Avec le sourire (1936)

American title: With a Smile.

A man arrives penniless in Paris. He meets a young woman who is a dancer at a nightclub, and manages to get employed there.  Step by step, he climbs to the top of the social ladder, using his sense of opportunity, his lack of scruples, and his smile.

There isn't much to say about this film which isn't already in its dialogue. In a strictly moral sense, it is refreshing: it doesn't stray from objectivity for one second. You could call it a perfectly amoral film, or, if you do not like this terminology, you may call it an essay in social Darwinism. Even though it may look unique in that sense, I suspect it was not far from the standards of film writing in the 30s. Although I do not know a lot of that period's filmography, one needs only think of Hollywood's pre-code period for an approximate parallel. In America, however, the frankness was mostly sexual (and ended in 1934 with the strict enforcement of the Hays code), whereas in this film it is predominantly economical. Anyway, both in France and in America, films became more moralistic in later years. It was only in the late fifties that a certain spirit of boldness was to resume, but I doubt it would ever have the same free spirit again. For example, to pick a movie with a similar theme as this one, Room at the Top (1959) is a good movie, but is not without a certain implicit moralism, if memory serves me right.

Rating: 64