Letters from My Windmill

Angèle is a 1934 French drama film directed, produced and written by Marcel Pagnol. It stars Orane Demazis as a naive young woman who is seduced and abandoned. It is based on the novel Un de Baumugnes by Jean Giono.

Honoré Panisse is dying, cheerfully, with friends, wife, and son at his side. He confesses to the priest in front of his friends; he insists that the doctor be truthful. But, he cannot bring himself to tell his son Césariot that his real father is Marius, the absent son of César, Césariot's godfather. Panisse leaves that to Fanny, the lad's mother. Dissembling that he's off to see a friend, Césariot then seeks Marius, now a mechanic in Toulon. Posing as a journalist, Césariot spends time with Marius and leaves believing tales he is a petty thief. Only after the truth comes out can Marius, Fanny, César, and Césariot step beyond the falsehoods, benign though they may be.

Albert Topaze, sincere schoolteacher addicted to "rote" morality, works at a private school run by supremely money-grubbing M. Muche, whose daughter, also a teacher, makes cynical use of the knowledge that Topaze loves her. Alas, Topaze's naive honesty brings him unjust dismissal...and makes him fair game for the "aunt" of his private pupil, really the mistress of crooked politician Regis, who needs an honest-seeming "front man." Can artful Suzy Courtois keep Topaze on the string? With steadily escalating disillusion comes moral crisis...

"Merlusse" is French schoolboy slang for codfish, and M. Blanchard, a professor at a certain lycée, was known to his victims by that name. On Christmas eve, when some twenty of the students—orphans, foreigners or just plain "unwanteds"—had to remain in the boarding school, Merlusse is placed in charge. His glass eye glares at them stonily, his good one with no less severity. He sets them to tasks, marches like a proctor up and down the aisles, exacts to the utmost the last measure of discipline. But when the youngsters awake in the morning, there are toys by each bed in the dormitory and M. Blanchard, no longer to be called Merlusse, is exposed for the softhearted fraud he is.

Cigalon (Alexandre Arnaudy) manages a restaurant in a small town in Provence. A chef with a high opinion of his past culinary achievements, he makes no effort to attract customers and is rude to those who venture into his establishment expecting to be fed. To Cigalon, gastronomy is the greatest of all the arts, and so he is naturally aghast when a former laundress named Madame Toffi (Marguerite Chabert) opens a restaurant next door to his. Madame Toffi does not share his elevated notions and intends to serve meals to the general public - an appalling prospect! While Cigalon's restaurant remains empty, Madame Toffi's is always busy. To prove he's the better chef, Cigalon must now start catering to the whims of paying customers or be forced out of business.

In this little Provencal village, a new baker, Aimable, settles down. His wife Aurelie is beautiful and much younger than he. She departs with a shepherd the night after Aimable produces his first breads. Aimable is so afflicted that he can not work anymore. Therefore, the villagers, who initially laughed at his cuckoldry, take the matter very seriously (they want the bread) and organize a plan to find Aurelie and to bring her back to the bakery.

Marcel Pagnol's adaptation of his own novel Manon des sources, the story of a shepherdess who exacts her revenge on the townsfolk she blames for killing her father, in two parts: Manon des sources and Ugolin.

Franz Schubert retired from Vienna in country for musical writing. He draws his inspiration from a romance with the watermiller's daughter. An operetta in the fifties Vienna style. This is the only movie from Marcel Pagnol in color and the only movie in rouxcolor, a French experimental process derivated from the agfacolor German process.

This is the story of a wealthy bourgeois who marries his only child, a daughter, to a penniless nobleman because he hopes to use his son-in-law to get a title. The son-in-law is a lazy, affected stereotype; but M. Poirier is also a stereotype, of the obnoxious big businessman. The poor daughter, who falls in love with her husband, lets him walk all over her.