User Reviews

We get the impression that the french Cinema hit its peak in the WW1 period with Feuillade and this film representing a more serious line.

The plot is a far-fetched account of his past sins catching up with the prosecutor but the performances and the use of genuine Paris exteriors, Jardin du Luxembourg, Seine transport, many of them unchanged to the present are ahead of most of what was being done at the time.

Interesting to find VIEILLE DAME INDIGNE Sylvie appearing as a teen age ingénue.

The presence of Julien Duvivier on the credits also intrigues.

It survives in a reasonable Cinematheque Francaise 35mm. copy.

Restored in the late eighties ,we are warned : some scenes must have been cut,because of the censorship which could hardly stand the release of a criminal (lines are used instead of pictures) and the depiction a children penal colony (which is reduced to short scenes) .

André Antoine is an unfairly forgotten name of the French silent age :"La Terre" is an estimable adaptation of Zola's novel,with a stunning last scene ;his unfinished "L ' Hirondelle Et La Mesange" (1920) ,which was edited by Henri Colpi in the eighties ,compares favorably with Vigo's " L'Atalante " and displays the director's qualities: filming on location most of the time,and an immoral side in the screenplay to boot.

"Le Coupable" is a melodrama ,guaranteed to send the impressionable tearing through an entire box of Kleenex.But the treatment is excellent.

A prosecuting attorney commences his summing-up : the defendant is his son whose pitiful fate led him to murder ; he left his mother he got pregnant and the unwed poor thing had to fight against a hostile world ;after she died of consumption,the poor boy,mistreated by his brutal stepfather,was sent to a penal colony .

This is a long flashback ,which was rare in silent movies,which comprises flashbacks in it (superimposed visions of dear mother ;working girl Louise's past);many scenes are filmed on location,in the Jardin Des Tuileries or on a boat on the Seine .

Antoine was first a stage director (the Théâtre-Libre) ,but we never feel like watching a filmed stage drama,even though Romuald Joubé's playing as the magistrate may seem grandiloquent (the part of this guilty father who must judge his natural son demands it anyway)

His assistant was none other than Julien Duvivier who would remember André Antoine when he filmed "Sous Le Ciel De Paris" ,particularly the sequence on the Seine ; and Sylvie ,here cast as Louise ,would be the woman-with-the-cats in Duvivier's work!

A good remake was made by Raymond Bernard twenty years later;the screenplay was modified : the young man does not want to leave the girl who is pregnant by him ,but has to go to war;on her deathbed ,the unwed mom urges his son to find his true father;and the name "Chretien" becomes a mundane Jerôme.Well acted by Pierre Blanchar as the magistrate and dainty Madeleine Ozeray as his unfortunate love.