Le Diamant noir (1941)
Directed by Jean Delannoy

Film Review

Whereas the Hollywood melodrama of the 1940s has enjoyed something of a reappraisal in recent decades, with many offerings (notably those featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford) attaining the status of classics, its French counterpart remains a thing of sour derision.  The bitter irony and underlying bedrock of authenticity that redeem many American melodramas are hard to detect in French films of this ilk, so that all that remains in the French melodrama is an over-laboured exhibition of gratuitous schmaltz that aptly deserves the damning epithet of 'women's picture'.  Le Diamant noir is typical of its genre, a lachrymose monstrosity that now appears dated beyond belief, despite some very creditable acting from its lead actors, Charles Vanel and Gaby Morlay.

Morlay was the undisputed queen of the French melodrama.  Her subsequent Le Voile bleu (1942), directed by Jean Stelli, was one of the most popular French films of the Occupation, and with some justification.  Morlay had an unstarry, self-effacing persona that made it easy for ordinary women across France to identify with her - no one was better suited to play the humble, self-sacrificing, and unceasingly virtuous heroine than she was.  Gaby Morlay's melodramas were incredibly successful at the time, but, contrived, stilted and ridiculously over-sentimental, they now they appear horrendously dated.  It's hard to comprehend just why it was that audiences flocked in their millions to watch Saint Gaby being martyred time after time up on the big screen, whilst their political leaders lent their support to a real tragedy of infinitely greater proportions - the systematic expulsion of Jews and other 'undesirables' from French society. Panem et circenses.

Le Diamant noir is by no means the worst example of its kind but it makes pretty grim viewing - not because the subject matter is depressing (it is actually quite dreary and predictable), but because it is so atrociously mishandled.  Jean Aicard's novel had already been adapted for cinema by André Hugon back in 1922, and this is a far superior film.  Jean Delannoy's version is, by contrast, crass and soulless to a fault, with scarcely a note of genuine feeling in it.  It's not sufficient that the script is drenched in the kind of mechanically hammered out sentimentality that makes watching the film without an easily reachable sick-bag a highly risky venture; Delannoy has to further ratchet up the toe-curling ickiness with some pointlessly accented mise-en-scène, which is not helped at all by a score that brings tears to the eye with all the deft subtlety of a rapid psychopath repeatedly trapping your most intimate parts in a cast-iron door.  Delannoy did ultimately prove to be a highly respectable and gifted filmmaker with such impressive fare as La Symphonie pastorale (1946) and Les Jeux sont faits (1947), but at this early stage in his career his films are pretty hard to stomach, most being tainted by the unmistakable stench of tacky populism and bogus sentiment.  Now that is something to cry about.

Film Synopsis

François Mitry, a wealthy banker, has scarcely had time to come to terms with his wife's death in a car accident when he is struck by another blow.  By chance, he finds a bundle of letters which his wife Thérèse requested be destroyed after her death.  Mitry is at first willing to comply with his wife's request, but before the letters are burned he cannot resist reading the fragments that remain.  It seems that before she died Thérèse was pursuing a love affair with another man and that Mitry is not the father of their infant daughter Nora.  His feelings for his daughter having altered, Mitry readily agrees to a suggestion proposed by the girl's governess, Mademoiselle Dubard, to send her to a boarding school.  Several years later, on the threshold of womanhood, Nora absconds from her school and returns to her home, where she is surprised to see her father and the hated Mademoiselle Dubard kissing.  It transpires that the latter has long nurtured a fondness for the lonely widower, but Nora has no intention of accepting her as a replacement for her lost mother...