Anarchist attempts to assassinate queen, queen protects anarchist, queen loves anarchist, anarchist loves queen. Or does she...and does he? The skeleton of Cocteau's adult fairy tale, L'Aigle à Deux Têtes, is also that of L'Herbier's very different Le Bonheur- - made a decade earlier and set several centuries later in '30s Paris, where the palace is a film studio, the royalty are movie stars and the fairy tale survives even L'Herbier's ironic analysis. Charles Boyer is the passionate politico turned lover - a role entirely suited to his seething recalcitrance that erupts into moments of startling verbal eloquence. Gaby Morlay, as a movie star courted by a vast and fauning public and a small, mostly male, entourage, is the modern day queen (upstaged, or dethroned, from time to time by Michel Simon, who luxuriates in a comic performace as Morlay's exaggeratedly homosexual manager). Their story is told by L'Herbier utilizing all the tricks of the trade which he was instrumental in developing back in the silent era; photographed by American cinematographer Harry Stradling, Le Bonheur revels in its visuals, from the “high moderne” decor of its sets to the freedom of a traveling camera that hangs over the poor-people's balcony during Morlay's theater performance, then swings from the rafters of the courtroom where Boyer gives his.
As if to retaliate against the very system which forced him into the making of commercially viable sound films, L'Herbier created in Le Bonheur a beautiful trap - the last word, as it were, on the glossy web that is the cinema. L'Herbier is that anarchist embodied in Boyer, who rails against the lure with which the cinema encourages idiocy in a gullible nation; and who is drawn into a love affair at the very center of the system. What happens to Boyer at the film's end shouldn't happen to a (running) dog; yet, it is happening to us even as we sit watching him watching Morlay watching the cameras. Le Bonheur is a brilliant piece of reflexive cinema, a film that, as you weep at it, weeps right back at you. (JB)

Please note: Le Bonheur will be repeated Sunday, June 13.