresh air to audiences of the time.  What was so refreshing about the film was its total lack of artifice.  The story it tells is a simple one which anyone who saw it could relate to.  It deals with everyday themes - the rift between parents and their grown-up children, the pains and practicalities of falling in love, the difficulty of reconciling personal ambitions with the emotional need for love and stability.  Marius is nothing more than old-fashioned soap opera at its simplest and best, an authentic depiction of ordinary people coping with mundane problems, in a way that is thoroughly beguiling, without the tawdry contrivance of melodrama.  The film’s phenomenal success not only provided a boost to Marcel Pagnol’s career, allowing him to become one of France’s leading independent filmmakers; it also helped to position the auteur at the heart of French cinema.  Its impact can be felt today, in the unusually high proportion of naturalistic dramas that come out of France each year, many of which tackle the very same issues.

Marius started out as a phenomenally successful stage play, first performed in March 1929 at the Théâtre de Paris.  This first production ran for over 800 performances and established its author Marcel Pagnol as one of France’s most celebrated modern playwrights.  The film’s success attracted the attention of Paramount France, a recently created subsidiary of Paramount Pictures, which was looking for popular stage plays to adapt into films. The director of Paramount France, Robert T. Kane, offered Pagnol the substantial sum of half a million French francs for the film rights to his play, but the writer refused.  Showing uncanny business sense, Pagnol negotiated a far more favourable deal - he would have complete control over the adaptation of his play and the casting, and would take one per cent of the profits.  As the film proved to be a massive international hit (earning over eight million francs in the first two months of its French release), it made Pagnol a wealthy man and enabled him to set up his own film production and distribution company, which he based in his beloved home region of Marseilles.

One source of contention between Paramount and Pagnol was the film’s casting.  Paramount wanted to use their contract players - Victor Francen, Henry Garat and Meg Lemonnier were lined up for the parts of César, Marius and Fanny - but Pagnol insisted that the actors in the original stage play be used.  Paramount had two concerns - firstly that none of the actors in the stage play had had much, if any, experience of film work, and secondly that the imperfect sound recording equipment of the time may make their strong regional accents unintelligible to audiences outside Marseilles.  Pagnol refused to give ground and finally got his way, although the hiring of Raimu presented some difficulty as he was, at the time, under contract with one of Paramount’s biggest competitors in France, Braunberger-Richebé.  Pagnol managed to secure Raimu after a distribution deal was struck between the two rival companies.  Paramount chose to simultaneously record two other versions of the film, one in German and another in Swedish, but Pagnol had no input into these versions.  

Although he was very keen to get to grips with the process of filmmaking, which he saw as essential to the future of the dramatic art, Marcel Pagnol did not feel qualified to direct Marius himself, so Paramount offered the job to Alexander Korda, a Hungarian émigré who had recently begun working in France after a successful stint in Hollywood.  Korda had never set foot in Marseilles (and would not do so whilst making the film), but with the help of his set designer, and working under Pagnol’s close supervision, he succeeded in recreating the ambiance of the busy French port in the studio.  The film was shot in just five weeks, almost entirely in Paramount France’s studio at Saint-Maurice on the outskirts of Paris.  A few shots of Marseilles were recorded on location, without any of the cast, to establish the setting.  One of the things which Pagnol disliked about the film was its studio-bound feel.  For the two sequels, which were shot in Marseilles, he would use extensive location filming to achieve a far greater sense of realism, setting a precedent for all of his subsequent films. 

The staggering success of Marius was not only good for Pagnol, giving him artistic freedom he could never had dreamed of, it also made instant stars of its three lead actors - Raimu, Pierre Fresnay and Orane Demazis - each of whom distinguished him or herself with an exceptionally moving performance that brings out the best in Pagnol’s devastatingly humane screenplay.   In what was her screen debut, Demazis was acclaimed as the Lillian Gish of French cinema, providing a model for other actresses with her strikingly modern portrayal of an ordinary young woman tormented by very familiar crises of the heart.  Raimu became so sought-after as a screen actor that he had to give up his stage work, whilst Fresnay found himself an immediate matinee idol and would soon be called up by Alfred Hitchcock to feature in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).  Another notable presence in the film is Charpin, a remarkable character actor who would become a very familiar face in French cinema in the 1930s, perhaps best remembered as the cowardly informer in Julien Duvier’s Pépé le Moko (1937). 

Not long after completing his work on Marius, Alexander Korda settled in England and found even greater acclaim as the director of such films as The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Rembrandt (1936), before making a huge impact as a film producer.  Months before the film version of Marius was released in October 1931, Marcel Pagnol had written a sequel for the stage, Fanny, which would have its first theatrical performance in December 1931.  Lacking Marius’s male leads - Fresnay was otherwise engaged and Raimu had been dismissed after a row with theatre owner Léon Volterra - Fanny was far less successful on the stage than its predecessor, and its run was curtailed after 400 perfomances when Pagnol made his film adaptation.  The latter was released to great acclaim in November 1932 - but that’s another story…

© James Travers 2001-2011

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