La Piste du sud (1938)
Directed by Pierre Billon

Film Review

Desert melodramas were a popular mainstay of French cinema in the 1930s, although Pierre Billon's La Piste du sud is a pretty poor example of the genre.  Compared with Julien Duvivier's Bandera (1935), Jacques Feyder's Le Grand jeu (1934) and Léon Poirier's L'Appel du silence (1936), it's a pretty undistinguished piece that fails to come alive, in spite of a mostly excellent cast and a story that has immense potential as a taut psychological drama.  The film is based on a novel of the same title by the well-known Belgian author Oscar-Paul Gilbert, who had two other notable novels adapted for cinema around this time - as Robert Siodmak's Mollenard (1938) and G.W. Pabst's Le Drame de Shanghaï (1938), both highly recommended.

Pierre Billon had a long and moderately successful career as a screenwriter and film director, although he is better known for the films he made in his later years, notably Raimu's swansong L'Homme au chapeau rond (1946) and his stylish excursion into film noir, Jusqu'au dernier (1957).  Saddled with a mediocre script and inadequate resources, Billon had his work cut out trying to make anything of La Piste du sud, and whilst there are a few notable plus points (the photography is of a high standard throughout, particularly the location exteriors) the film is poorly paced, poorly structured, and looks like it was made in far too great a hurry, on a shoestring budget.

Pierre Renoir, René Lefèvre and Jacques Baumer - three extremely good actors - are totally wasted in incidental roles that add little (if anything) to the plot, whilst the three leads - Ketti Gallian, Albert Préjean and Jean-Louis Barrault - manage to destroy the film's credibility with some disgraceful overacting.  Barrault is, surprisingly, the chief offender and completely gives the game away (does he ever allow us to doubt for one second that he is not the murderer?) by continually over-egging the pudding.  On the stage, Barrault's face-contorting, wildly gesticulating performance would have been just about acceptable; on screen it looks hideously over-the-top.

Préjean's lack of ability as a serious screen actor has rarely been more apparent than it is here, in a role that clearly demands more muscle, and you wonder how anyone as obviously talentless as Ketti Gallian could have landed the lead role in a film such as this.  On the acting front, La Piste du sud is pretty well a disaster, and it would have taken a far more capable director than Pierre Billon to salvage this film.  Henri Verdun's overly emphatic score only makes things worse, totally destroying the tension in some scenes with its ear-bashing cacophony, and if it wasn't for Christian Matras's moody photography the film would have pretty well nothing to commend it.

Film Synopsis

The location is a French military garrison in Tirzit, a North African stronghold lost in the Sahara Desert.  Olcott, a man who distributes essential supplies in the region, arrives at the fortress in a desperate state.  Visibly perturbed, he claims to have witnessed the brutal killing of his colleague, Marchand, by the locals.  The fact that the dead man's bullet-ridden corpse is in his van proves he is not mad.  As the fort's commander Lieutenant Naud attempts to establish the truth, Marchand's young widow, Hélène, turns up unexpectedly, after a harrowing journey across the desert during which she narrowly escaped with her life after being attacked.  Intrigued by her husband's death, Hélène continues to harangue Olcott until, overcome with guilt, he is compelled to reveal the terrible truth of Marchand's death...