L'entraîneuse

This is a delicate melodrama by Albert Valentin where Michele Morgan is wonderfully cast as Suzanne, a nightclub hostess -a job which does not pass for a noble one- who is on holiday on the Cote d'Azur thanks to a guest's generosity.There she meets young boys and girls from a good background.One of them falls in love with her and soon she becomes integrated into the group.Actually,among them she passes for the wisest ,the nicest girl who has ever been.

Alber Valentin often films on location and he uses the light of the Mediterranean coast to good effects.Suzanne ,for a while ,wants to believe she can get out of her dump:she knows that her new friends and her are worlds apart ,because they are part of a family.As any melodrama heroine,she never complains about the fact that everything could have been different had she been part of a family -we never hear about Suzanne's parents- The depiction of the nightclub is harsh :the girls' life here is no laughing party;the nightclub's program also features an alcoholic chanteuse ,Frehel (who plays her own character),and it's no coincidence if Morgan's face ,during the last sequence and a superb fade in-fade out ,turns into the singer's face bewailing "no more love for me".

Should appeal to people who have liked Mervyn Le Roy 's "Waterloo bridge" (1940;French title:'la valse dans l'ombre")