Têtes de femmes, femmes de tête

Jacques Feyder had been a film director for about a year when he turned out this, his fourteen movie -- they turned them out a lot faster in those days.

This is a comedy of manners about women fighting over a man who is a professional escort for married women and the sort of warfare that goes on when, escorting a pair of sisters to the opera, he stops to say hello to another client. They don't like it and make their displeasure known, until he exacts his own revenge -- or tries to.

Feyder makes full use of the French style of camera-work in which the camera seems to sit there, sardonically observing people. He does a lot more editing than Gaumont's master of the style, Feuillade, does, but Feuillade was working on serials at this stage, and he could afford to let people wander in and out, especially when he was making up something to write himself out of a corner. Feyder had to make every second count, and he does; he is working in a couple of reels, and has his actors behave subtly for the period -- but they let you see that their good manners are only on the surface.