The Well-Digger's Daughter (1946)

Load of rubbish!!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A full-fledged Pagnol masterpiece - Marius or La Femme du boulanger - is as good as movies get. So a lesser Pagnol masterpiece is still worth watching. As the others have remarked, there is a lot of melodrama to this movie. But the best scenes rise above that. Orson Welles supposedly called Raimu the greatest actor in movies, and I'm not about to question that. The scene where he goes to the Mazel family to ask Jacques' parents to convince their son to marry his daughter and the subsequent scene where he sends his pregnant but unwed daughter away are as deeply moving as movies will ever get. Raimu gets more out of underacting than a hundred actors could get out of overacting. Charpin gets to play nasty as well as repentant, and he is good at both. It's a long movie - perhaps Pagnol needed a good editor; perhaps - but it never drags once it focuses on the real story: not Patricia's love for Jacques - that is just run-of-the-mill melodrama, the sort of thing we made in this country with Stanwyck and Davis and Crawford - but the emotions of the three parents, all of whom lose their children at one point in the story.This is not Marius or La Femme du boulanger, but it's still very much worth watching.

Pagnol is on record as saying that his stories are essentially simple about simple people and here he gives us Marius under another name; Pascal hopes that his daughter Patricia will eventually marry his assistant Felipe despite the fact that Felipe is on the cusp of middle age and not the soundest bucket in the well. Patricia however falls for Jacques so much so that she winds up slightly pregnant as both men leave for the front. Eventually they hear that Jacques has made the ultimate sacrifice for France and it looks like wedding bells for Felipe and Patricia but wait ... who's that on the horizon, surely not Martin Guerre. Okay, it's hoke and we've seen it before - let's face it, Pagnol himself got a Trilogy out of this one - but as always it's not what you say but how you tell it and WHO you get to tell it and here Pagnol got the best in the business, Raimu as Pascal, Fernandel as Felipe and Charpin as Mr. Mazel, father of Jacques. These guys could read The Farmer's Almanac to camera and make it sound good. Yet another from Our Man In Scandinavia to whom much thanks.

The unmarried mother is a permanent feature in Pagnol's cinema:see his famous trilogy Fanny/Marius /Cesar OR Angèle."La fille du puisatier" is more of the same but it has Raimu and to a lesser degree Charpin and Josette Day ,the future star of Cocteau's "la Belle et la Bête".Raimu was so great an actor that any movie he is in makes all worthwhile.And Pagnol's poetry,his use of Provence landscapes are strong assets too.The story is very melodramatic but still manages to keep you interested till the very end. Handsome soldier gets Patricia pregnant before going' to war;and the boy's father is not prepared to accept it.She's not worthy of his offspring.But alas,the courageous military man is killed.And he was the old man's only child.Now it's Raimu (Patricia's father) who has the upper hand.But it's not over far from it.."La fille du puisatier" is excellent Pagnol stuff.