... seems to whisper Puh-LEEZE. This is primarily a movie for the curious; Abel Gance directing light Opera! This I have to see. Ginette Leclerc, Cadaver Extraordinary To The House of French Cinema -known as 'the most murdered woman in France' because of her proclivity for winding up dead in the bulk of her films, can she keep breathing in this one? Let's check it out and see. Last but not least, for the fully paid-up student of irony Robert Le Vigan, whose life was anything but playing in light Opera. Yes, please, wheel it on. In the event this is mediocre in the extreme. The plot - girl's parents object to her interest in bohemian composer - needn't detain us, Grace Moore does Grace Moore as well as anyone so if you like that kind of voice and the kind of songs it sings you'll salvage something and there's always La Vigan. There aren't too many actors who go from playing Jesus Christ on celluloid to dedicated Fascist in oxygen and wind up dying in poverty in South America. La Vigan was a fine actor -completely wasted here, of course - who enhanced films as disparate as Quai des Brumes and Goupi Mains rouge and whose extreme politics cost him a key role in Les Enfants du Paradis and who, in spite of his Fascist beliefs could still get people like Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carne to testify on his behalf when he stood trial. Of course in 1939 the viewer would know only that Le Vigan had played the artist in Quai des Brumes and Jesus Christ in Golgotha. Louise did nothing to eclipse either film and remains a curio.
Review of Louise
