L'Appel du Silence

Through a scheme sponsored by the Catholic Church, 100,000 of the faithful each stumped up a few francs to finance this movie, said sum eventually to be deductible at the box office. (The idea was instantly copied by the workers' CGT to make Renoir's La Marseillaise.) The result was a hero-worshipping account of the life of Charles de Foucauld, soldier, explorer, missionary ('the hermit of the Sahara'), killed by Arab rebels in 1916. The plodding Poirier's tableaux are notable only for their wholesale issue-dodging and the suppression of everything even slightly contentious to do with colonialism, race, religion and sex.