Little Lise

Victor Berthier, a decent man but a violently jealous one, kills his wife in a fit of jealousy. After serving years in the penal colony at Cayenne he is released for good behaviour, and he is overjoyed at the thought of returning to Paris and seeing his daughter Lise again. What he finds instead is that Lise, through the fault of André, who is both her lover and the man selling her, has unwillingly been drawn into a killing, so the thing the father paid for has now happened to his child. Jean Grémillon’s eighty four minute film was made in the first full year of sound cinema in France and is remembered as a bold experiment that already treated sound as part of the storytelling. Nadia Sibirskaïa and Pierre Alcover star, and it failed commercially on release.