Le Coeur et l'argent (1912)
Directed by Louis Feuillade, Léonce Perret

Film Review

The year before he began making his much vaunted Fantômas films, the first in a succession of enormously popular crime-thriller series, Louis Feuillade teamed up with another prominent director at Gaumont, Léonce Perret, to make this unusually pessimistic melodrama.  Le Coeur et l'argent came at a time when Gaumont was consciously trying to raise its game, in an attempt to compete with classier productions from its rivals, in particular the recently founded Le Film d'Art.  Not only does the film use location filming extensively (something that would become a feature of Feuillade's subsequent serials), it also employs the rarely used (at this time) device of 'split screen', not as a gimmick but as an ingenious means of showing us what is in the mind of the protagonists.

The contrast between the sunny location scenes (shot in the rural-looking suburbs just outside Paris) and oppressive studio interiors is striking and graphically emphasises the choice the heroine has to make, between a life of freedom and fulfilment with the man she really loves, or one of comfort, restraint and life-sapping boredom with one for whom she has no feelings.  The location sequences are attractively photographed and have a similar naturalistic lyricism to what we find in Jean Renoir's La Fille de l'eau (1925).  There is a touching romanticism to these scenes, and the final shot of the drowned heroine instantly calls to mind Millais' famous painting Orphelia.

The film's most striking innovation is its use of split screen, in its two key scenes.  In the first, trapped in a loveless marriage, the heroine recalls her happy times with her true love, which are depicted on the righthand side of the screen with a superimposed shot of the happy young lovers on the river.  In the second, when the heroine and the ferryman are reunited, the cause of the latter's antipathy towards his former lover is revealed to us with a similarly superimposed shot on the lefthand side of the screen, showing the heroine wooing another man.  The first spit screen stresses the brutal disconnect between dreams and reality; the second shows us the now unbridgeable rift between the heroine and her lover.  Given how effectively the split screen technique is used here, as a device that lends psychological depth to a simple narrative, it is surprising that it wasn't used more widely.

In the film, the heroine is played by Suzanne Grandais, one of Gaumont's biggest stars - an actress who was considered the Mary Pickford of French cinema and whom Feuillade likened to Pearl White.  Grandais wasn't just an attractive and charismatic performer, she was also a highly accomplished actress, and, even though she was just 19 when she starred in Le Coeur et l'argent, her performance is both captivating and true to life.  Grandais' prominent career was tragically cut short when she died in a road accident eight years later whilst making what was to be her last film, Charles Burguet's L'Essor (1920).

Film Synopsis

Suzanne Mauguiot has fallen in love with a penniless ferryman named Raymond, but her father, a prosperous innkeeper, has decided she must marry the wealthy Monsieur Vernier.  Suzanne has no choice but to comply with her parents' wishes but Vernier dies suddenly, not long after the marriage.  In his will, Vernier leaves his entire estate to his wife, on condition that she never remarries.  Unable to keep this promise, Suzanne returns to her first love, but, seeing her now as a faithless woman, Raymond drives her away...