Leonide Moguy was reportedly appreciated by Quentin Tarentino : he must have singled out "le déserteur "(aka "je t'attendrai" ) his towering achievement (1939) which ,in the history of cinema,was to my knowledge the first movie with a real-time structure. And perhaps his thriller "whistle stop" starring Ava Gardner.
The rest of his career ,which encompasses not only France ,but also the US and Italy ;it essentially deal s with women getting a raw deal :female juvenile deliquency ("prisons sans barreaux" ),sex education ("domini è troppo tardi"),prostitution ("le long des trottoirs".)girls dreaming of movie stardom and meting the harsh world of the pictures ("donnez-moi ma chance"
"Les enfants de l'amour " follows suit ;it depics the plight of unwed moms ,all the action taking place in a home for these poor girls ,whose boyfriend told them to face it on their own and whose family is ashamed of illegitimate children
One follows the destiny of three girls: the screenplay is terribly melodramatic and today this kind of movie has not aged well ;this genre can spawn great works (Pabst's "das Tagebuch einer verlorenen,", 1929) but it takes another approach and mainly a first-class direction. Here the story(ies) is/are cut and dried , between finer feelings galore -the highschool boy ,learning he's fathered a child and running to his ertswhile sweeetheart- and hard bourgeois prejudices (Mylène Demongeot's parents who insist her baby be in care (in state custody) .There's also the good handsome doctor, a Kildare of sorts (Jean-Claude Pascal ) who has a crush on the social worker (who , what a surprise,is also an unwed mother :it's surprising nobody supported her-particularly the state- when she gave birth to her baby when you know who she and her dad were!)
At the time ,it could be considered a heartfelt plea for sex education,family planning ;the doctor even hints at abortion in th utmost cases,which was risqué for the 1950s.
