LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jacques Feyder: Anatole France
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Jacques Feyder had already made two sound films in France; his creative skills were by no means diminished by the new dimension. His successful collaboration with Charles Spaak was to further produce one of the wittiest, most colourful and amusing comedies to reach the screen, La kermesse héroïque. Taking as his subject the period of the great Renaissance of Flemish painting and the less happy era of Spanish domination, Feyder made a major contribution to "women's lib." The film satirizes political, religious, and moral pretentiousness, and the men come off second best when a strong-minded and realistic woman encounters a tricky diplomatic situation.
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Screenplay by Jacques Feyder, based on a novel by Anatole France (L'affaire Crainquebille), with a running time of approximately 70 min when released in France in 1922. Re-edited to 60 minutes and re-titled as "Bill" in the United States by Hugo Riesenfeld and distributed by Red Seal Pictures.
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Dining out in Montmartre, Feyder and Françoise discovered a boy playing in the street. This child was little Jean Forest, whom Feyder directed with consummate skill in three films, Crainquebille, Visages d'enfants, and Gribiche. The first, based on the Anatole France story, added to Feyder's reputation, while the second, shot with simplicity and sensitivity in the Haut Valais, Switzerland, showed that Feyder possessed a remarkable skill for directing child actors. Gribiche was his first film for the Russian-inspired Albatros Company. It introduced the designer Lazare Meerson, working in the Art Deco style. It ... featured Françoise Rosay in her first major role.
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In May of 1923 the Belgian director Jacques Feyder and a French crew decamped to the Swiss canton of the Valais. In the high valleys of the Entremont and Anniviers they shot the footage that would comprise much of what was released, after a delay of two years, as Visages d’enfants (“faces of children”) in France and Alles voor moeder (“everything for mother”) in the Netherlands.
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Feyder is unflinching in his portrait of the chaos and grime of Paris for its lowliest workers, like the prostitutes swept up in police raids and ... the bustling energy of the Central Market where orphans mix with middle-class schoolboys. The film was adapted from a 1902 novel by Anatole France, winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature and openly aligned with the Communist Party. The Roman Catholic Church categorized his books as forbidden.
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Feyder found young Jean Forest on the streets of Paris and gave him the Chaplinesque role of a paperboy with a cute dog. When Crainquebille is at his wit's end on a bridge over the Seine, Forest's character intervenes in a scene that prefigures both It's a Wonderful Life and The Crowd. The film's welcome happy ending doesn't negate author France's sly message.
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