L'enfant de Paris

I first heard of this film in an interview thirty years ago with Edward Gory (imdb is trying to correct my spelling, that should be g-o-r-e-y), and it's hard to imagine a more perfect audience for this movie, with its tale of an innocent little girl who loses her parents (one in war, the other to the usual collapse Victorian wives succumb to) and winds up in the hands of scoundrels, only to acquire a purehearted protector in their ranks. (He is, in a nod to Hugo, a slight hunchback.)

The unspooling of this melodrama is hypnotic, in Perret's clear-eyed and skillful telling; even so well-crafted an American film as Traffic in Souls from the same year seems remote and unsteady compared to the clean, perfectly efficient visuals and editing here. That said, it is a modest disappointment that the little girl-- a charmingly capable miniature Bernhardt, able to pull off every Victorian stage gesture never seen in real children-- becomes little more than a prop over time; her plight is never milked for the emotional effect it could have. If there's an apparent flaw in Perret's work-- comparing it not to other 1913 films but to the later teens films it seems the peer of-- it's that he doesn't seem as interested in his actors as you'd like him to be. They're all obviously skilled, and play their types perfectly to type, and he shoots them in medium shot so we can actually see their faces; but there's no reason for a movie called The Child of Paris to be decorous in its playing-- it ought to pull out all the stops and jerk tears like Griffith a few years later. What starts as a serial seems to end as a neatly solved puzzle.

Still, Kino's release of this film in its Gaumont set is an enormously important release that does some serious rewriting of the standard film history.