Le domino vert (1935) User Reviews (2)

Decoin/Darrieux:film n°1

[dbdumonteil · 18 May 2003]

This is the first time Henry Decoin teamed with star Danielle Darrieux(whose career spans the whole story of the French cinema after the beginning of the talkies:think about it,she's one of the Ozon's "huit femmes" in 2002!!!)

So almost 70 years before.."le domino vert";the construction of the movie is weird indeed:a short introduction,then a very long flashback(more than an hour) ,then back to the present in search of the truth:because it's primarily a detective story mixed with melodrama elements:a young girl from a chic milieu ,raised by relatives,discovers that her father killed his wife ,and besides,that he had a lover ,Darrieux's mother.Flashback(Darrieux plays the two parts,mother and daughter).Was he guilty? A young lawyer helps the daughter ,twenty years later,to find what really happened;this last part is definitely the weakest link:their investigation lasts barely ten minutes on the screen and a ten-year old could guess the solution of the riddle.

This is mainly a curios ,but it reveals Decoin's metier:the psychological thriller.This is only a sketch but it predates his great achievements of the forties and the fifties:"les inconnus dans la maison" "non coupable" "la vérité sur Bébé Donge" (again with Darrieux )or "bonnes à tuer".One wishes that some day they will reissue "malefices"(1962) from a sensational Boileau-Narcejac (diabolique,vertigo)screenplay ,which is very hard to see.

Double Six

[writers_reign · 8/10 · 25 April 2008]

Danielle Darrieux - still going strong; she appeared in a TV film this year at the age of 91 - gives a new meaning to the word 'prolific'. She made her first film in 1931 and had completed seventeen more when this was released in 1935. This was the first of nine films she made with Henri Decoin whom she married that same year and buried in the credits is the name of producer Alfred Greven later infamous as the head of Continental, the German-run French film company which flourished during the Occupation. It was, in fact, quite normal for films at that time to be shot twice, once in French, once in German with the leading roles switched to accommodate each country so with inter-country liaison a common occurrence it's not too hard to understand why some French actors - Darrieux among them - came to work for Continental. There was, however, one German involved in this entry who wound up like Harry Baur, i.e. with a tag on his toe. Co-director Herbert Selpin was moved to offer critical comments about a film he made in 1942, Titanic. He sunk without trace. Although less than perfect especially in the way Decoin has chosen to tell the story it was enough for me to savor Darrieux sailing effortlessly through this psychological drama aided by veteran Charles Vanel and I have no hesitation in awarding it eight out of ten.