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SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS
FRANCE, 1930 9 reels
production company: Filmsonor-Tobis
script and direction : Rene Clair
photography: Georges Perinal
art direction: Lazare Meerson
music: Raoul Moretti and Armand Bernard
CAST
Pola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pola Ilery
Albert . . . . . . . . . . . . Albert Pre jean
Fred . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaston Modot
Louis . . . . . . . . . . . . Edmond T. Greville
Paris in 1930 — the little side-streets, with their street singers, cafes and suburban apartments. The capricious Pola fascinates three men, Fred, the local wide boy, Albert, the street-singer, and his friend Louis, a hawker. It is Alfred who loves Pola the most, but he is sent to prison for a crime he did not commit, and Pola goes off with Fred. When Albert comes out of prison and tries to win back Pola, he is involved in a knife-fight with Fred. He wins; and then Pola picks her true love — Louis.
With the slenderest of stories — more a succession of sketches than a definite plot — Clair evokes a charmingly romantic and humorous impression of Paris. Sous les Toits is the most varied in mood of Clair's films, and has a melodrama and a melancholy not found in the others. The brief sequence when, a few weeks after they had been about to marry and Albert has been sent to prison, the camera lingers in the empty apartment with the settling dust and mice running across the floor, has a real poetic quality. In his first sound film. Clair uses very little dialogue, and orchestrates natural sounds to heighten the effect of his scenes: the ominous accompaniment of trains passing in the dark during the knife-fight, conversations seen but not heard through a window. Clair was ahead of his time in his grasp of the new medium of sound and image, and in his style of poetic realism, for which French films were to become famous.
Two famous talents worked with Clair on this film. Lazare Meerson, designer, of Russian extraction, was responsible for the sets of all Rene Clair's films between La Proie du Vent (1926) and Break the News (1938), with the
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