The Marcel Pagnol novel that inspired Claude Berri's 1986 twin features, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, was itself a literary reworking of Pagnol's penultimate theatrical feature in 1953. Gaumont released the original only after getting Pagnol to make cuts in the nearly 4-hour rural opus.

The Marcel Pagnol novel that inspired Claude Berri’s 1986 twin features, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, was itself a literary reworking of Pagnol’s penultimate theatrical feature in 1953. Gaumont released the original only after getting Pagnol to make cuts in the nearly 4-hour rural opus.

Action of the 1953 film corresponds roughly to that of the Berri Manon, with much of the past history of Jean de Florette retraced in Pagnol’s favorite medium – dialog. Unlike Berri, who had to cram the story into two hours, Pagnol leisurely unfolds his tale, taking the time to sketch a gallery of colorful types familiar from many of the writer-director’s earlier classics (e.g. The Baker’s Wife).

Manon contains the best and worst of Pagnol. On the debit side notably is the mediocre technical quality, the indifference to classical notions of direction, and a major miscasting, that of Manon, the wild solitary shepherdess who cuts off a village’s water supply as vengeance for her father’s death. She is played by Jacqueline Pagnol, the filmmaker’s lovely wife, whose artificial manner and diction never suggest an orphan who’s grown up in the Provencal hills.

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Yet the film is buoyed by its other vivid characterizations and the nonstop verve of Pagnol’s dialog. Though story is plotted in mostly static sequences, there’s an enchanting quality in many scenes that is simply not reproduceable on a stage.

[Pic was reviewed at the first showing of the uncut version, in October 1988.]

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Manon des Sources

France

  • Production: Pagnol. Director Marcel Pagnol; Producer Marcel Pagnol; Screenplay Marcel Pagnol; Camera Willy Faktorovitch; Editor Raymonde, Jacques Bianchi; Music Raymond Legrand; Art Director Eugene Delfau
  • Crew: (B&W) Extract of a review from 1953. Running time: 222 MIN.
  • With: Jacqueline Pagnol Raymond Pellegrin Rellys Henri Poupon Robert Vattier Fernand Sardou

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