Premier mai (1958)
Directed by Luis Saslavsky

Film Review

Premier mai - Le père et l'enfant (released in Italy as Festa di Maggio) is a heart-warming Franco-Italian production which, with its over-earnest portrayal of working class solidarity, feels like a throwback to the mid-1930s.  It's a film whose class prejudices are clearly visible (the affluent middle classes are portrayed throughout with abject contempt), with a young Yves Montand proving to be as vivid a representation of the noble proletariat as Jean Gabin had been at the time of the Popular Front.  This is one of the lesser films to be directed by Luis Saslavsky, who had been an influential filmmaker in his home country of Argentina in the 1930s and 40s before being forced into exile in France in the 1950s.  During his time in France, Saslavsky directed half a dozen now mostly forgotten films that include the Cocteau-scripted La Couronne noire (1951) and stylish thriller Les Louves (1952).

Both stylistically and thematically, Premier mai looks like a halfway-house between the old-fashioned cinéma de papa that the critics of the time had come to revile and the early offerings of the French New Wave.  Extensive location sequences filmed in Paris have an odd mix of Nouvelle Vague modernity and Italian neo-realism about them.  The characters are authentically drawn and convincingly played by a likeable cast.  As well as an usually jovial Montand, the cast includes some other talented up-and-coming actors, in the form of Nicole Berger and Laurent Terzieff.  Aldo Fabrizi, a well-known Italian actor and director of the period, has a welcome presence as a surly but kind-hearted trunk-driver, but it is the young Yves Noël who steals the film as the adorable eight-year-old hero of the piece, François. 

The film's high point is a memorable scene in which François coerces his father (Montand at his most affable and down-to-Earth) into explaining to him 'where babies come from'.  Montand's awkward attempts to answer the question that every father dreads hearing from his cherished offspring ("Daddy, how did you make me?") can hardly fail to strike a chord with any parent. Overall, however, it's a pretty lacklustre affair, a stuttering social comedy that offers perhaps too rosy a picture of life at the lower end of the social spectrum.  For every genuine scene such as the one described above there are at least two which fail to ring true because they paint an implausibly optimistic view of human nature.  For a film made in France in the late 1950s, Premier mai is somewhat dated and saccharine, but that does not mean that it is without charm.  For devotees of Yves Montand, it is an unexpected delight.

Film Synopsis

Jean Meunier, a low-paid electrician, cannot afford for his wife Thérèse to give birth to their second child in hospital so it is agreed that she will have a home birth, attended to by her sister Annie and her mother.  With Thérèse about to go into labour at any moment, Jean is surplus to requirements so he heads off to a football match with his eight-year-old son François.  On the way, they run into an old friend of Jean's, Blanchot, who persuades Jean to accompany him to a clandestine gambling joint.  Jean wins a tidy packet at the roulette wheel but before he can go on his way with his winnings the joint is raided by the police.  In police custody, Jean tells François to head back home and return with his identity papers.  The little boy arrives home just as his mother is about to give birth and ends up performing an errand of far greater importance...