Paradis Perdu

Napoléon made Gance, at 38, the youngest Grand Old Man of French cinema. Thereafter his career, a sequence of theatrical adaptations and historical romances relieved only by some grandiose (and mostly doomed) projects, described a precipitously downward spiral similar to that of L'Herbier. Not much extravagance, then, in this film, the sentimental chronicle of a World War I widower overly troubled by his daughter's physical resemblance to her late mother. Academic and impersonal, its sole asset is a youthfully ingenuous Micheline Presle.