Deuxième bureau

This film was telecast by the BBC from London in 1939. It must have been before September of that year, because the BBC suspended its TV service when war broke out. Curiously, they used the French version (with subtitles, I think) and not the English version ("Second Bureau") released in 1937.

I saw the telecast. I was ten or eleven years old. A TV receiver was far beyond the means of my family in those days, but an aunt who spoke French took me with her to the television room for guests at the Mount Royal Hotel in London. It was not only the first telecast I saw but also my first foreign-language film.

The "Second Bureau" version is a reminder that in the early days of sound film, before dubbing was perfected (or anyway made acceptable to audiences that didn't like subtitles), one of the ways of dealing with the problem of foreign distribution was to shoot a duplicate version with other actors who spoke the foreign language.