El beso

"The kiss" took the melodramatic accents of Feyder 's precedent work " Les Nouveaux Messieurs"and tightened them up;whereas that work should have been boiled down to a 90 min movie, "the kiss" depicts a tragedy in admirably succinct style :only 62 min,a very good screenplay which does not reveal the whole truth before the last minutes.It's the classic story of the divine lady married with a graybeard without love ,in love with a more handsome gent;add a young man,pretending to be a man (the subject of the immature young lad will come back later in Feyder 's career in " Pension Mimosas")and all the ingredients of a good melodrama are in it.

In Hollywood,Feyder accurately depicted his native land:in jails for women ,the wardens were nuns (in 1960 ,in Clouzot's "La Vérité" ,Brigitte Bardot was guarded by sisters too);and the gendarmes' uniforms are exactly as they were.

After this successful work (which owed a lot to G.Garbo in her last silent movie) ,Feyder was disappointed with the screenplays left for him to direct and he came back to his native land and produced his greatest achievements :"Le Grand Jeu" ,"Pension Mimosas" and his masterpiece "La Kermesse Héroique".