Monsieur Vincent 1947

Monsieur Vincent is Maurice Cloche's 1947 film about Saint Vincent de Paul, the 17th-century French priest who spent his life organising help for the poor, the sick and abandoned children. Pierre Fresnay plays him from his arrival as a simple parish priest in a plague-stricken town to his old age as an adviser to the powerful. The screenplay was co-written by the playwright Jean Anouilh. Fresnay won the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival, and the film received an honorary Academy Award in 1949 as the best foreign-language film released in the United States the previous year, before that category existed as a competitive Oscar. It is a sober, well-made biography carried by one of the finest French actors of his generation.

A priest among the poor

The film opens with Vincent's arrival in the parish of Châtillon-les-Dombes, where the plague has struck and the villagers are hostile and terrified. He goes into the houses of the sick that everyone else avoids, and he discovers that charity given at random does little good. Helping the poor requires organisation.

From there the film follows his rise. Introduced to the great families of the kingdom, notably the Gondi household, he uses his growing influence to raise money and to found charitable institutions. He works with Louise de Marillac to create the Daughters of Charity, women who go out to nurse the poor in their homes, and he takes up the cause of foundlings, abandoned babies left on the streets of Paris.

Fresnay

Pierre Fresnay had been Boeldieu, the aristocratic officer in Renoir's La Grande Illusion, and the star of Clouzot's Le Corbeau (1943). His Vincent is neither a plaster saint nor a sentimental figure. He is practical, sometimes impatient, ironic with the rich and tender with the poor, and he ages convincingly over the decades the film covers. A review in Sight and Sound called it one of the most perfect pieces of work to be seen for many years.

Charity and power

Anouilh and Jean Bernard-Luc wrote dialogue that is sharp rather than pious. The film is interested in a political question: how can a priest persuade a society of privilege to pay for the misery it tolerates? Vincent flatters, shames and bargains with duchesses, the queen, Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Richelieu, played by Aimé Clariond, while knowing that charity can never be enough.

The final scene, in which the old Vincent tells a young woman joining his work that the poor will forgive her the bread she gives them only if she gives it with love, is the film's best-known moment.

Production

The film is said to have been financed partly by subscription among Catholic supporters. The cinematographer was Claude Renoir, nephew of the director Jean Renoir. Look out for young actors at the start of long careers: Jean Carmet as Father Portail and Michel Bouquet as a sick young man.

The Vatican later included Monsieur Vincent in its 1995 list of important films.

Who will enjoy it

You do not need to be religious to appreciate it. It is a solid historical drama about a man who used the system of his time to reduce suffering, and Fresnay's performance justifies watching it alone. Viewers who find biographical films of this period stiff may feel the same here in places.

For the wider context of postwar cinema, see the best French films of the 1940s, where it appears alongside Les Enfants du paradis.