Crainquebille (1922)

During a period in America when times were carefree, energetic, and lavish especially in the cinema with the Hollywood filmmaking machine, a half a world over films were also being produced that shared and different view point on life. The United States were just coming into the roaring twenties after the Great War and times never seemed better. In Europe, the continent that was devastated during the war (not to mention the tensions that would begin to build ultimately climaxing with the second World War), shared in it cinemas and movie houses a more real-to-life feeling, where the movies stirred deeper meanings within the audience rather then being large and lavish eye-candy that American filmmaking seems to push out easily.

Here we see the French film about an elderly man selling vegetables out of his cart on the busy market streets of Paris. Here we see and wonderful peek into a life-fill section of and City of Lights frozen in time as people go about buying their food in their normal fashion. (This is what makes film great. We get to look through time to see what life was really like in places around the world.) Here Jérôme Crainquebille carrying on as any other day as he modestly tries to earn his keep in life off the modest income from pushing the produce he has on his cart.

On this one day, a loyal customer purchases a item from him and is a bit short, but if Crainquebille waits a moment she will retrieve the necessary change for the sale. As he waits a policeman wishes Crainquebille to move along and not block the way for other passerby's. Crainquebille, with his inability to explain that he must stay so the customer can return with the money to pay him, refuses to move. In his stubbornness the officer arrests our poor friend moments before the customer returns, and thus begins a spiral in his life.

Crainquebille is taking to jail, which humorously he grows found of, because the jail provides him a clean home, complete with bed and regular meals. He really doesn't want to leave when he is released, but of coarse he will go back to the life he is use to, or at least he attempts to. When he returns to the Parisian streets to sell his goods, the people avoid him, as he is now a seen as the man that was arrested rather then the loyal, friendly produce cart pusher. His life is turned upside down, as everyone looks down on him and he has no means to keep himself going. Thereafter he falls to alchohalism and becomes a man that is loathed. At his lowest point Crainquebille, with no hope in living, steps to the edge of a bridge and considers suicide, but along comes a young street boy that gets him to come down from the ledge and come to his modest abandoned building he calls home and feeds Crainquebille (which includes sharing wine. Oh those French kids and their wine!). This shows Crainquebille that life is in fact good despite how bad it looks, thanking the young lad for saving this old man from depths of himself.

The film is very simple. The cinematography is simple, but good. The characters are simple, but good. The acting is simple, but good. The editing is simple, but good. And the story is simple, along with everything else makes for a very good film. The film doesn't need to dazzle the audience, but it rather draws you in with the heart of Crainquebille. He is a simple man that does no wrong, but life doesn't go his way. You want him to succeed so badly, but it will not be, yet he does find a new friend in a young boy, who he shares the same simple enjoyments in life.

With a bridge scene that is remarkably like the one in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, we see how great scenes will be repeated in other films. Whether or not Capra had seen this film and and was inspired with it for It's a Wonderful Life we see how great moments transcend form one film to another, continuing to stir audiences through time. Films are great as either lavishly big or simple and small.