Les petites alliées

Jean Dreville was a prolific director and it eventually went against him;his best works "la ferme du pendu" "le visiteur" and the remarkable "les affaires sont les affaires ",Octave Mirbeau's work about the nouveaux riches,are not to be overlooked.

"Les petites alliées " is a somber work ,the story of a bourgeois girl who becomes an easy girl ,an escort girl at a time the expression did not exist, nay a luxury prostitute who leaves Paris for Toulon , the reign of the French navy officers .

But ,with the exception of the M. O. ,the girls are only entertainment,casual love affairs ,between two of their missions on the sea;as the disillusioned doctor finally says, our wife is the sea.

Célia (a touching Madeleine Renaud) thinks she has found the grand amour with a young midshipman but he is flickle and he left her.for an older woman ;when she finally marries the M. O., she realizes she's got another unexpected rival. Too bourgeois ,too intellectual (she 's a good pianist and she probably missed her calling) to fit in this chic but cheap milieu.

Best scene : one of the girls is dying of TB , she's lying on her bed in a cabin and the sailors make her believe they are sailing away, for a cruise to Egypt ,the dream she's always been longing for .Such a sequence may have inspired Abel Gance for "la venus aveugle" .

The fleet ,which is shown twice,and which makes their officers proud ,was to be scuttled by the government of Vichy six years later, in the darker occupation days.