The Curse of Greed (Le Roman d'un mousse)

Featured image for The Curse of Greed (Le Roman d'un mousse)

After a film company reaps a windfall by ruthlessly exploiting child labor and demonizing the lower classes and the colonized in order to lay siege to the hearts of its prey, it reneges on the agreed happy ending and snatches another child to exploit, and again threatens its prey with the bottomless evil of unwashed masses - who, this time, are commanded by a moneylender (who audiences likely would assume to be a Jew - understood to be the root of all evil in post-Dreyfus France). As before, the scenery is nice in this cinematic postcard. But still it suffers from The Curse of Greed: a boring, shallow existence.

Online: YouTube

Related:

L'enfant de Paris

Think two-hour “epics” are reserved for tales of war or larger-than-life heroes, as in Cabiria (1914), The Birth of a Nation (1915), or J'accuse (1919)? Sorry, but this golden-to-ghetto melodrama came before those. Here - “epic” this:

  1. Credits: 3 minutes
  2. Gomez is called to smack down uppity desert hanky-heads, leaving Uncle Fester responsible for the family: 3 minutes
  3. Gomez unleashes the fury of the French Empire, hanky-heads let loose the juice and served him like couscous: 6 minutes
  4. Morticia seizes the chance to bail on Fester and her boring brat: 3 minutes
  5. Fester is called to smack down uppity audience members demanding refunds: 3 minutes
  6. Audience punished for uprising - forced to watch nothing more than a boring brat weeping: 15 minutes

Finally, after 33 minutes of bourgeois colonialist weepfest, things get real when Edmond “The Graduate” enters - but he exits less than 5 minutes later, and is gone for 15 minutes. After his return, he disappears again, and the final 47 minutes of the film is little more than watching a nookie-starved snitch run back and forth to the cops.

Sure, the street scenes look nice, but the investigation of those scenes by The Cine-Tourist is much more interesting.

View...