Battement de coeur

For a moment you think you're in for a pretty silly thirties comedy about a school for pickpockets run by Saturnin Fabre as M. Aristide ("Crapule!") but enter Danielle Darrieux ("plus jolie, plus gamine, plus délicieuse que jamais", just as the trailer says), escapee from the House of Reform in Amiens, and the plot exuberantly swings us off into the world of ambassadorial finery and class barriers. She rattles out delicious slang and one funny line after another with the excellent André Luguet as ambassador. When she's caught for stealing a tie-pin, "Well you shouldn't have been wearing such an expensive one on a bus anyway!" As she's muscled out of a cinema, "But there's a cartoon afterwards!" Baron Dvorak (Charles Dechamps) tries to coach her in her new identity: "And you are...?" "Knackered." More hilarious moments as she and goofy Roland (Jean Tissier) make themselves at home in Claude Dauphin's mansion. DD is front and centre, the agile mistress of every comedic or pathetic twist.