Essentially a screenwriter, Yves Mirande made a handful of interesting movies: "café de Paris" " derrière la façade" ;he often co-directed ,with Georges Lacombe and even ,you read well ,with the great William Wyler's brother ,Robert ,for "la merveilleuse journée "(1932).
"A nous deux ,Madame la vie" ("let's talk ,lady life")is an interesting melodrama ,well acted by a stellar cast.
Two bank clerks embezzles money to bet on a horse ; one of them backs a horse which is a winner and becomes a wealthy man ;for his pal , it's a horse of a different color ,and he cannot refund the bank; he implores his so-called pal who's deaf to his plea and says "face it on your own" ; so the poor boy winds up in jail whereas the nouveau riche founds his own bank ,steals the prisoner's fiancée who still loves her former flame yet.
Aimos almost steals the show from Barrault in the scenes in jail ;a golden-heart pimp, he almost makes us forget his macho side and his shameless exploitation of women ; educated bashful young man discovers the world of jail his mate knows very well (I will get you the libarian job,meself ,I can't read"and the outside world : the popular café where one of his friends of the underworld sings a song which contrastswith the marvelous song the heroine performs in her desirable mansion:based on a tune by Chopin,the same music Serge Gainsbourg would use much later for his duet with daughter Charlotte ("inceste de citron").
Against all odds,the characters are not. Thoroughly cardboard ; the heroine's mother ,notably ,adopts a middle -class outlook and becomes snob ; even he daughter , in the long run,does not know where she stands anymore ; and not only the poor former bank does not put a Monte Cristo's act, he warns the selfish bourgeois man against his enemies who tries to take over his bank ...Not really a happy end ,all in all.
