Les Lettres de mon moulin (1954)
Directed by Marcel Pagnol

Film Review

Marcel Pagnol concluded his prominent directing career by adapting four stories taken from Alphonse Daudet's anthology Les Lettres de mon moulin.  Three of these ended up in Pagnol's last film for the cinema (named after Daudet's famous oeuvre); the fourth, Le Curé de Cucugnan, was made by Pagnol for French television thirteen years later and was broadcast on Christmas day in 1968.  Despite the time lapse between the first three and last of the short films, they form a complete work and are as intensely expressive of Pagnol's love of Provençal life as his earlier, better known films.

Les Lettres de mon moulin was photographed by Pagnol's loyal cinematographer Willy Faktorovitch and features some of his favourite actors, including Rellys and Edouard Delmont, who are as evocative of Pagnol's sun-drenched Provence as the lush, rolling landscape they inhabit so easily.  Of the three episodes in the film, it is the last one, Le Secret de Maître Cornille, which fits most easily into Pagnol's oeuvre, and the one which makes best use of its rural setting.  The other two, Les Trois Messes basses and L'Élixir du père Gaucher, are atypical in that they are mostly confined to interiors and take an almost malevolent delight in poking fun at those of an ecclesiastical persuasion (in his earlier films, Pagnol's mockery of the clergy is far more restrained, albeit with just a hint of malice).

Whilst the film was a phenomenal success in France (it attracted an audience of over two million) Pagnol was not tempted to direct another film for cinema and instead he devoted himself to a literary career.  This he began in 1957, by embarking on his two volume Souvenirs d'enfance, which would be adapted for cinema in 1990 by Yves Robert as La Gloire de mon père / Le Château de ma mère.  Once he had established himself as one of France's leading authors, Pagnol had no desire to return to the cinema, although the temptation to round off his Lettres de mon moulin with Le Curé de Cucugnan, a short film for French television, was too great to resist.

Film Synopsis

Alphonse Daudet, purchases a windmill in Pampérigouste, an attractive region of rural France, so that he can write a series of short stories about country folk. In the first, The Three Low Masses, the devil persuades a bon vivant priest to gallop through a Christmas mass so that he can fill his belly on a lavish feast afterwards. In The Elixir of Father Gaucher, a monk manages to rescue his brothers from poverty by distilling and selling a powerful elixir, but ends up as a chronically alcoholic martyr.   Finally, in The Secret of Master Cornille, an elderly miller struggles to keep up the illusion that his windmill allows him to earn a living, in spite of the fact that all the villagers make use of the more reliable steam-powered flour mills.