La lutte pour la vie

René Alexandre cannot find an engineering job in Nantes. He takes to the road, and rescues a farmer being dragged by his plough horses. The old man is grateful, but the sons are envious and drive him away. Eventually Alexandre arrives penniless in Paris. There his hard work and good character serve him well.

This early French feature is pretty much a Horatio Alger sort of story, with Alexandre serving as the exemplar of how the virtues are rewarded in this life as well as the next. There's lots of oversized gesticulation, the copy I looked at was colored -- although the tints had faded -- and cut from 69 minutes to only 44.