In the '30s, a handful of superb French films-adult, atmospheric, and tender-created a new American movie audience, and the art–house came into existence. La Grande Illusion, The Baker's Wife, Regain, Le Jour Se Leve (Daybreak), reawakened an interest in motion pictures among people who had grown up on Hollywood's standard product and had grown beyond it. Regain (1937), adapted from the 1930 novel by the great Provençal primitivist, Jean Giono, is perhaps as refreshing now as when it jolted its first American audiences by the extraordinary purity of its love–story set in an abandoned village. (Typically, the New York censors at first refused to pass it.) Marcel Pagnol made the film in Provence with a superlative cast-the young Fernandel (in what we still think his finest role) as the itinerant tinker who sells his slavey–mistress, Orane Demazis (the Fanny of the Pagnol trilogy), to the magnificent, wild hunter, Gabriel Gabrio.