Orage (1938)
Directed by Marc Allégret

Film Review

After revealing Michèle Morgan's star potential in Gribouille (1937), director Marc Allégret wasted no time in raising her aloft and flinging her up into the realm of the big screen goddesses.  This he did with his next collaboration with her, Orage, a conventional melodrama adapted from Henry Bernstein's 1927 stage play Le Venin.  Here, Morgan is cast opposite an established French movie star, Charles Boyer, who, at the time, was struggling to make a name for himself in Hollywood (he would get there just a few years later).  Allégret may not have been the greatest director of his generation but he had an unfailing eye for talent and always knew how to get his discoveries' careers off to a flying start.  The Michèle Morgan that he reveals in Orage is not the fragile adolescent audiences had seen in Gribouille, but a fully fledged femme fatale, as sensual, mysterious and beguiling as any that graced movie screens over the next decade or two.  Here we have a glimpse of the alluring siren of the night that Morgan would immediately go on to play in Marcel Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938), the film that would make her not only an international star but also an enduring cinema icon.

Marc Allégret was never in the same league as Marcel Carné and even with such remarkable leads as Charles Boyer and Michèle Morgan he fails to deliver much more than a fairly routine melodrama - one that not only fails to capitalise on its chief assets but also struggles to make Bernstein's already dated play interesting for a late 1930s cinema audience.  The mediocre, limply realised script does little for Boyer and Morgan, who at least have their charisma to fall back on, but for the supporting artistes it is calamitous.  Jean-Louis Barrault appears hideously out of place and it takes a huge leap of the imagination to accept that Morgan could ever have had the hots for such a wide-eyed eccentric (indistinguishable from the fanatical revolutionary Barrault had previously played in Allégret's Sous les yeux d'occident).  Robert Manuel and Lisette Lanvin are merely dull - you can feel the life drain out of the film whenever they come into shot, not because they are bad actors but because they are so poorly utilised by Allégret, whose attention is so obviously monopolised by his leading lady.

The predictable tragic denouement fits the pattern of the 1930s film melodrama to a tee but it fails to deliver anything like the impact we might have expected.  Far from being a tempestuous downpour, it feels more like a moderately damp shower.  After this mostly lacklustre offering,  Michèle Morgan worked with Marc Allégret (the man who made her a star) on only one further film - the even more disastrous Maria Chapdelaine (1950).  Boyer's next collaboration with the director - Le Corsaire - had a luckier escape - it was scuppered by the outbreak of WWII and never saw the light of day.  His creativity now visibly in decline, Marc Allégret continued serving up tepid potboilers like this, only occasionally living up to his early promise with such memorable offerings as Entrée des artistes (1938) and Félicie Nanteuil (1945).  Orage was remade in 1954 by Pierre Billon, an equally forgettable Franco-Italian production starring Raf Valone and Françoise Arnoul.

Film Synopsis

André Pascaud is a naval construction engineer who lives near Toulon with his wife Gisèle and his brother-in-law Gilbert.  The latter is in a terrible state because his Parisian girlfriend Françoise Massart, with whom he is madly in love, has not written to him in weeks.  When his works calls him away to Paris, André agrees to deliver a letter from Gilbert to Françoise and is surprised by how casually the latter dismisses her affair with his brother-in-law.  Despite her obvious youth, Françoise is a fully liberated modern woman who is happy to pursue short-term relationships with men whilst waiting for the great love of her life to show up.  Before he knows it, André is Françoise's next victim and a passionate romance quickly ensues.  It isn't long before both of them realise that this is more than just a fleeting liaison.

Caught in the raptures of love, André is none too happy to learn that his mistress is already in a long term relationship, with a wild-looking man he comes face-to-face with when he calls at her lodgings one day.  This so-called 'African' contrives to break up André's affair with Françoise, with the result that André is whisked off to Venice by Gisèle in a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage.  The second honeymoon fails to have the desired effect.  André is unable to get Françoise out of his head and when he learns that she is being kept by a wealthier man he becomes jealous.  André and Françoise resume their passionate love affair, with the intention of spending the rest of their lives together.  It seems that nothing can upset this plan, until the fateful day when Gilbert confronts Françoise with the news that his sister is pregnant with André's child...