Merlusse

Over the Christmas holidays about twenty boys stay behind at a boarding school in Marseille because they have nowhere to go: orphans, foreigners, children nobody came to collect. Put in charge of them is Blanchard, a hard master with one glass eye whom the boys call Merlusse, schoolboy slang for codfish, behind his back. The children are afraid of him and he does everything he can to keep them that way. Marcel Pagnol shot the film in fifteen days at the Lycée Thiers, the school he had attended himself, during the holiday break. What comes of it is a quiet relationship between a man who looks like a tyrant and a group of forgotten children. The film is short, unshowy and delivers its feeling without raising its voice; one of Pagnol's less known and best loved works. Henri Poupon plays Blanchard.